CNet introduced Jung Inyoung’s concept bag that provides power using kinetic energy. (http://www.cnet.com.au/suitcase-powers-your-devices-339330076.htm)

The two gears on the bag’s wheels collect energy as you stroll around the airport. It stores energy in a charge battery and delivers it through the port located on the top of the bag. There’s also an LED battery indicator that displays how much energy is stored in the battery.

There are, however, electrical outlets on the walls of the airport but even these are very much competitive.

Jung’s newly designed bag can get useful for frequent and busy travellers however the concept bag is not yet for sale.

This pretty much sums up what SPA and PIPA is all about.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is an amalgam of a million different product demos, press events and fleeting snapshots in time. As reporters, we can cover the show as it unfolds in real-time, but we can’t really make sense of the spectacle until a few days have passed — and even then we need to steal a few moments of quiet reflection.

This year, we Gadget Lab reporters had our “what does it all mean?” epiphanies at the Wired party during our third night in Las Vegas. Our lips loosened by cocktails — the Patron Pyrat-spiked chai was particularly lubricating — our reporters riffed on the products, trends and all-around happenings that mattered the most.

Bonnington opens the video with a burst of optimism, waxing enthusiastically about playing with new smartphones, and meeting face-to-face with other journalists who were only just Twitter handles three days prior.

Malinowski, Calore and myself then riff on the specific trends that touched us the most, tempering true excitement with a particular version of battle fatigue that only CES can imbue upon a tech reporter’s soul.

Isaac finishes the video with a blunt confessional: CES was boring this year — “no super-cool innovations” and “a lot of stupid tablets.” Jaded? Perhaps. But Isaac won this year’s Gadget Lab award for “Fewest Hours Slept at CES,” so we should allow him a bit of meh.

On the eve of Apple’s highly anticipated foray into digital textbooks, the e-textbook wars are heating up.

Chegg, best known for selling and renting physical textbooks through the mail, will on Wednesday announce a new way for students to buy and rent textbooks to read online.

Its Web-based tool is a little less glitzy than other app-based digital textbook offerings. Those, from companies like Inkling or Kno, often offer features like the ability to circle a passage with your finger and to create flash cards and rich diagrams.

In contrast, books in Chegg’s online reader look more like regular books. But the company has built a number of tools it says are unique and designed to be useful to students without hampering them. Among them: the ability to shoot a question about a passage to a community of users for a real-time response. Another feature instantly highlights the most important passages of the work using software that analyzes its meaning.

“Sure, there are some flashy features that work on a very small number of books,” says Brent Trowetsky, director of product management at Chegg, referring to competitors. “But it isn’t that useful for students.”

Trowetsky says Chegg has about 40,000 digital textbooks now and has signed contracts with all the top publishers. To participate, all a publisher has to do is “drop a PDF at our doorstep and we do the rest,” he says. Prices range from $20 to $120– 30% to 40% off the price of a new textbook.

Competitor Kno says it offers around 150,000 titles from around $5 to $100 per book, with rentals costing less. This week the company, co-founded by Osman Rashid, a former co-founder of Chegg, announced new interactive flash cards and a dashboard for students to better track their study habits. In addition to its iPad app, the company also offers a more basic online reader.

Inkling, which takes a different approach of rebuilding titles specifically for iPads, has around 110 books available today with many priced at around $100 per book, with individual chapters from $1.99. Its books boast bells and whistles like “interactive assessments” that provide feedback as students progress and 3D molecule models. The service currently requires users to download an iOS app, but the company is also developing a Web-based HTML5 version, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig says the company will eventually open up the new digital textbook service to others besides professional publishers. He adds that he believes Chegg’s other offerings, such as its rental business and site for helping kids with their homework, will help drive adoption.

“We want to offer textbooks in whatever format students want and at multiple price-points,” he says. “Print textbooks are going to be around for a long, long time.”

Rather than foretelling any great ground shift, more often than not industry projections published by research firms tend to paint a picture of more of the same.

Juniper Research’s latest take on the mobile market, for instance, suggests the culture of free-to-play releases currently taking hold of the industry isn’t going to go away.

Rather, as users become more acclimatised to the idea of in-app purchases, annual spending is going to surge.

In-app purchase power

Between now and 2016, Juniper believes revenue generated from purchases made in-game will more than double from $2.1 billion in 2011 to 4.8 billion in 2016.

