It’s been a year since E la Carte launched its customized tablet for restaurants, which brings menus, wine lists, nutritional info, play-while-you-wait games, and payment options tableside, and now the company has new numbers to reveal. This time last year, there were around 20 restaurants using the tablet; today there are now over 600, including national chains Pizzeria Venti and Umami Burger, as well as Faz Restaurant Group in the San Francisco Bay Area and Classic Restaurant Concepts in Boston. In total, there are around 20,000 tablets in 20 U.S. states, and seven countries worldwide.
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The Kindle Fire from Amazon has stolen a march in the tablet world, with some estimating that it now makes up more than half of all Android tablets in use in the U.S. today. But the latest monthly figures from mobile ad network JumpTap today paint a different picture in terms of usage.
JumpTap noted that in the months after its launch, Amazon’s device rapidly picked up market share, reaching 33 percent of all traffic on its network in January 2012. But since then, the figure has gradually been in decline and is now at 22 percent. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPad — which had lost share to the Kindle Fire — is now back to 65 percent, or where it was before Amazon launched its tablet.
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Barnes & Noble has found a new, major partner in its fight to get an edge over Amazon and Apple in the market for e-books and the devices being used to consume them: it is teaming up with Microsoft in what the two are calling a strategic partnership, name yet to be determined.
It will come in the form of a new subsidiary of B&N that will include all of its Nook business as well as its educational College business. Microsoft is making a $300 million investment in the subsidiary, valuing the company at $1.7 billion in exchange for around 17.6 percent equity in the subsidiary.
The news leaves the door open for B&N to eventually spin these off into a separate business altogether — or even sell them to Microsoft. And it leaves a load of questions about what B&N will do next with the Nook, which is currently built on a forked version of Google’s Android platform. → Read More
Just watching TV without also using a tablet or smartphone at the same time seems to be on its way out. Earlier this month, Nielsen launched the first part of its report on primetime TV viewers in the U.S. and today, the analytics company is taking a deeper dive into the demographics of those who simultaneously watch TV and use their tablets. According to Nielsen, 45% of tablet owners watch TV and use their tablet together at least once a day. A whopping 69% say they do so at least several times a week and only 12% say they never do this. → Read More
On the same day that Amazon will be releasing its quarterly earnings, some research from comScore underscores just how far the company has come since launching its Kindle Fire tablet in November 2011.
The researchers say that as of February 2012, Amazon’s Kindle Fire now accounts for 54.4 percent of all Android tablets in the U.S. Given how many different models of Android tablets there are out in the market at the moment, that gives it a strong lead over the rest of the field: the whole range of Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, added together, only accounted for 15.4 percent of the market, with the Xoom following at seven percent, comScore said. → Read More
We’ve always been interested in the Notion Ink project, which has always striven to be a true alternative to both the iPad and Android masses. Last time, it was through both a Pixel Qi screen and an interesting custom interface, but delays and yield problems more or less buried it and competitors piled up.
The sequel to Notion Ink’s Adam was originally going to have a 10″ screen running at 1920×1200. A post on the company’s development blog has admitted that this is not likely to happen. → Read More
For anyone who’s loved to watch Twitter reactions or a liveblog of a big event on TV, this will probably come as no surprise. For advertisers and broadcasters who haven’t figured out how to capitalize on this, you are missing a trick: we are fast becoming a culture of people who love to use devices like smartphones and tablets while watching television.
According to the latest study from Nielsen covering Q4 2011, in the U.S., a full 86 percent of tablet owners and 88 percent of smartphone owners said that they used their devices while watching regular TV at least once in a 30-day period. Nearly half (45 percent) actually did this on daily basis with their tablets, with 41 percent saying they watched TV while tapping on a smartphone every day.
But what’s perhaps surprising is that, while sites like GetGlue and Twitter have capitalized on the idea of social streams coinciding with TV viewing, Nielsen says the most popular activity is actually checking email, with the second most-popular activity being related to checking content related to the program or products being advertised around it. → Read More
The saga of India’s “$35 tablet” is long and slightly disappointing. While the idea of low-cost, standard hardware to be distributed in needful communities is a great one, the fact is that the device itself is more or less junk. Poorly built, with a small battery, outdated OS, and low-quality touchscreen, the Aakash has not had a good reception among people who care about such things.
But it’s only the beginning of the road for this type of device, and DataWind, the company that made the Aakash, has already announced the follow-up — and now they’re considering expanding the market to the US. A pilot study may be in the works for under-served schools in Philadelphia. → Read More
Early in 2011, upstream suppliers of displays and components let a few of Amazon’s secrets into the open, and these early, incomplete indications were actually on whole quite correct. Now we’re seeing more of the same kind of thing predicting the coming year’s announcements from Amazon, and the predictions seem just as reasonable.
The news is what you might expect: a diversification of the Kindle Fire lineup, with a focus on display quality — and presumably thrift, considering the series’ low price. → Read More
A federal judge has ruled that Asus’ Transformer Prime tablet does not infringe on Hasbro’s Transformers trademark, in spite of the suit actually making sense. Just “Transformer”, or just “Prime”, might have flown right by Hasbro’s lawyers without a second look — those are words, after all — but putting the two together seemed like tempting fate. As expected, Hasbro took Asus to task in December.
But the judge has initially sided with Asus, saying that people were unlikely to confuse the tablet with Hasbro properties, noting they had also waited too long to file the suit.
