Another day, another slate aimed at the education market. The Brainchild Kineo is an education-only device aimed at grade-school kids. It runs Android, sure, but the whole thing is locked down like Gitmo and the teacher has full control over the lessons displayed on the screen. → Read More
Today at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang threw out a prediction for the future of the tablet market that isn’t too far removed from that of the smartphone market over the past few years. Huang said that Android will surpass Apple’s iOS-powered iPad in market share over the next 2 1/2 years. → Read More
The more CEOs try to defend their products in the public arena, the sadder they sound. For example, Stephen Elop’s discussion of an upcoming (as in not ever shipping) Nokia tablet smacks of careful CEO talk and whiff of BS. When describing Nokia’s future plans for the device, he hedges his bets, saying that they may go Microsoft or they may go somewhere else (Ubuntu?) and that they don’t want to be another me-to tablet and instead they want to create something amazing and special. The last time Nokia created something amazing and special was probably 1999 when Neo talked to Morpheus on a modified Nokia 8110. → Read More
After ousting previous tablet lead Gianfranco Lanci, Acer has named Jim Wong as head of their Touch Business Group (Touch BG) and PC Global Operations (PCGO). After a series of wildly unsuccessful tablet launches, including the inscrutable Iconia, Lanci resigned. Wong, who led Acer’s IT initiatives, has been with the company for a little over a decade. → Read More
You can’t really tell from this quick demo video, but what you’re peeping is the bulimic OGT Mobile Tablet. The company says it’s the slimmest Android tablet on this green planet and I can’t find anything to the contrary. It’s even thinner and lighter than the sickly iPad 2. But that doesn’t mean this Android slate is lacking in the tech department either. Nope, according to AndroidCentral, this kid packs the goods. → Read More
More details emerged today about the New York Times’ digital paywall, which will go up at the end of March. As far as paywalls go, it’s not terrible. Subscribers to the print edition don’t have to pay anything extra to read online or in mobile apps, links to individual articles from blogs and other news sites won’t be blocked, and the paywall only goes up if you read more than 20 articles a month. That’s all fairly reasonable and forward-thinking.
But there is one part of the pricing plan that is wrong-headed. It discriminates by device. Depending on what device you read the paper on, you will be charged differently for an all-digital subscription. The pricing plans start at $15 a month for Web access plus iPhone, Android, or other smartphone apps. On the iPad or other tablets, it will cost $20 a month. And if you want to switch between the Web, phone, and tablet, that will cost you $35 a month. And Kindle subscriptions are not included. (Plus, the pricing is for every four weeks, meaning that the billing cycle will be padded even more). → Read More
Remember the Xoom? We really liked it. Anyway, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek says that the Xoom is going to be knee-capped by the iPad 2 this week and probably for the rest of its natural life, a situation that does not bode well for the Honeycomb tablet. → Read More
CrunchDeals, get your Crunchdeals. Read all about it, on your new eReader/tablet. DinoDirect.com is offering up a 7-inch eBook Reader with Google Android for only $99.99 with free shipping. That’s about $100 off the lowest price we could find. → Read More
Apple just announced its massive Q1 numbers yesterday; they sold 4.13 million Macs. Now that’s only in one quarter, but HP thinks they can also pull off some massive numbers by selling 45 to 48 million notebooks in 2011. In 2010, HP did….
More after the break. → Read More
Sprint has only had the Samsung Galaxy Tab out since November 14th, yet is already slashing its price. Perhaps the huge amount of tablets announced at CES has something to do with the price adjustment. That or the fact that when Honeycomb comes out, the Tab will be obsolete. Besides it’s not that much to make. → Read More
Sure, it’s not Honeycomb, but who’s counting! The sub-$200 Android tablet is available from a no-name OEM called AOC and weighs 1.1 pounds. It has an 800×600 pixel touchscreen and 12 hours of battery life. → Read More
Even though it wasn’t supposed to be released until CES, Dell’s new tablet leaked today via some ad copy, and it turns out the tablet will be called the Streak 7. → Read More
A Greek website, DigitalLife, has posted a long hands-on with the Alcatel E66, an Android tablet running at 800×460 resolution with a seven-inch screen. Nothing absolutely amazing, but I do love the woman’s voice demoing it. It sounds like a cross between a British Airlines flight safety warning and a mysterious archeologist heroine in a Dan Brown book. → Read More
The first of the OEM garbagetablets(TM) are being recalled. Staples is pulling the Viewsonic gTablet for manufacturing defects and is “flexing” the laptop display to make it seem like the devices were never there – a very Stalin-esque way of saying these things were junk. → Read More
The Creative ZiiO 10 isn’t exactly a secret. The Creative UK store posted its product page a few weeks ago, but the simple fact that the device is sitting with the kind folk at the FCC seems to state that a US release is immanent. Everything is available in the FCC docs: external photos, internal photos, user manuals, nearly everything but a price sheet. → Read More
Yeah, sure, it will come out. Don’t worry. I know you guys are totally into the Notion Ink Adam tablet and I’m here to tell you that this thing won’t ship this year and when it does you won’t be happy with it. Barring all that, the company has just released a website so you can gaze longingly at the device for a few more precious hours. → Read More
Isabella Products, the folks that brought you the Vizit interactive picture frame are planning to bring your children a 7″ tablet called the “Fable”. Aside from built-in mobile broadband and a camera, no real technical details are available. The product will incorporate the “carousel” interface used by the Vizit picture frame. Apps include an e-reader with children’s content from Houghton Mifflin, a drawing thingie, games, and a photo sharing thingie. → Read More
Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have downplayed actual e-reader device sales numbers, instead crowing about the number of ebooks sold in the past year. This is an important distinction because it shows us a few things about the Nook/Kindle audience. First, e-readers (dedicated e-readers, mind you, not tablets) are popular with heavy readers and, as a corollary, most e-reader owners buy a lot of books. However, the real value has been in the e-book format itself, as the popularity of the Kindle and Nook e-book stores can attest. Since the first e-readers trickled out of Sony in about 2006, the general audience has complained about the lack of a color option and their interest has been consistently drawn to tablets like the iPad, the Playbook, and the HP Slate. What’s an e-reader manufacturer to do?
In short, they need to create a slate with a focus on e-reading which, like the Nook, will run a kiosk-style, locked-down version of Android. A thin LCD screen (OLED is right out) should satisfy all but the most picky reader and a $250 price tag, $50 more than the best E Ink Nook, would create a fairly compelling offering for that self-same reader.
And that’s just what we can expect to see from Barnes & Noble this week when they announce a new Nook. → Read More
News Corp, publishers of the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and a slew of other international papers including The Sun, has cancelled plans to offer a tablet-based newsstand, code-named Project Alesia. The project would have brought all of News Corp’s media holdings together in one app as well as aggregate news from other sources, a la Google News. The project has apparently been folded back up into News Corp. → Read More
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