The next Amazon event is just a few sleeps away and is expected to deliver the official release of the Amazon Kindle tablet. Backed by the brand-power and recognition Amazon can offer, this new tablet is expected to be one of the first serious contenders to the iPad.
With a price rumored around $170 USD, this device may be hard to resist for those of you who haven’t yet taken the plunge into tablet ownership.
According to Digitimes, curved glass screens are going to be the hot trend of mobile phones and tablets, beginning in the first half of 2012.
The Taiwan news site cites its ambiguous industry sources, saying that both Apple and Apple’s competitors are planning to release products with curved touchscreens. Apple has reportedly invested in glass polishing equipment for its suppliers.
So with only 11 months of being at the HP helm under his belt, Léo Apotheker has been removed as CEO of HP. Meg Whitman has been named as his successor, bringing with her the kind of technology vision that helped her successfully lead a little company you may have heard of once or twice: eBay.
Some are criticizing Whitman’s background, indicating that a career established by selling Beanie Babies and collectables has ill prepared her to deal with the corporate consumer climate at HP. In the end, she found her market and catered to her target audience. I’m not sure that HP would be poorly served by selling more consumer products, so I fail to see where the problem is there.
Technology research firm Gartner Inc., recently predicted that Apple is poised to be the top dog in tablet sales this holiday season. Apparently, no one else even comes close, nor will they for another three years.
According to a recent Gartner report, Apple is expected to maintain 73 percent of the market share for the rest of the year. While no other tablet is individually expected to own more than five percent through the end of 2011.
The love affair for tablets by airline companies and aircraft manufacturers continues to produce new stories around the world.
Apple has done extremely well with the iPad across different airlines – as a replacement to paper flight manuals and navigational charts, and also as a way to improve customer service. Now Qantas has announced its testing of Apple’s tablet as an option to its in-flight entertainment system. Android has also scored a win after Boeing selected the operating system for the next-gen 787 Dreamliner touch screens.
According to ZDNet UK, Samsung Electronics reported that Apple filed a suit against the Korean-based manufacturer in the United Kingdom on Monday. Samsung told ZDNet UK that Apple’s newest complaint was in response to the former’s suit that was filed in June. No information regarding the exact complaint is available at this time as the patents in question have not yet been made public.
If you’re tired of Safari and looking for a browser that’s more fully featured to use on your iPad, you may want to check out Dolphin Browser, which was just released in the App Store.
Dolphin Browser is the most popular third party browser on Android, and when it was released for the iPhone, it quickly became the number one productivity app. Now you can get the browser for your iPad, and enjoy gesture-based browsing, tabs, Dolphin’s signature Webzine, and more.
With Sony starting to take orders on their new Sony S tablet, all eyes are focused on how it might compete with the iPad as well as the existing Android tablets on the market.
Certainly Sony has the brand recognition and corporate weight to provide a compelling argument to choose their products, but how do they stack up against Apple’s tablet?
2011 is the year of the iPad 2, and according to analysts, it’s going to remain the year of the iPad 2. This means that a new version of the tablet is not likely to be released until 2012, keeping it on schedule with Apple’s other iPad releases, which generally happen in March.
This is not due to supply problems, according to Rodman and Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar, who says that the decision is likely a marketing choice.
According to Forrester Research, Amazon has the potential to sell between three and five million units of their yet-to-be-released super secret tablet within the last three months of 2011. Reuters reported Forrester Research’s Sarah Rotman Epps as saying that Amazon would have to offer the tablet at significantly lower prices than the average tablet, and would have to have enough supply to meet the demand, but that they could reach the 5 million mark by the end of the fourth quarter.
Since its debut in April of 2010, Apple has sold 30 million iPads. While many competitors have entered the market, none have matched the iPad and they continue to fall short in the market share numbers. Forrester Research believes, as many others do, that Amazon has the potential to finally close the gap.
DigiTimes recently reported that Samsung Electronics has recruited Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) ex-vice president of PSG marketing Raymond Wah to handle the company’s PC sales. Samsung has been rabidly deflecting any rumors that it plans to buy out HP’s computer department, and although this move does not prove the rumors, it certainly shows that Samsung is interested in the goods.
It was also reported that Samsung may be interested in purchasing HP’s, now defunct, webOS. Neither company will comment on this rumor.
There really isn’t any doubt that Amazon’s Kindle eReader is an overwhelming success. So when Amazon (all but) announces that they’re releasing a tablet to succeed that device, it’s going to get our attention. But what will it look like? Techno Buffalo released the mockups shown on the left, based on reports from sources cited by writer, Noah Kravitz.
In addition, if rumors are correct, these new tablets will run Android on Intel-based hardware and be available in both 7″ and 10″ screen sizes.
Just once I would like to see a device released on its own merit. I want to see the manufacturer and reviewers all say ‘this is the coolest new thing we’ve ever seen and you need to have one’, instead of the current (attempted) mantra of “this is the one that will take down the iPad’.
And don’t give me that line about how ‘it is logical to compare new devices to the existing options in the marketplace’. I won’t buy it.
Millennial Media just released their July Mobile Mix Report and the numbers show that, for the second year in a row, Android ranks highest over all other operating systems for advertising impressions.
Millennial Media’s Mobile Mix reports key advertising trends with a focus on mobile manufacturers, devices and operating systems. Some highlights from the report include, Apple is number one with 26.45 % of the share of mobile device manufacturers and the iPhone is the number with mobile phone manufacturers.
According to McAfee’s Q2 2011 Threats Report, it’s been a bad year as far as malware is concerned. The amount of malware targeted at Android devices jumped by 76% since last quarter, making it the most attacked mobile operating system.
The second quarter of 2011 also marked the first appearance of fake anti-virus programs on Macs and a significant increase in rootkits.
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