It’s a rise Juniper puts down to pure momentum.

As gamers become more comfortable with not paying for games up front, splashing out during play itself instead, so more developers currently delivering paid releases will be tempted into serving up freemium titles.

Juniper also maintains developers are quickly learning free releases have other benefits to offer, too.

Piracy play

“An increasing number of games developers are finding the in-game purchase model attractive simply because it provides easy answers,” said report author Charlotte Miller.

“Their piracy rate will drop and the game will see more downloads. However, while some games may generate significant revenues from in-game items, the model doesn’t work with all games and developers have to tread a fine line between encouraging purchases and appearing to be exploitative.”

Hand in hand with this in-app purchase revenue rise will be the increasing popularity of social and casual releases, with Juniper predicting they’ll both “account for the lion’s share of mobile games downloads” between now and 2016.

Games on feature phones will, in turn, decline over the next five years, while Juniper believes tablets will increasingly become a main port of call for many gamers.

The full white paper can downloaded from Juniper’s website for £1,750.

Notoriously, Apple has very hard lines when it comes to incentivised actions – certainly when it comes to incentivised downloads.

Facebook, however, is happier to embrace some aspects of the business model.

Indeed, it’s now relaxing previous restrictions, allowing developers to create offerwalls that use their own in-game currency, alongside official Facebook Credits.

Paid to play

“…these offers can be a valuable additional source of revenue by helping them monetize users that may not otherwise pay for virtual currency,” sagely notes Facebook’s Abhishek Doshi, on the company’s developers blog.

“Today we’re launching in-app currency offers, which lets developers award users with their own in-app currency (e.g., Fred Currency in Fred’s game) upon completing an offer.”

In terms of how the system works, Facebook enables developers to take deals from Offerwall and TrialPay’s Dealspot.

These provide offers such as watching videos or signing to up to Netflix, Flixster and credit cards etc, the payback being you get virtual currency, or Facebook Credits for such actions.

Obviously, for developers, being able to offer their own currency provides a lot more flexibility compared to Facebook’s official virtual currency, which is more comparable, being available across hundreds of games.

“We hope this new product provides you an additional source of revenue, and we look forward to seeing how you incorporate this new functionality into your apps,” Doshi adds.

If only Apple was as forthcoming…

So let’s start with some numbers from the turn of the year.

Clearly, the folk at Flurry don’t take holidays, updating its blog on Boxing Day to inform us that 6.8 million new iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day.

It followed this up early in the New Year to let us know that the holiday season was first ‘power week’ with more than one billion apps downloaded - 1.2 billion in total. Of course, both figures are estimates from apps running Flurry’s analytics package so shouldn’t be viewed as ‘official’.

From the horse’s Tweetdeck

We got one side of that story, however, from Google’s Andy Rubin who tweeted/Google+ed that 3.7 million Android devices were activated over Christmas weekend.

Another company bigging up its performance was Amazon, which didn’t provide hard numbers, but said that the Kindle Fire had sold millions over holiday season as the #1 ranked item on Amazon.

Analysts reckon total sales for the $199 Android tablet could be as high as five million.

Rival retailer Barnes & Noble is doing well with its range of Nook e-readers and tablets. So well, in fact, that it’s now considering spinning out what it hopes will be $1.5 billion business in FY12.

Doing less well in the tablet stakes is RIM, which is selling off its BlackBerry PlayBook tablets for $299 in North America during January.

Meanwhile, other tablets manufacturers are dealing with the situation by dropping their prices, with entry level devices starting from around $300. Acer’s new 10-inch Icona A200 family starts from $330.

Another significant rumour is that Intel will be getting into the hardware business to better promote its new Medfield chip architecture.

It’s expected to launch a smartphone running Android Ice Cream Sandwich at CES – something that will be launched in conjunction with carriers in Europe and India.

Millennial steps up

The year has also started well for companies looking to raise investment.

Polish publisher and social mobile gaming platform provider Tequila Mobile has announced it’s closed a $1.7 million round, user acquisition tool Playerize secured $1 million in its first funding round, while UK augmented reality startupBlippar received seed funding from Qualcomm Ventures.

The big news, however, its that the largest independent mobile ad networkMillennial Networks has filed its S-1 form with the SEC, prior to a potential listing on the Nasdaq.

