Kindle Fire sales are cooling now that the holidays are over. Photo: Victor J. Blue/Wired.com When it launched last November, Amazon’s Kindle Fire was touted as the first tablet to seriously challenge Apple’s iPad
Rumors point to an iBooks announcement at an Apple event later this month Apple is planning a “media event” in New York Later this month, according to All Things D. The event will likely be presented by Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services (and Larry Page look-a-like), Eddy Cue. Will this be the hotly-rumored AppleTV (the actual TV with a screen)? Will it be the iPad 3?
As reported earlier Tuesday, Amazon has released a software update for its Kindle Fire tablet, promising enhanced “fluidity and performance” and improved “touch navigation responsiveness.” But nowhere in its update language does Amazon speak to improvements in the speed of its Silk browser. As it turns out, the new software update doesn’t seem to improve browser performance to a significant degree. And that’s a shame, because laggy web-page load times are a real problem for Amazon’s tablet. When I reviewed the Fire a little less than five weeks ago, I found the tablet’s browser performance to be bizarrely, inexplicably slow.
Click, click. Buy, buy.
For now ASUS’ Transformer Prime is the lonely king of the quad-core tablet hill, but as we’d heard a few weeks back, it looks like it’ll have company soon enough. Insider sources have reported to DigiTimes that you’ll be able to snag a nifty Android tablet with a quad-core GPU for between $459 and $599 in 2012. Acer and Lenovo are apparently set to target Apple’s iPad tablet as well as ASUS with NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 GPU tablets running Android 4.0 ( Ice Cream Sandwich ) in the first quarter of 2012. These sources also stated that since neither Acer nor Lenovo have a direct advantage over Apple or Amazon’s tablet devices, they’d only be competing for about 10 to 15 percent of the total PC tablet market
The Eee Pad Transformer Prime has yet to start shipping, but when it does, you’ll be able to wrap it up in this specialized Smart Cover, from ASUS. Spotted on Amazon’s German site, this Origami-like accessory will prop up your Prime in either a vertical or horizontal lying position, much like some of those other “intelligent” covers we’ve seen . The folds look decidedly ornate, but we’ll have to wait a little longer before trying it out for ourselves
Look what we got in our grubby hands — it’s the new Nook Tablet , Barnes & Noble’s attempt to elbow in on this holiday season’s crowded tablet landscape. At $249, the slate is being positioned as a direct competitor to Amazon’s budget Kindle Fire . Thus far, the device has yet to capture the public’s imagination in the same way Amazon’s tablet has — due, at least in part, to the many similarities between it and last year’s Nook Color . Externally, the Tablet is virtually indistinguishable from the Nook Color. It’s got the same dimensions (8.1 x 5.0 x 0.48 inches), making for a tall and narrow display. It also rocks that same distinctive bar looping out from its bottom lefthand corner
After having already arrived on a host of Android slates , iPads and even TouchPads , Zinio’s reader app has now made its way to the newest tablet platform — the Kindle Fire . The magazine marketplace made its debut on the Amazon Appstore today, just in time for today’s grand launch . Available as a free download, Zinio brings more than 5,000 magazine titles to Amazon’s new slab, including The Economist , Rolling Stone and US Weekly , among others
Back catalogue releases of comic books thanks to Marvel comics cool iPad application , in conjunction with the features of the Amazon kindle application, expand the horizons of usage for your iPad. Gaming and creative applications that are …
Photo Credit: Tim Carmody Tech companies can sometimes be touchy about letting journalists get their hands on brand-new devices. At today’s Barnes & Noble event, representatives demoed working Nook Tablets for the press, but we weren’t allowed to actually handle them ourselves. It’s a common precaution. Amazon did the same thing at its Kindle Fire launch event. It’s partly about protecting scarce pre-release devices, and partly about protecting the information on them — corporate-level usernames are handy in the wrong hands.
