GIT Unveils Moderately Priced Honeycomb Tablet originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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Barnes & Noble reported its economic performance nowadays. They generated $ 1.4 billion in sales, a 2 percent boost over the identical period last year.

Book sales were down, but the firm’s Nook operation were up, reports C/Net.

The company reported that its Nook enterprise, which includes hardware and digital-content sales, grew 140 percent during the period to $ 277 million.

The $ 139 Nook and Nook $ 249 Color, which runs Android, functions a B&N application store, in addition to e-book support.

The agency pricing model for e-books, in which book publishers set the retail cost and retailers take a commission, is working nicely for Barnes & Noble, says Paid Content. Amazon now can’t undercut it on e-books from the “big 6” publishers, all of whom use the agency model.

“We think agency is going to take hold as the dominant form of pricing for e-books going forward. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in an investor call this morning.

All eyes are now on Amazon, for an anticipated color Android tablet.Technologizer speculates on how the Amazon Tablet may possibly be priced:

It would have to be attractive. A thin 7″ device with a Super AMoLED display may well support – particularly when packaged with Amazon’s MP3 cloud library, Movies, Kindle books and Android Apps.

Amazon’s 7-inch tablet PC, which is supplied by Quanta Pc, is expected to begin shipping in October. Mass production of Amazon’s 10.1-inch tablet will be conducted in the first quarter of 2012 with Foxconn Electronics making the device, says Digitimes

Amazon outsources its Kindle e-book reader to Foxconn with an estimated volume of 15-18 million units, accounting for 60-70% of global e-book reader shipments of 25-30 million units in 2011.

But people forget that the Amazon tablet will be a media hog (in contrast to the Kindle). The data connection is key — WiFi is just too inconvenient.

A low cost 4G connection, say $ 10-$ 20/month for 1-2GB/mo, appears required to attract a mass market. Newspapers and magazines might help subsidize the price of the connection — along with Google, Microsoft and other people.

Forrester expects Amazon to sell among three and 5 million units in Q4.

In its revised report on “media tablets,” iSuppli bumped up its overall growth predictions for all shipments, stating that 60 million tablets will ship in 2011, 1.1 million much more than it originally stated. In 2015, it now expects annual shipments to reach 275.three million, up from 262.1 million in its previous report.

dailywireless.org

When HTC released the Flyer tablet, I’ll admit, I was a bit jealous of its Scribe technology and writing capability sufficient so, that I went out and bought a capacitive stylus to use with my own Xoom tablet. Surely the Xoom’s bigger screen would be much better for writing anyway, but to my dismay, there weren’t a lot of apps for me to write with. Those that did exist weren’t precisely as useful  or smooth searching as what the Flyer was touting.

Weeks later, nonetheless, XDA forum member Transceiver, has made my pen buy a worthy investment. Transceiver is the creator of an app still in beta known as WritePad, although that name will likely alter to some degree simply because an app with that name already exists in the Android Marketplace.

Although originally designed for the Asus Eee Pad Transformer running three.two, I’ve identified the app have a silky smooth writing encounter on my Xoom as nicely.

Presently the app attributes

• No lag and no jitter among the stylus movement and the screen response.
• Intelligent palm detection – only records the writing from your stylus (appropriate handed only for now).
• Export page and notebook – share the page as a PNG file, or export the whole thing as a ZIP file to your Dropbox or Gmail account.
• Paper sorts – comes with 4 familiar paper kinds such as White, Legal, Composition, &amp Engineer (Graph Paper)
• Stylus calibration – instead of drawing where the stylus touches the screen, it will draw where you ‘think’ the stylus tip is which is great for thicker tip styluses.

If you are a tablet owner, I highly encourage checking this app out. Transceiver is interested in having different types of tablets beta test the app, so go grab it from the application forum and leave him your feedback.

Application Thread

Take Note, WritePad Brings Stylus Optimized Handwriting to any Honeycomb Tablet.

Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Amazon is, by all reports, finding ready to launch an Android based Tablet. This tablet is aimed at domination for the Android tablet planet and possibly as a viable competitor to the ever common iPad. The tablet would be backed with access to Amazon’s gigantic market place and marketplace features.  Amazon is gearing up to launch the tablet sometime in October, best for the holiday rush and the name Amazon is recognized far and wide, a lot further and wider than any android tablet released to date.

The tablet is expected to carry a 9 inch screen which would be equal to that of the iPad and as we have noticed from shoppers, its “Give me large screen tablets or give me nothing!” As android continues to improve and merge is OS we can anticipate a lot more features to be streamlined as nicely, giving an Amazon tablet the benefit with Android updates.

