Tag Archives: tablets

Apple hoards tablet share while market falls off a cliff for first quarter

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The first quarter of the calendar year usually results in a decline in unit sales from the previous quarter due to the holiday season rush to buy gadgets. Apple wasn’t completely immune to this market force—IDC says the company shipped 11.8 million iPads during the first quarter of the year, down from 15.4 million units over the holiday season. Despite this drop, Apple’s share of the tablet market was able to shoot up more than 14 percentage points between quarters, largely because of the precipitous decline in tablet sales from the likes of Amazon. According to IDC, Amazon’s share of the tablet market with the Kindle Fire was 16.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, but fell to just 4 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

via Apple hoards tablet share while market falls off a cliff for first quarter.

The tablet that changed the whole market for tablets, and isn’t a tablet

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Kindle Fire’s best feature is its ability as an e-book reader, according to reviewers. It is much more, however. For a list price of $199, customers get a seven-inch display, 8GB of RAM, free storage on Amazon’s cloud, WiFi and USB connections, the ability to run any Android-compatible app or game and automagical connections to media (for which you can pay Amazon) including e-books, music, movies and anything else you can find on the Internet.

Fire’s list price is $430 lower than the list price of the latest edition of the iPad and $249 less than Amazon’s discount price for a new ten-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet and $50 less than the seven-inch Samsung Galaxy.

via The tablet that changed the whole market for tablets, and isn’t a tablet | ITworld.

Python e-book error

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Python will turn your everyday binary strings into Unicode strings when necessary. But things get trickier if you put non-ASCII characters in Byte strings.

via. http://lobstertech.com/python_unicode.html

The ebook reader in linux was written in python and chokes on a lot of abnormal characters and I think the above is the reason why.  This could be a problem with the nook and other ebook readers but I’m not sure and it’s really not a priority to find out.   I know the nook will not accept an epub with a malformed stylesheet.css even though the python linux e-reader will.

It will be interesting to find out how some of the bigger tablets handle this.

If Barnes & Noble Wants To Take Its Nook Tablet Abroad, It Has A Lot Of Work To Do

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She noted that at the moment “over 70 percent” of buyers of the Nook are women aged between 25 and 45. They live within 15 minutes of a B&N store and often have kids. “When you go in, you can see kids running around loose in the store,” she said. “We even have nook tables in the stores for the kids to try out apps.

via If Barnes & Noble Wants To Take Its Nook Tablet Abroad, It Has A Lot Of Work To Do | TechCrunch.

Blueprints on the iPad for Construction

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The iPad will be the thing that changes all this. Although the things it does better than laptops – smaller, more durable, longer battery life, doesn’t need a table to be useable – seem more evolutionary rather than revolutionary, in the context of construction field workers, it’s the difference between using a tool that almost works and a tool that is able to get the job done. It’s basically the first computer that is usable in the field and as a result it’s starting to be rapidly adopted by construction companies.

via PlanGrid – Blueprints on the iPad for Construction.

This statement applies to all tablets, not just the one branded IPAD.

A year late, hundreds of dollars short: Sony Tablet P coming March 4

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The tablet has an NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM running Android 3.2, with no reassurances that the tablet will ever be upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Each of the tablet’s two 5.5-inch screens has a 1024×480 resolution, and the device has two cameras: 0.3 megapixels on the front, and 5 megapixels on the back. The Tablet P has only 4GB of internal storage, which can be supplemented via its microSD card slot, and gets 7 hours of battery life. Skeptics of the body style aren’t going to be reassured at all by these middling specs.

via A year late, hundreds of dollars short: Sony Tablet P coming March 4.

$550

H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software

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From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.

via H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software – NYTimes.com.

Tablet priced under $100 with Android 4.0 surfaces

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Ainol’s Novo7 tablet has a 7-inch capacitive screen and runs on a 1GHz single-core MIPS processor, said MIPS Technologies and chip maker Ingenic in a joint press release. The tablet’s battery lasts eight hours on watching video, seven hours when browsing the Web and six hours when playing games.

The tablet runs on Google’s Android 4.0, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, which is the successor to Android 3.0, code-named Honeycomb, which is found on the more advanced tablets today.

via Tablet priced under $100 with Android 4.0 surfaces | ITworld.