This reveals the company had sales of $69 million for the nine months ending September and was marginally loss making. It valued itself at $305 million during its most recent stock options round.

Another interesting deal saw German mobile and online games and entertainment outfit Bob Mobile buys Dutch rival CLIQ in a deal worth $71 million. It also bought the remaining shares of Guerilla Mobile that it didn’t own.

The combined company, which is floated on the Frankfurt exchange, expects sales of $120 million in FY12.

Prior to CES, there was also plenty of activity in the TV gaming space, withTransGaming buying Oberon’s TV games division for $7 million, PlayJam hooking up with GameHouse, which will provide games for its Smart TV gaming platform, and Myriad partnering with AppCarousel to serve up Android app platform for internet-enabled TVs,

Samsung booms

And the numbers will continue to flow as we hit the three week financial reporting period, starting with Apple’s Q4 figures on 24 January.

Prior to this, it seems as well as Apple, Samsung will be posting some impressive figures. It released its preliminary Q4 numbers this week, but didn’t break out the contribution of Samsung Electronics from the overall total. However, analysts now expect the company to ship as many as 170 million smartphones in 2012.

Less good news for HTC, which although it posted unaudited FY11 sales of $15.4 billion, saw a heavy decline during Q4, thanks in part to competition from Samsung.

Of course, both vendors are heavy supporters of Google’s Android OS. New figures reveal that Android 2.3x (Gingerbread) is now the dominant version of the OS, being on more than 50 percent of devices for the first time.

The company continues to invest in the platform, buying 217 more patents from IBM. Analyst outfit Distimo also notes that Android Marketplace now has400,000 active apps, and looks likely to overtake the daily increase in new apps of Apple’s App Store in early 2012.

Nokia back in the USA

The big OEM news of the week was the resurgence of rumours that Microsoft is looking to cherrypick Nokia’s smartphone operations: something the company denies.

What is clear, however, is that Nokia’s attempt to grow its presence in North America will kick off with the Lumia 900 (an uprated Lumia 800) with dual cameras, and LTE support. It will launch with AT&T and be backed with a $100 million ad campaign.

It’s such initiatives that persuaded Credit Suisse to upgrade its guidance on Nokia stock, while metrics from StatCounter show that Symbian ended 2011 asthe most popular mobile OS, thanks to its continued dominant in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

And ensuring it will continue to support those markets, it was revealed that back in November 2010, Nokia bought Norwegian turnkey OS outfit Smarterphone for an undisclosed sum. It provides a platform that gives $25 – $75 phones a more smartphone-like experience.

iPad price segmentation?

Apple rumours never end and 2012 started with rumblings about iPad. The current thinking from sources deep within Apple’s supply chain is that iPad 3 will launch in March or April with a retina display, which will enable iPad 2 to drop in price to compete better with the $199 Kindle Fire.

More contentious is the rumour that a ‘proper sequel’ – iPad 4 – will launch in October.

What’s not up for debate is the success of the device, which ABI underlined with the news that app downloads on iPad have topped 3 billion in 20 months.

Other Apple news saw it hiring Adobe VP Todd Teresi to head up its troubled iAd division, while iPhone 4S will launch in 22 new countries next week, including China.

Microsoft is looking to new markets as well, with developers now able to submit apps and games for sales in countries such as China, Indonesia and Malaysia, prior to the Windows Phone Marketplace switch on in those countries.

Tiny Tower’s growth

But over three years into the app ecosystem, it’s not just the big companies that are able to generate significant headlines.

Tiny US developer NimbleBit continues to impress with its Tiny Tower free-to-play game now seeing more than 1 million daily active players, who are clocking up 10 million sessions a day.

Much larger, Korean publisher Gamevil’s has done 13 million downloads across iOS and Android, while Epic revealed that its two Infinity Blade games havegrossed more than $30 million on iOS.

And the biggest of all – downloads-wise – Rovio let us know that a massive 6.5 million Angry Birds’ games were downloaded on Christmas Day; which using Flurry’s figures, would be 2.7 percent of all iOS and Android downloads on the day.

The Finnish company is opening a new development studio too, in 150 km north of its Helsinki HQ in Tampere.

Bid up, tear down

Let’s end, though, with two intriguing mini-trends.

