nookcolor
Latest
Refresh Roundup: week of April 22nd, 2013
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
Refresh Roundup: week of February 11th, 2013
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
IHS iSuppli: Apple iPad takes 69.6 percent of tablet brand market share in Q2, reader tablets take a bruising
An earlier portrait of the second quarter's tablet market share made it quite clear that the iPad was on a rebound, if it was ever in a slump to start with. All those numbers focused on platforms and not brands, however -- we didn't know how the individual makers were doing. If IHS iSuppli's figures are on the ball, there's even more of a discrepancy if you break down the period's results by manufacturer. The iPad staked out 69.6 percent of tablet shipments in the spring. That wasn't just an 11-point jump over a year earlier; it was a level of share Apple hasn't had since the Motorola Xoom was just cutting its teeth early in 2011. As for the rest? Transformer Pads kept ASUS growing, but it's not a pretty sight if you're making an Android reader tablet; both Amazon and Barnes & Noble shed roughly a point and a half each, which is no small amount relative to their size. Samsung also lost share by this after its deliveries of Galaxy Tabs mostly stayed flat. We'd add that there's some wiggle room as to real performance knowing that units shipped and sold aren't always one and the same. Most of these companies are leaving clues regarding upcoming tablet refreshes that might level the playing field, some not so subtle, but it's currently Apple's game to win.
Barnes & Noble cuts prices across its Nook lineup, vies for your budget tablet affection
In what could be seen as a response to the positive reaction that Google's $200 Nexus 7 has garnered, Barnes & Noble has just cut down the prices on all three of its Android-based, seven-inch Nook Tablets. The 16 and 8GB models have been respectively reduced to $199 (from $249) and $179 (from $199), while the Nook Color is priced 20 bones cheaper than before at $149. Not sure whether those prices too good to be true, even up against the likes of the Kindle Fire? Feel free to peruse our reviews of B&N's reading-focused slates before potentially taking the plunge at its webstore.
DC Comics arrive on Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble lets you watch, zoom the Watchmen
When we initially did our Nook Tablet / Kindle Fire battle royal, the choice between the devices for comics fans largely came down to the preference between the Marvel and DC universes. The lines, however, are blurring. Thanks to today's announcement, Justice League fans should find as much to love in the Nook Tablet and Color as Avengers devotees. DC has brought more than 100 graphic novels to the aforementioned devices and Android tablets running the Nook app. Barnes & Noble also used the opportunity to announce the new Zoom View feature, which lets readers focus on individual panels -- functionality that sounds fairly similar to what Comixology offers in its own popular app. For more information about Crisis on Infinite Nooks, check out the press release after the break.
Barnes & Noble establishes German base: Will the Nook visit Europe?
While Americans have more than one way to consume those e-ink verses, those in the old country are largely stuck with Amazon's still-expanding Kindle family or e-reader hardware lacking the clout of a publisher. But Europeans may get the chance to pick up a Nook in the future, following news that Barnes & Noble has filed for a new digital company in Germany. Add in the publisher's recent (and slightly bizarre) meet-up in London with app developers and it looks likely that we'll be seeing some European presence from the bookseller in the future -- hopefully with all the associated content already seen on the other side of the Atlantic.
Dark Horse Comics graphic novels coming to Nook Tablet and Nook Color
Dark Horse Comics has penciled a contract with Barnes & Noble (it'll be sent off to be inked and colored next week*) to get the former's content onto the latter's Tablet and Color e-readers. Available in the Nook Comic store, you'll be able to pick up a mix of the publisher's licensed titles like Mass Effect and Star Wars as well as home-grown fare like Hellboy and Sin City. The range will gently expand month-on-month and is available from today, with titles priced around $10 depending on what you want. * This is a comic book joke.
Barnes & Noble 2012 Q3 Report: loss-making Nook generates sales, tears
It's that time of the year when Barnes & Noble's accountants reveal the figures for the quarter to determine if the age of print is over. Turns out there's some good news for bookseller. Overall sales for the chain increased five percent: the company took $2.4 billion through the cash registers. That was split $1.49 billion (up two percent) in high-street retail, online sales took $420 million (up 32 percent year-on-year) and the Nook in all its forms and glories took $542 million (up 38 percent). The only grey cloud was that sales in college-only stores dropped three percent, thanks in part to renting textbooks to impecunious freshmen. They're probably all using that money on buying digital content on their Nooks: digital content purchases increased by 85 percent in a single quarter. Like rival Amazon, it wouldn't release how many devices were sold, except to say it likely maintained its market share. However, all of that (pretty) good news is a bit of a smokescreen: B&N won't reveal its profits after interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization has been deducted. Pre ITDA income dropped 12 percent from the same period in 2011 and the company has revealed that the BN.com and Nook businesses made a combined loss of $94 million, with annual income looking to be in negative figures. Update: A tidbit from the conference call, the company believes the device currently holds around 30 percent of the overall e-reader market: using numbers direct from the publishers themselves.
Barnes & Noble unveils 8GB Nook Tablet for $199, slashes Color to $169
Looks like those murmurings of a lower-priced Nook Tablet with only 8GB of storage were right on, though, the reduced RAM was conveniently left out. In most ways it seems the updated Android slate is identical to its 16GB forebearer, except that by slashing the storage and memory in half Barnes & Noble has managed to meet the Kindle Fire on price -- $199. And, unlike the Fire, the Nook sports a microSD slot, so the loss of 8GB of storage isn't necessarily a huge deal. In addition to the new Nook Tablet, the Color is getting a rather significant price cut to just $169, making it cheaper than the Kindle Touch without ads. Looks like the brick-and-mortar stalwart has finally thrown down the pricing gauntlet. The lower-priced tab is available today both online and in Barnes & Noble stores, with other retailers to join the parade soon. Check out the complete PR after the break.
Nook Tablet coming to Walmart with less storage and a lower price tag?
One of the things that has kept the Nook Tablet from hitting Kindle Fire-like heights has been the price tag. Sure, $250 is super cheap for a rather well specced slate, but when the Amazon's entry is a full $50 cheaper it spells trouble. Now it looks like B&N is getting ready to tangle a little more directly with the online retail giant by cutting the Nook Tablet's storage in half to 8GB and slashing the price. Details are pretty slim at the moment, but it does appear that Walmart will be selling the device starting February 22nd, this Wednesday. Sadly, we'll have to wait till then to find out just how much cheaper it'll be and, whether or not the Color will be receiving a corresponding price drop.
Barnes & Noble offers discounted Nooks with one-year subscription to The New York Times
In the market for an e-reader and a subscription to the digital edition of The New York Times? Then Barnes & Noble has a new promotion you might want to consider. From now through March 9th, it'll give you a Nook Simple Touch for free or a Nook Color for $99 if you also sign up for a one-year New York Times subscription at a rate of $19.99/month. That's a savings of $100 in both cases, and the subscription also includes access to the New York Times website in addition to the Nook version. Alternatively, you can get $50 off the Nook Tablet (bringing it down to $199) with a subscription to People, which will run you $9.99/month. Complete details are at the link below.
Plex media app: streaming soon to Nook Tablet and Color
Well, well, if it isn't the famed iOS and Android media jock (read: Plex) making its way to the Nook universe. The application's now gone through yet another good-to-go regime, and if all goes according to plan, it should be hitting Barnes & Noble's virtual stores in the coming days. For those of you out of the loop on Plex's offerings; the service acts as a media server ready to stream online and locally stored content, which are great features to have -- especially when someone limits how your internal storage can be used. We've got no info on how much cash you'll have to spend to start using the goods on your Nook slates, but we can imagine it'll be around the same ($4.99) as its other platform variants.
Refresh Roundup: week of December 12, 2011
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging to get updated. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery from the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
IDC: iPad maintains tablet dominance, HP's TouchPad fire sale burned brightly
While the Android tablets continue to roll in, Apple can still lay claim to the lion's share of the tablet market according to IDC's latest report. Its research suggests that the iPad holds onto 61.5 percent of the worldwide market share, down from 63.3 percent last quarter. Android devices in total also saw a slight contraction, down from 33.2 percent to 32.4 percent. This is partly explained by the HP TouchPad's final hurrah, which rocketed the ill-fated webOS tablet up to third place with a 5 percent of share of tablet sales and an estimated 903,354 devices sold. Samsung maintained its Honeycomb tablet crown, nabbing 5.6 percent of all tablet sales. The Korean manufacturer was closely tailed by Barnes and Noble's Nook Color with 4.5 percent and Asus, arriving at fifth place with a four percent share. Tablets in total sold less than the analysts had predicted, although growth has still exploded 264 percent compared to this time last year. Meanwhile, E-readers outperformed estimates, with 6.5 million E-readers sold in the third quarter, up 165.9 percent from last year. IDC expects some disruptive new tablets will spice up the fourth quarter results and you can take a look at its findings and predictions at the full press release below.
Nook Color gets multimedia upgrade, further blurs the tablet battle lines
Barnes & Noble's Nook Color is getting a piece of that promised multimedia upgrade. This round features video content from the likes of Netflix and Flixster, access to comics from the true believers at Marvel and a few other tweaks, like the ability to read books in landscape mode, to fully take advantage of that seven-inch display. The update further blurs the lines between the Color, which began life as little more than a color screen e-reader and the recently introduced Nook Tablet, which features souped up internals but an otherwise similar design. The Color is currently priced at $199 -- $50 less than the Tablet -- and will be getting more software upgrades in the future, including access to music services like Pandora and Rhapsody. Press info after the break.
Switched On: Between a Nook and a hard place
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. In the 1988 comedy Coming to America, a blatant McDonald's rip-off named McDowell's draws the legal ire of the empire built by Ray Kroc. In explaining his pathetic defense that includes noting that McDowell's uses golden arcs instead of golden arches, the eatery's manager notes that while both the Big Mac and his Big Mick both include the 1970s jingle-immortalized ingredients of two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, the McDowell's flagship burger bun has, in fact, no sesame seeds. This state of differentiation isn't a far cry from what characterized some of the earliest 10-inch Honeycomb devices -- a few fractions of an inch of thickness, a higher-quality display, a full-sized USB port, an hour or two of running time and some bundled apps constituted how many of the tablets asserted their competitiveness. Of course, there was the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer with its keyboard add-on and its follow up, the Eee Pad Slider, which finally brought an integrated one. But whether it's been from a lack of options for manufacturers or disadvantages of the overall Honeycomb approach, larger Android tablets have made limited inroads versus the similarly sized iPad and are now going after it more aggressively on price.
Nook Tablet forgets to use protection, lets outside apps in
In the annals of history, the scrappy fight betwixt the megaliths of e-reading and their respective tablet progeny will yield an underground victor. Much like the sleepy hacker hit that was the Nook Color, Barnes and Noble's big bro tab looks to be carrying on that legacy of unapproved use and this time there's a lot less microSD card swapping required. In fact, there's none needed at all, as the barrier for entry here is super low. All it takes to sidestep B&N's app store for a host of third party options (like Amazon's App Store shown above) is the tab's own browser. Yes, it's almost that simple and also kind of hit or miss. See, once you attempt to install an application via the web, a previously hidden settings menu should pop up asking for permission. Grant the slate access, find the app in your download queue, re-install it and, presto magico, it'll work and then... vanish from your homescreen. But don't fret, the app's still there, you'll just need to search for it using the "n" hardware button. Confused? Excited? Unsure of how to feel? Why not just give it a go and report back in the comments below.
Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet unboxing and hands-on (video)
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. Barnes & Noble has opted for a lighter silver color scheme here, instead of the Nook Color's dark gray shell, and has managed to shave a bit of weight from the newest Nook -- so it comes in at 14.1 ounces, in spite of its souped-up internals. At 0.48 inches, the tablet is thicker than both the iPad 2 (0.35 inches) and the Kindle Fire (0.45 inches), if only just barely in the latter case.%Gallery-139473% %Gallery-139477% %Gallery-139478%
Nook Tablet vs. Nook Color...Fight!
So, we've already established that the Nook Tablet looks an awful lot like the Nook Color. Just how similar are they? Check out the above image of the devices side by side, and you tell us. Shades of the Kindle Fire, perhaps? More comparison shots in the gallery below.%Gallery-138656%
Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet gets real, we go hands-on (video)
Sure, we can't say we didn't see this coming -- Barnes & Noble today launched its answer to the Kindle Fire. The new Nook Tablet certainly isn't all that new from an aesthetic standpoint, compared with the Nook Color. Walking into a store blind, it would be awfully tough to distinguish the devices -- though the Tablet is bit lighter, color-wise. It's also lighter in terms of actual weight, shedding an ounce from its predecessor -- a fact that's really only noticeable when holding both devices in your hand. The Nook Color certainly did well for the company, becoming a top seller the previous holiday season, and Barns & Noble clearly took an "if it ain't broke" approach here... It really is a nice form factor, easy to hold in a single hand for reading and watching video. The company also promises that a case with a built-in stand is coming, so you can take full advantage of that wide screen when watching longer videos on Netflix or Hulu Plus. The Power button is located in the top left and corner, with volume on the right. The microSD slot can be found just behind the Tablet's distinctive metal bar. What separates Barnes & Noble's two higher end readers is largely internal. Unfortunately, the products being shown off at today's event weren't quite ready for prime time. We managed to see a bit of video demoed on the thing, and certainly the screen looked quite nice as it played back the trailer for J Edgar and flipped through the pages of a Spider-Man comic. Unfortunately, we're going to have to spend a bit more time with a final version of the product before we feel comfortable recommending the Tablet, given its $50 premium over both the Nook Color and the Kindle Fire. Check out a hands-on video with the device after the break.%Gallery-138651%