The Amazon digital content benefit will hugely enhance the value of this tablet, as Apple’s claim to fame with the iPad is the amount of content supplied for it. Pricing points and several other elements should support Amazon launch this tablet and be competitive when it comes to other tablets, and the iPad.

Source: eweek

More Honeycomb apps are always a good thing, right? This time, the folks at Zinio have brought us a hardware-accelerated application optimized for performance on Honeycomb and Tegra 2. The company says they have 100,000 magazines from 4,200 different publishers in all types of languages and available to purchase in a variety of currencies.

Content can be synced to a number of other platforms, including PC, Mac, and iOS and soon to be Blackberry, Windows 7 and WebOS. To sweeten the pot, Zinio’s giving away the latest editions to three popular magazines – ESPN, Harper’s, and Popular Science. Sounds like a deal, if you ask me. The application itself can be had for free from the Android market.

Android Phone Fans

Lenovo has been taking their sweet time putting out their LePad tablet that we finally got to see at CES back in January this year. We heard about their launch plans for the LePad last June, then September, then after it still didn’t come out, they stated they weren’t releasing it until Honeycomb was released. Well, Honeycomb is released, but are we going to see Lenovo make good on their claims? It’s starting to sound like Notion Ink already!

Well, they aren’t totally matching their word, but sort of. They are launching the tablet, and Honeycomb has come out…but the tablet will reportedly have Android 2.2 on it…not Honeycomb. Fail. Pricing may be the only thing saving this device from total annihilation in the tablet race, which will be between $399 – $449. It’ll be launching in June (we’ll see that when it actually happens), and in China in March.

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth it at all, but let us know what you think below.

Lenovo launching LePad Android tablet in June 2011

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

A lot of Android tablets look the exact same. Or maybe some would say a lot of Android tablets look like the iPad. Here is one that doesn’t… a made by Marvell prototype that just might come into production courtesy of a well known GPS company:

My two favorite features by far:

• The ruggedized rubber look that makes this device stand out from the crowd. I instantly saw it and wondered “what is THAT cool looking thing”? Lots of manufacturers have gone the sleek, sexy and simple route so this unbranded device was a breath of fresh air and I really dug it’s design.
• On the back, the holes for the speaker grill were oriented to look like the Android Robot. Lovely touch and fun to see… I haven’t seen this done anywhere else before.

I didn’t evaluate the device based on real world effectiveness – it’s clearly a prototype and doesn’t even have a brand or home yet. I was just incredibly interested in the product design. I’m not sure how well this would fare as a GPS-focused device, which I was told might be the end game, but mostly because we haven’t seen Android widely adopted as a GPS-focused device. I personally think that’s because your phone does navigation quite well with Google Nav regardless, but it also doesn’t have a huge screen.

In any case, argue with the potential for GPS-focused Android devices if you want, but you’ll be hard pressed to convince me that this thing doesn’t look pretty awesome with the tough rubber style and Android robot speaker grill.

View full post on Android Phone Fans

After all the tablets have been coming out at CES 2011, and now finishing off MWC 2011, there have been rumors and wonders on why we didn’t see a Sony tablet announced with all the other goodies we got. Rumors also were about that the Sony tablet would have special “PlayStation” gaming options like the Xperia Play smartphone, but again, no information came out…until now.

Apparently the VAIO section of Sony will be putting out a tablet device which will have PlayStation gaming built in, and will be 9.4 inches in size running Android 3.0. The design above is a mockup and not official, but Engadget was told that the Sony tablet may have a curved flap design to it, meant to remind us of the tablet being a personal item like a book or magazine.

The tablet will have 1280×800 resolution, IR for remote control capabilities on other devices like your Bravia TV, dual-core Tegra2 processor, USB-A port supporting flash drive input, and a volume rocker on the side all running Honeycomb OS. Price should be around $599, and meant to compete directly with the Apple iPad. We should see the Sony S1 shipping in September this year. By the time this comes out, we may even see NVIDIA Quad-Core ‘KAL-EL” chips in it. That would be awesome!

Sony S1 PlayStation Tablet is real, may be shipping September

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

HTC has debuted their first tablet ever, The Flyer. HTC is a machine when it comes to putting out quality Android devices, delivering precise tightly engineered hardware, putting it under a sleek casing, and making Android groupies go nuts. Following the post we covered earlier regarding 3 other devices HTC debuted, you can’t help but think they’re just competing with themselves.

The HTC Flyer has some of that iconic presence the company is known for, it looks good, it’s got the sweet software, and similar hardware to every device released in the last year. Have a look.