The first follows the decision of developer Neal Schmidt to sell his iOS gameBuckshot on eBay, gaining $16,000 in the process. This has encouraged others to follow suit with Simon Papineau making three of his games available.

The other demonstrates the lack of clear thinking from some of gaming’s old guard as Nintendo told UK indie Icon Games to remove the download figures of its self-published WiiWare games from its blog.

The result of this – and other restrictions of Nintendo’s current digital download platform – is the company is now focused on Sony platforms.

The organization and chip supplier Marvell Technology are using next week’s Consumer Electronics Show to demonstrate the XO 3.0, a tablet-style computer designed to stand up to rugged classroom use in places where sunlight is plentiful but electricity and other comforts are not.

OLPC was originally a project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and its co-founder, Nicholas Negroponte. The goal announced in 2005 was to deliver laptops for $100, far less than the going price for low-end portables at the time. OLPC first started mass shipments of laptops in 2007, though it failed at that time to hit its original price target.

It appears that at least one model of the XO 3.0 will. Though Marvell declines to comment on pricing, Negroponte–who has been discussing plans for a tablet since 2009–told IDG News that the new product will cost less than $100 for a model with a standard eight-inch display.

OLPC’s hardware has been distinguished in part by an unusual display from Pixel Qi that is designed to be read in bright sunlight. Models of the new tablet with that screen are expected to cost more than $100.

The XO 3.0 is also billed as the only tablet the only tablet that can be charged directly by solar panels, hand cranks and other alternative power sources.

Marvell is supplying a chip called the Armada PXA618 for the new device, which is based on the ARM Holdings designs used in cellphones. The company says it offers a significant decrease in power consumption compared to other portable computers.

Rumors of a March launch for Apple’s third-generation iPad with a high-resolution Retina Display have been deemed “completely accurate,” though a claim that Apple will launch an “iPad 4″ this October was written off as “completely made-up nonsense.”

John Gruber of Daring Fireball issued a response on Friday to a new report fromDigiTimes that gained attention earlier in the day. That report from the Taiwan-based publication said that Apple will ship a third-generation iPad in March with a high-definition display.

“Wait a minute. What’s going on here?” Gruber responded sarcastically. “A DigiTimes report about Apple and the iPad that’s completely accurate? No completely made-up nonsense? Is something wrong with me?”

He then went on to quote the portion of the article that said an “iPad 4″ with “killer applications” will arrive in October. To that he responded, “OK, phew, what a relief.”

Though the post was tongue-in-cheek, Gruber seemingly does use it to confirm a March launch of the next iPad, consistent with the timeframe of the the iPad 2 launch in 2011. He has also said on previous occasions that he believes the next iPad will sport a high-resolution Retina Display. Gruber is well-connected and has a reliable track record on Apple predictions.

Separately, Gruber took a few guesses at what Apple might do in 2012 for Macworld. There he suggested that Apple’s Retina Display branding would only apply to new high-end models.

“I think Apple will continue selling the existing iPad 2 alongside the new ones, or introduce a new lower-end model that still sports today’s 1024-by 768-pixel screen, simply because I think the retina-display iPad will be a bit expensive,” he said. “I think the new iPad models will use the same screen size as today’s — no 7-inch model.”

As for the next iPhone, Gruber believes it will be a completely redesigned model that will arrive in late 2012, like the iPhone 4S. He doesn’t expect that the new iPhone will have a larger display, but he does see Apple including an even better camera than is in the iPhone 4S.

With rumours that even Apple is looking at lowering the entry point prices of its tablet range, it’s predictable that other manufacturers are looking to board the sub-$350 tablet train too.

Especially after the Amazon Kindle Fire cried ‘all-aboard’ with its $199 asking price.

Acer is one such manufacturer, with its 10-inch, 1280 x 800 resolution,  Iconia Tab A200 tablet due to go on sale in the US on January 15, prices starting from $330.

Break the Ice (Cream Sandwich)

Though the tablet will ship packing Android’s Honeycomb OS, an Ice Cream Sandwich update is expected to touch down around the middle of February.

The cheapest version of the tablet will have 8GB storage, with the 16GB version costing an extra $20, bringing it to $350.

Both devices come with a MicroSD slot and are one of the few tablets out there which boasts a USB 2.0 port for easy file transferring.

An Nvidia dual-core Tegra 2 SoC powers the device, the battery for which can keep it ticking over for about eight hours.