GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

In this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, the crew fiddles around with a mildly useless iPad stylus (made by Hard Candy) before diving into more serious news about innovation-blocking cable networks, a phone you can’t have, and some upcoming tablets.

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We discuss the Logitech Revue, one of the first set-top boxes running the Google TV operating system. It’s a sweet device, but the problem is the TV networks have neutered it by blocking access to their internet TV channels. Jerks!

Also in the bad-news department, Apple has delayed the white iPhone 4 once again this time until spring 2011 and we’re fairly sure that phone is never going to ship.

Topping off the podcast with some tablet-ey goodness, Wired.com’s Priya Ganapati touches on Barnes & Noble’s next Nook e-book reader, which is basically a tablet that can only be used for reading.

Speaking of do-overs, the makers of the failed JooJoo say they’ll be back next year with a family of tablets running the Android OS.

Like the show? You can also get theGadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you dont want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out theGadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Labvideo oraudio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #93

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Photo credit: Tim Carmody/Wired.com.

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NEW YORK — Barnes & Nobles Nook Color is real. For $250, it may even be spectacular. Readers will find out for themselves sometime around November 19th.

Our customers snack on content of all kinds all day, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a press conference announcing the device. He called the new Nook Color the first readers tablet.

The booksellers second-generation e-reader takes aim at both Amazon and entry-level Android tablets. Like its predecessor, the Nook Color is powered by Android. But this e-reader gives Googles OS a bit more of a workout, ditching the low-power, monochrome E Ink display and the two-screen interface of the original Nook.

Instead, it’s got a 7-inch color LCD touchscreen made by LG. The screen technology is called “VividView” and incorporates an anti-glare coating, but is otherwise far closer to a tablet display than an e-book reader like the Kindle.
In related e-book reader news, Amazon announced Tuesday that the Kindle would be gaining a strictly limited e-book lending feature similar to what the B&N Nook has.

This graduates the Nook from dedicated e-reader to personal media player, if not quite a full tablet computer. In addition to Barnes & Nobles current library of EPUB-derived black-and-white e-books, the Nook Color will be able to display color books, photos and games, multimedia-enhanced ebooks, a good chunk of the web, and even video.

Opportunities to test out the new Nook Color were very limited. Barnes & Noble did not give reporters unfettered access to the device. Most of the press conference centered around giant mockups on the screen.

The first showpieces for Nook Color will be magazines and newspapers. Barnes & Noble has partnered with Cond Nast (the publisher of Wired and parent company of this website) and Hearst to offer magazines as both single issues and as subscriptions. (Apple lets publishers sell tablet magazines for its iPad, but hasnt sorted out subscriptions just yet.)

B&N is also inviting other developers to create interactive color reading content specifically for Nook Color. The company is starting a program for developers to create Android applications specifically for Nook Color, to be offered in the Nook store. At launch, the Applications section will offer Pandora for streaming music, a handful of games like Chess and Sudoku, and a gallery application for viewing photos and video.

You’ll also be able to upload media by mounting the Nook Color as a hard drive on your PC’s desktop (using a USB cable) and doing a drag-and-drop; it will support MP3 and AAC audio and MP4 video.

When you also consider the recently announced Nook Kids store for childrens books, Barnes & Noble’s strategy is clear: Flank Amazon, Apple and other Android devices by offering formats and genres at the seams, which the other devices hardware and marketplace models have difficulty handling. While Apple’s hardware offers vivid color and interactivity, and Amazon’s store is flush with books and periodicals, Nook Color will have both.

Nook Color will also leverage its Wi-Fi connection to integrate reading with popular social networks. Readers will be able to share comments and excerpts from books, newspapers or magazines via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter by opening up a submenu while viewing a document.

The interface will be familiar to existing Nook readers. In its default view, the library scrolls along the bottom quarter of the screen (where the old LCD touchscreen used to be), although you can also navigate in full screen.

Barnes & Noble was able to keep the device fairly lightweight; the Yves Bhar design weighs less than a pound and comes in at just one-half inch thick. It will have 8GB of internal storage and a microSD port for additional memory.

The battery life predictably suffers from supporting an LCD color screen, but Barnes & Noble claims it will still get around 8 hours of reading time.

There are some things the Nook Color won’t do. There’s no 3G option, which saves you some money and Barnes & Noble a lot, but does limit your ability to buy a book on a whim at an airport or hotel. It won’t have access to the Android Market or have the ability to run applications originally designed for other Android devices — you’ll be stuck with the apps Barnes & Noble picks, unless you opt to root/jailbreak your device.

Barnes & Nobles Nook has been available for less than a year, but its quickly established itself as a solid competitor to the Kindle, capturing 20% of the e-book retail market, a worthy Pepsi to Amazons Coke.

The company has leveraged its in-store presence and customer base, building in-store Nook boutiques and offering free Wi-Fi and book browsing in-store. Its also branched out from its own stores, selling its reader online, and at other retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy; it plans to continue that wide retail availability with Nook Color.

Barnes & Noble plans to continue selling the original Nook as an entry-level black-and-white E Ink reader for $150 and $200 and the company promises to continue to support and enhance the original device.

It’s clear, though, that Barnes & Noble is thinking of E Ink readers as a “segment of the e-reading market,” to borrow a phrase its executives used over and over again. Its bet is on interactive color as the e-reading standard of the future.

When asked whether Nook Color would cannibalize Barnes & Noble’s sales of print books, Lynch pointed to data suggesting that current Nook owners were actually buying more print books from Barnes & Noble.

“We plan to cannibalize other people’s physical book sales more than our own,” he added.

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Accessory makers are the weak link in keep any super-secret product launch super-secret, even if the folks making accessories are in the same company. So it’s not especially a surprise that a Nook Color Film Screen Kit appearing on (then quickly pulled from) BarnesAndNoble.com has leaked a likely image of the Nook Color a day early.

Barnes & Noble has a media event tomorrow (October 26) at its Union Square store where it’s expected to announce its next-generation Nook. On Friday, CNET reported sourced information that the new device would be called Nook Color, have a 7″ color-capable screen and retail for $249, splitting the difference between its current-generation E Ink Nook and more expensive Android or iOS tablets. Now a CNET source again has the Nook Color Film Screen Kit, featuring the image above.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Barnes & Noble is launching a subsite of its e-book store called NookKids.com. Nook Kids should have 12,000 chapter books available by this Sunday (October 31), with 100 or so picture books following in mid-November, and enhanced children’s books coming in early 2011.

Picture books suggest color screens and a mid-November availability for the Nook Color. (David Carnoy’s source at CNET also tipped towards a November release.) In addition to NookKids.com, Barnes & Noble has also registered NookColor.com. So if nothing else, the new device will almost definitely be called Nook Color.

Assuming the mockup above is a fair image of the new Nook Color, we’re looking at a single hardware button on the face — so touchscreen, probably Android-based like the first Nook.

As I reported Friday, the big question hanging over the Nook Color, like all color e-readers, is its choice of screen technology. E Ink is low-power and highly readable, even in direct sunlight, but is limited to grayscale still images. LCD and LED screens have great color and video capability, but are power-hungry and harder on the eyes for extended reading. Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology, which combines aspects of both (low power consumption, good readability, color/video capability) is still probably six months off, maybe longer for larger screens.

Barnes & Noble’s EPUB-based e-book format is color-capable, so they could switch over to producing color books without many problems. But Pandigital, a company that partnered with B&N on a touchscreen e-reader, produced an LCD color e-reader earlier this year that was generally considered a failure.

Unless Barnes & Noble’s has a really neat trick up their sleeve, they have some tough choices. It’s a huge gamble. When it comes to e-readers and e-books, adding more color, more interactivity, more features always seems like a good idea. But there’s a very fine line separating an absolutely amazing, incredibly capable e-reader and a really crappy, hamstrung tablet.

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Rumors are swirling that Barnes & Noble’s next device after the first-generation Nook will be an Android-based, full-color, touchscreen e-reader. The company will reportedly announce the e-reader/tablet hybrid, called the Nook Color, at its October 26 media event in New York.

“It’s a big step ahead, instead of chasing Amazon,” a source told CNET editor David Canroy. Canroy identifies the source as an anonymous tipster “who has proven reliable in the past.”

Reportedly, the Nook Color will have be Android-based like the current Nook, have a 7-inch screen and retail for $249. It won’t have quite as much functionality as the iPad or a full Android tablet, but it will also cost much less.

Currently, the Nook has a custom Android-based OS, a 6″ black-and-white E Ink screen, a 3.5″ color touchscreen LCD for navigation, and costs $149 ($199 for a model with 3G). Barnes & Noble will reportedly continue to sell the current Nook along with the Nook Color.

Barnes & Noble has definitely long been interested in combining e-books with color. Earlier this year, Pandigital offered a 7″ color reader with access to Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore. The Pandigital Novel was available at many retail outlets, but was panned for poor hardware and interface design and went back to E Ink in its second iteration.

It’s possible that a color-capable Nook could use a Mirasol screen. Developed by Qualcomm, the Mirasol is low-power, is readable in direct sunlight, switches back and forth between color and black-and-white, and can play video. In August, we reported that Qualcomm was shipping 5.7″ screens at the end of 2010 for devices — including one from “a major client” — slated to appear in early 2011.

That doesn’t match the specs suggested by CNET’s source, which instead point to a 7″ LCD touchscreen. It would also mean that the new Nook wouldn’t appear until sometime next year at the earliest.

Barnes & Noble could also stick with the Nook’s two-screen approach, using a 5.7″ Mirasol screen for display and a 3.5″ LCD touchscreen for navigation. It may not run a full range of applications like a hybrid, but would be a solid media player, offering color books, photos, the web and some video on a single screen. Barnes & Noble could announce the device now, do preorders later this year, and begin shipping it in late winter or spring 2011.

That’s not quite as good as being able to sell it right away, but might slow the Kindle 3’s momentum. And with a firmware upgrade for existing Nooks on the way, they can continue to sell the discounted older device and plenty of e-books until the Nook Color arrives.

Image: Mirasol prototype e-reader.

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Amazon’s newly overhauled Kindle application for Mac offers notes, search, two-column reading and a much-improved UI. It might even make me read e-books on my computer again.

It’s funny: I used to read a lot of e-books in client apps on my MacBook and iPhone. Since I got my Kindle 3, I hadn’t read any.

Amazon was frankly slow to bring its e-book software to Macs. The PC desktop client came first, and a pared-down Mac application only eventually followed in March. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble had already released a Nook desktop app for Mac simultaneously with PC.

B&N’s Mac client offered every feature you could ask for: copy-and-paste, two-column reading, notes and highlighting, text search, built-in dictionary, multiple viewing themes, use of every font on your computer. I still think it might be the most powerful e-reading application available on the desktop.

Even generic readers beat Kindle’s UI. Amazon just didn’t seem serious about Mac support, or desktop readers at all.

A few days ago, I noticed that even though I’d been buying Kindle books again, I didn’t even have the Kindle app on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered to transfer it over from my old machine.

So I go to Amazon’s site and download the application, open it up — and I’m astonished. The Kindle desktop app is so much better than I remember — not quite the equal of Barnes & Noble’s app, but infinitely closer.

I thought I was hallucinating, or my memory was faulty. Actually, I’d just downloaded the brand new app a day before it had been officially announced.

Improved WhisperSync support means that I can read a book on my Kindle, open it on my Mac, and it will open to the last page read on the Kindle. When I open the same book on the Kindle again, I have the option to pick up where I left off either on the Kindle or the Mac. I actually like that it’s a prompt on the Kindle, rather than an automatic sync; on the desktop too, I can toggle between last page read on Kindle or last page read on Mac, but it’s a menu option rather than a prompt.

Just because Amazon’s finally getting serious about the Mac doesn’t mean it’s neglecting software updates for the Kindle; only a week after the 3.02 firmware update graduated from beta, Amazon’s offering the 3.03 version for download as a preview release.

As you might guess from its version number, it’s a minor release, offering some performance improvements (moderately faster page syncing and page turns, mostly) and reportedly plugging some security gaps. 3.02 seemed to improve the Kindle’s performance in direct sunlight. 3.03 is download-only for now, but will be available as an over-the-air update soon, probably in a few weeks.

Kindle for Mac — Read Kindle eBooks on your Mac [Amazon.com]

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You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.

The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.

That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.

Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.

But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.

Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.

According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.

If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.

Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr

Related posts:

• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess
• Wi-Fi Only Nook For $150 in Best Buy
• 5 Things That Make Us Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook E-Reader

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The e-reader price wars is on. Amazon has cut the price of its Kindle e-book reader to $190 from $260 earlier. Amazon’s move comes in response to Barnes & