Tablets

Amazon is prepping a new 10-inch color Kindle tablet that would support streaming video and sell for around $399, according to a report recently released by investment firm Detwiler Fenton.

Code-named Hollywood, the new Kindle tablet would include a promotional video service with Amazon reportedly offering the same movie service that it now offers for free to its Prime customers. The service would be free to Hollywood buyers for a certain amount of time, according to Detwiler Fenton.

The new Kindle would be powered by a more robust processor than is found in the smaller Kindle e-book readers and is expected to debut in time for the holiday season.

E-book readers and rival tablets alike have faced strong competition from the iPad, but Detwiler Fenton said it believes Hollywood's $399 price tag should be low enough to give it some traction against the iPad. This could put pressure on more expensive tablets, such as Motorola's Xoom and RIM's BlackBerry Playbook, each of which is expected to sell around 1 million units this year, said the investment firm.

It comes as no secret that Amazon has reportedly been busy readying its own lineup of tablets, according to various sources and some hints from CEO Jeff Bezos. One of the reports refers to "Hollywood" as the code name for a new 10-inch tablet from Amazon, to be powered by Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El chipset.… Read more

American Airlines gave Android a sky-high boost earlier this month when it started offering the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as an entertainment device for first-class passengers.

American will deploy 6,000 Galaxy Tabs on Boeing 767 flights between New York's JFK airport and Los Angeles, JFK and San Francisco, and Miami and Los Angeles. Passengers also will find the device on 767 aircraft serving South America and Boeing 757 aircraft flying between Boston and Los Angeles.

Besides replacing American's current entertainment system, the Wi-Fi-enabled tablets also will offer passengers Internet access during flights for an additional fee. … Read more

Among all the myriad events and announcements of E3 2011--some bombastic, some evolutionary--the unveiling of the Wii U was one that, no matter who you asked, generated some degree of mixed feelings. As gaming press and players, what we saw from Nintendo's future console controller produced sensations of excitement, skepticism, ambivalence, and intrigue.

That might be due partly to the expectations that Nintendo set for itself. The Wii was a new experience, a new idea. It also might be due in part to Sony's PSVita stealing some of the spotlight a day before; the handheld device actually has … Read more

Another tablet is available for preorder.

Toshiba's 10.1-inch, Wi-Fi-only Thrive tablet can now be preordered on Amazon.com, Office Depot's Web site, and Toshiba's own online retail page. The device, which starts at $429.99 for the 8GB option and goes up to $479.99 and $579.99 for the 16GB and 32GB models, respectively, runs Android 3.1. It includes front- and rear-facing cameras, as well as a host of connectivity options, including USB 2.0, Mini USB, and HDMI.

Although the Thrive might seem like a run-of-the-mill tablet, it boasts some features not yet … Read more

As Android users begin to purchase additional mobile devices such as tablets, the issue of app compatibility rears its ugly head.

Believe it or not, compatibility between Android handsets and applications can vary. On the handset side, developers are able to target specific models based on various factors including processor type and carrier. With tablets, though some apps say they work on Android 1.5 and up, they aren't compatible with the Honeycomb OS.

Fortunately, however, Google aims to clear things up with the latest addition to the Android Market. In the desktop version of the Market you'll now find a function that checks applications and games against your devices. You can find out if a title will work on the gadgets that you own and determine whether an app is compatible across all devices on which you've logged in using your Google account.

Google hasn't yet made the feature official, but I've tried it for the last couple of days and it seems to be fully in place. It's possible that it was integrated ahead of the Android Market coming to Google TV this summer, since it would clear up confusion over which apps would work on the set-top box.

Even with all of the recent strides the Android Market has made, there's still a bit of work to do. For instance, I'd like to be able to hide or archive devices so they don't clutter up the screen. I've reviewed a considerable amount of handsets over time, so it's beginning to get confusing when scanning through my list. … Read more

Asus is ramping up production of its EeePad Transformer tablet and wants its competitors to know.

Asus CEO Jerry Shen was quoted yesterday in the Taiwan Economic News saying that he plans to outship all other tablet makers this month. Except for the iPad.

Asus will ship 300,000 of the 10-inch Android tablets in the month of June, according to Shen. That, he points out, is an increase over the 200,000 per month Asus was shipping in April and May. Shen believes the tablet will account for 10 percent of Asus' revenue.

His comments appeared to be aimed … Read more

Research In Motion is ready to launch its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in an additional 16 markets.

The tablet will be made available to customers in the U.K., Spain, Germany, Australia, and several other countries within the next 30 days, RIM said. Currently, the BlackBerry PlayBook is available only in the U.S. and Canada.

Unlike much of its competition, RIM's tablet focuses on enterprise customers first. The tablet boasts a 7-inch display and runs the company's new tablet operating system. It includes dual 1080p HD cameras for video conferencing and capture, and runs on a 1GHz dual-core … Read more

Sprint isn't the only one ramping up its lineup today. U.S. Cellular just announced its product road map for the remainder of the year, and it includes eight smartphones and two tablets.

Seven of the eight handsets will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the eighth will be the carrier's first Windows Phone 7 handset. One of the models among the group will also be U.S. Cellular's first 4G LTE smartphone, due out in November.

HTC will provide four of the devices, beginning with the Windows Phone handset due out this summer. This will be … Read more

Higher tablet demand and lower Netbook sales are likely to take a greater bite out of the PC market this year than expected, according to data released today by Gartner.

Global PC shipments are now forecast to grow by 9.3 percent in 2011, reaching 385 million units, says Gartner. That marks a slight drop from the research firm's previous estimate of 10.5 percent growth for the year.

Gartner blamed the downfall mostly on shrinking demand for Netbooks but also pointed to tablets as shaking up the market.

"Mini-notebook [Netbook] shipments have noticeably contracted over the last several quarters, and this has substantially reduced overall mobile PC unit growth," Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. "Media tablets, such as the iPad, have also impacted mobile growth, but more because they have caused consumers to delay new mobile PC purchases rather than directly replacing aging… Read more