As a little kicker on the story, court filings have revealed that the device has produced pre-order numbers that are, shall we say, less than legendary. → Read More
While hosting this year’s Academy Awards, Billy Crystal cracked, “I prefer the big screen… which is my iPad.” The remark was an ironic counterpoint to the evening’s theme, “Let’s go to the movies,” itself a half-hearted attempt to resuscitate flagging U.S. box office sales. On the heels of a year that saw the lowest movie theater attendance in almost two decades, it’s clear that the silver screen feels threatened by younger, slimmer screens.
Apple’s new iPad is shattering sales records and quickly ushering in the post-PC era. The company sold three million tablets in the first weekend they went on sale and may sell as many as 66 million by year’s end. Like the iPhone and iPod before it, the iPad is reinventing an entire technology category and bringing it to the masses. → Read More
As developers hunker down and get into the business of trying to work out how to get consumers to buy more of their product on mobile devices, some revealing numbers out from Nielsen on what people are willing to pay for on tablets already.
The upshot: paid content, it seems, is alive and well, but some media categories are doing a lot better than others. → Read More
Even if you have perfect vision, indulge me here for a second. You know when you go in for an eye exam and you’re asked to look at a combination of letters and numbers on a chart against a far wall? You read the first few lines, then realize you actually can’t go any further. Then you get prescribed glasses (or contacts) and you can all of a sudden read every letter and number. And even the ones you could read before are now so much clearer.
That’s what it’s like looking at the new iPad versus the older iPads.
It’s weird because I was never one of those people who thought the original iPad’s and the iPad 2′s screen was poor (but there were plenty of those people in the post-iPhone Retina world). I guess it’s just like a pre-glasses world — you never realize how blurry things are because that’s just how you’ve always seen everything. And then you put the glasses on and you wonder how you ever managed without them.
Once you see and use the new iPad, there will be no going back. → Read More
Veteran tablet maker Archos has released a teaser video of a new tablet they’re going to be releasing (we presume) later this year. It’s called the G10 XS (the latest in a series of G tablets) and it has a few differentiating features that may call your name.
As others have noted, the only way for Android tablets to set themselves apart from one another is in design and specs. Archos has found one more that seems to have been mostly neglected: material. Ubergizmo reports that the shell of the G10 series will be made of “paper-thin” steel. Perhaps that’s how they managed to get the thing down to an impressive 7.6mm thick. → Read More
With news of Apple’s new iPad selling out its first run due to overwhelming demand, 2012 is off to a galloping start for the tablet market; and because of that IDC is upping its forecasts for how many tablets will be shipped this year. The analysts predict that the number will top 106.1 million units, up from their previous forecast of 87.7 million units, due in part to strong demand for that new iPad, but also a number of other devices at a range of price points.
Indeed, while Apple will continue to be the single biggest tablet maker on the market, Android, collectively, will continue to hold its own against it, with some notable devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire doing particularly well. But it will not be until 2016 — four years from now — that IDC thinks that Android shipments will outnumber those of iOS. → Read More
At yesterday’s Apple event, CEO Tim Cook ran through some big numbers that underscored just how strongly the iPad is pacing against PCs when it comes to consumer interest. Today, Gartner released some forecasts that underscore how that story is not set to change any time soon.
The analysts say that PC shipments are on track to grow by just 4.4 percent in 2012 — to 368 million units, as consumers continue to prioritize purchases of new tablets, and smartphones, ahead of buying new laptop or desktop computers. But at least this is a slight improvement on 2011, when Gartner said that shipments were essentially flat on 2010. → Read More
The onward march for Android and Apple continues apace, and leaves a big question mark for how other platforms can hope to compete, at least in the U.S. market: New figures out from Jumptap indicate that in the month of January, the two combined made up 91 percent of all smartphone traffic on its U.S. mobile ad network — representing a new high for the two most-dominant mobile phone platforms.
But while Apple has seen a huge jump in smartphone users following the launch of the iPhone 4S last year, Jumptap’s figures indicate that in tablets it has a strong competitor in the form of the Kindle Fire, which now accounts for 33 percent of all tablet traffic on the network. → Read More
On the eve of what is very likely to be the launch of a new iPad from Apple comes some new analysis from Forrester Research on the current competitive landscape — or lack thereof, as the case seems to be.
In short: despite the rush of tablets that have come out in the past year, many built on Google’s Android OS, Apple has managed to continue to run away with the competition, and how has 73 percent of the tablet market. No Android tablet maker, it notes, has more than a 5 percent share against it.
There is a caveat to Forrester’s research, however. → Read More
By most accounts there aren’t very many people out there in the world using PlayBooks, but for those that are, or are considering the purchase of one, comes some good news: RIM has finally updated the OS to include two services that have been long discussed and much anticipated: integrated email support and Android app availability.
The OS could serve to give the device a boost in the market, after many people slammed RIM for shipping the tablet too early when it debuted last year without these and other features. → Read More
If you own a tablet and have children, chances are that this will not come as news to you. For those who don’t but work in mobile, it’s something worth remembering when you’re concocting up your next big product: Kids are crazy about tablets.
According to some research out today from Nielsen in the U.S., in households that own a tablet, seven out of 10 children under the age of 12 use them. And that usage is on the rise: those numbers are for Q4 2011, and are a nine percent increase on the quarter before. → Read More
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