• Android 2.4 Gingerbread
• 7″ Super LCD
• 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor with 1Gb RAM
• 32Gb internal storage with expansion via microSD
• 1.3MP Front facing camera, 5MP rear facing camera

Now look at what the competition has in-store.

Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1″ Quick Specs:

• Android 3.0 Honeycomb
• 10.1″ TFT display
• 1GHz Dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor
• 16Gb or 32Gb internal storage
• 2MP front facing camera, 8MP rear facing camera

LG G-Slate Tablet Quick Specs:

• Android 3.0 Honeycomb
• 8.9″ HD Multi-touch display
• 1GHz Dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor
• 32Gb internal storage
• 2MP front facing camera, 5MP rear facing camera and flash with Full HD 1080p and 3D video capture

I realize there’s alot of software integrations involved with the Flyer: Sense UI updates, the stylus integration(allowing you to draw, paint, write, etc.. on the screen), and the new Onlive gaming service which allows you to stream games over the web. I’m glad gaming came up. How do you think the Flyer is going to perform with the other devices as a gaming platform?

There is one thing that it might have going for it, pricing, but since noone has released any information regarding that on any of these devices it’s hard to say. I’d be willing to bet the Flyer is going to cost less than the other two. What do yall think of the Flyer?

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Huawei made it known that they were going to be announcing their IDEOS X3 and X7 at MWC. Indeed, they held true to their word, releasing the news this morning that the devices will be available second quarter of this year is various European and Asian markets. Full press release after the break.
Read More…

Huawei Introduces IDEOS line – X3 Smartphone and X7 Tablet

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

At MWC in barcelona, we’ve been seeing alot of new tablets being officially announced. One of the ones to get excited about is the LG Optimus Pad, an 8.9 inch tablet running Android 3.0, boasting a NVIDIA Tegra2 dual-core processor, with 32GB storage, and dual rear cameras capable of shooting 3D HD video. It’s a wee bit smaller than the Motorola Xoom, or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and just a bit larger than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 inch version.

LG made a declaration of war at their MWC event, showing slides which stated “True Tablet War” with the LG Optimus Pad beneath the text. You may have heard about LG’s teaser ad against Apple that got pulled rather quickly, most likely cause there were some copyright infringements involved in the context, but regardless, LG is trying to stand tall among a tablet market that is quickly beginning to get saturated. We’ll see how this all pans out for them soon.

What do you think, is the LG too small, too big…or just right in the middle for size?

Click here for Full Press Release below.

MWC 2011 – LG Optimus Pad announced – starting a tablet war

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Here is the new Acer Iconia Smart running Android 2.3, and looking long and slender. The look of the device is pretty nice, the fact its running Gingerbread is pretty sweet too. I’m just not sold on the size of this device. I’ll get to that in a second.

The Acer Iconia Smart has an 8 megapixel rear end with a 2 megapixel front, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and 1024×480 resolution at 21:9 ratio, 720p video playback and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Pretty good specs right? I know. It’ll cost you about $499 and should be in Europe first around April, then the US by June/July.

Now, back to the sizing. It’s a long 4.8 inches…I mean, I have a 4 inch screen with 800×480 resolution and that feels big enough in my jean pocket. The press release says its “100% Smartphone, 100% tablet”…umm, no, I don’t think so. Remember Dell tried that with the Streak at 5inches, and it really didn’t fair well for them, they decided to go to the 7 inch and 10 inch models instead. I’m really not buying the 1024×480 resolution, great for internet usage, and reading ebooks, but terrible for games and watching videos cause you’ll have these blank areas of screen on either side. The UI is much nicer than the Dell UI however with some changes to the notification bar being on the bottom and what not, but the size man! I can’t get over how awkward it’ll feel in my pocket, unless MC Hammer pants come back, then fine.

What do you think?

Click here for the full Press release below.

Acer Iconia Smart – 4.8inch smartphone or tablet?

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Adobe announced at Mobile World Congress that its digital publishing suite, which allows content publishers to craft magazine-like content for tablet computers, is now going to be available for Android in addition to iOS.

Adobe software is currently used to create over 100 publications that run on iOS devices, including Wired, The New Yorker and our own Portland Guide. The growth of Android tablets is seen as key to enabling maximum reach. With the introduction of the Content Viewer for Android, the resulting publications will run as Adobe AIR applications on Android-based tablets.

Adobe’s software will support Android 3.0, Honeycomb, and higher. It will offer the same options as found in the iOS suite, including the analytics feature which tracks the app’s usage and how end users move through the magazine’s pages. Support for HTML5, navigational elements, visualizations, and overlays, will be included, just like the iOS version.

Digital Publishing Suite supports direct entitlement (where publishers can fulfill digital content by integrating with a print subscriber database) as well as in-app purchase (currently through Apple App store, with planned support for Android Market).

The new Google eBooks service uses Adobe eBook DRM, called Adobe Content Server. Using InDesign CS5, publishers can leverage the skills of their design staff to produce eBooks without resorting to costly third-party conversion houses.

Google will pay the publisher 52 percent of the list price if a title is sold through Google’s store, or 45 percent if it is sold through the company’s retail partners, which include Powell’s and Alibris.

With Adobe Digital Editions content protection, said to be the most pervasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution, Google eBooks can be read on tablets like Apple’s iPad and dozens of other tablet-size devices.

The way books are created, distributed and read is changing. Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble and independent booksellers like Powell’s Books in Portland are heading into unknown territory.

According to Forrester’s five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. It’s expected to triple, with $3 billion in sales by 2015. At that point the industry will be forever altered, says the study’s author. Penguin Books sees ebooks hitting 10 percent of book sales next year (it’s currently four percent in the U.S.).

Forester says 14% of Americans — 27 million people – plan on purchasing a tablet device next year.

A similar study by the Magazine Publishers of America found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers expect to purchase an e-reader or tablet within the next three years.

Today, just 7% of online adults who read books read e-books.

Publishers need to make ebooks the new default for publishing, says McQuivey of Forrester Research.

The e-book market is the fastest-growing segment of the bookselling industry. Goldman Sachs forecast in April that sales of e-books in the U.S. would rise by 47 percent each year sequentially until 2015. They forecast $3.2 billion in e-Book sales by 2015.

• Goldman forecasts Apple’s e-book market share to explode to a third of all e-books sold in 2015. Currently they have 10 percent of the market.
• Amazon’s has half the market share presently. Goldman expects Amazon sales to fall to 28 percent by 2015.
• Currently Barnes & Noble has just 5 percent market share. Goldman expects this to grow to 15 percent of e-book sales by 2010.

Amazon says magazine and newspaper publishers can earn 70-percent royalty on each title they sell in the Kindle Store. Amazon also introduced a self-service publishing tool for magazines and newspapers, similar to its Digital Text tool for books.

Related e-book articles on Dailywireless include; Google Editions: Web eBooks Readied , Bookstores: Preparing for E-Books?, e-Publishing: The New Normal, iPad Publishing Model: It’s People!,

View full post on dailywireless.org

Huawei has a couple more devices to show us that should be making their official appearances during the MWC conference next week on the 13th. The first is the Huawei IDEOS X3 smartphone. Looks to have a front and rear camera, back, search and menu buttons, and 4 different colors to choose from (red, black, silver and blue). This looks to be more of a mid-range Android device, when compared to the X5 we saw here.

Below we also have the IDEOS S7, which will also a slim tablet device with similar hardware options with buttons, front and rear cameras, and a 7inch screen, unfortunately, we don’t know much more than that. We’ll have to wait for the official MWC.

Huawei IDEOS X3 and IDEOS S7 tablet revealed before MWC

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Remember that snazzy Toshiba tablet prototype that we were speculating about early last month? Well, Toshiba has finally launched the official Toshiba Tablet website, with a confirmation that the Honeycomb device will be available this spring.

The website itself is pretty sleek and pleasing to the eye, which is hopefully a sign that the Toshiba Tablet will be just as great. The Android section of the website confirms that the tablet will be running Honeycomb and allow custom desktops, apps, and the like.

Take a look at TheToshibaTablet.com by clicking the source link. Be sure to let us know your thoughts on the upcoming Toshiba Tablet in the comments.

TheToshibaTablet.com goes live, Toshiba Honeycomb tablet coming this spring

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Well folks, looks like you can now purchase the Dell Streak 7 tablet from T-Mobile directly for a subsidized price — after a $50 mail in rebate — of $199.99. If you want it without a contract, however, you can get it from Dell for $449.99. This tablet has a seven inch screen, and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) with a Tegra 2 processor.

Are you looking at getting one of these Dell Babies? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

T-Mobile Now Selling the Dell Streak 7 Tablet

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

If it’s one thing I can appreciate most, it’s using technology in and for an educational milieu.  Over the years I can admit that having a smartphone within arms reach has increased my knowledge exponentially by always having pertinent information at my finger tips.  It’s nice to note that companies like Brainchild feel the same way.  Today, at the Florida Educational Technology Conference, Brainchild introduced the Kineo, a 7″ Android tablet that is geared towards educating our youth with today’s tablet technology.  The device sports an 800 x 480 touchscreen, 800 MHz processor, 2GB of storage along with WiFi and HDMI out support.  Hit the break for more info, pics and a video.

Read More…

Brainchild Intros The Kineo Tablet, Focuses On Education Android Style (Video)

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

It seems that the RockChip processors are becoming very popular in China and we just received the RockTouch RT7, which  is another tablet from over seas, which was sent to us by HotMid.com.

The tablet is manufactured by altdevices.com, according to the insignia on the back of the device. Don’t try to head to their web site as it really doesn’t exist, you get a basic blog page that someone has installed but not setup yet.

This is the first tablet we’ve received from China that features a capacitive multi-touch screen and it really makes a huge difference to the over all experience.  That’s enough for the intro, let’s get down to the details of the tablet.

What’s Inside the Tablet:

The RockTouch RT7 features:

• Five point touch capacitive touch screen
• Rockchip RK2818 660MHz + DSP 600MHz Processor
• 256MB DDR RAM8GB Flash memory
• Support up to 32GB Micro SD memory card
• Android 2.1
• Android Market
• Muti-language: Deutsch / English / Italiano / French / Nederlands / Spanish / Russian / Japanese / Korean / Chinese
• 7 inch TFT, 800 X 480 pixels Capacitive touch screen
• 720P MPEG2,MP4,H.264(Baseline)AVI,WMV video playback
• All the usual audio formats
• 3.5mm Stereo Headphone socket
• Supports USB Host mode
• Wireless WiFi 802.11b/g
• G-Sensor Yes
• Battery 3000mAH
• Color White
• Size & weight 190×118×11mm, 360 grams
• Package Content 110-230V Charger, USB Cable, Earphone, Manual

The Hardware:

The tablet has buttons and ports on the right and top of the bezel,  and also has no physical buttons on the front.  The right side of the device has the USB Host Connector, Mini USB Connector, a power port and the SD Card slot.

HotMid RockTouch RT7 Right Side

The top of the device has the ESC or back button as we know it, the menu button, the power buttons, and a reset function.

HotMid RockTouch RT7 Top

The Screen:

The screen is fairly nice for an entry level tablet if viewed from the correct angle, however  if you move your viewpoint away from looking straight at the screen, the quality deteriorates, but not to badly.  It is certainly acceptable for the price point of this tablet though.  The front of the screen is one complete piece, and the navigation goes to the edges, which makes the over all appearance that much better.  The colors are rich and contrast is pretty good as well.  Movies also look good on the device.

HotMid RockTouch RT7 Home Screen

The Case:

The case is the slightly different from many of the tablets we have received, it has an aluminum bezel around the plastic casing that helps protect the tablet somewhat, however I can’t make my mind up as to whether I like it or not.  With a Black front and the White plastic molded back, the silver just adds another color to the mix, but it’s a step in the right direction over the standard full plastic shell.

HotMid RockTouch RT7 Back

The Software:

The device comes with the basic necessities as far as applications go, with an explorer for file management, audio and video players, email, and an ebook reader.  There’s  the usual Android applications as well such as calculator and sound recorder but that’s about it.  The Android Market is available on this device, however none of the rest of the Google applications come installed.

Performance:

The RockTouch RT7 is a mediocre performer at best.  The overall responsiveness of the tablet is great and is highly usable, but running any descent benchmarking application the results are not very good.  Linpack for example came back with as result of 3.968 MFLOPS.  I almost didn’t go any further after the Linpack result, however I decided to run Smartbench 2010 just to see what would happen. The good news was that the complete test ran without any issues, but the result came in with a productivity index of 143 and a games index of 185.  I’ve never had good luck with any RockChip based tablet on the benchmarks and I’m still not sure if it related to the software not liking the hardware or the results are real.  The reason I question this is because this tablet feels nice and smooth to me.

The Good:

• The screen is very responsive and the multi-touch support is great addition to an entry level tablet.
• Plays media with ease.  Video files plays without a hitch and were silky smooth even when playing HD videos.
• Build quality feels above other entry level tablets in this price range.

The Bad:

• No Camera with the device.
• No GPS.
• While the aluminum bezel is a nice feature, it isn’t quiet tight to the rest of the device in a couple of places so some movement can be felt.

As an entry level device I would recommend this tablet if your looking for the casual internet browsing, e-book reading, or an emailing experience.  If your looking for a gamer, I would recommend looking elsewhere.

For latest pricing and more information, head over to the Rocktouch RT7 page on HotMid.com

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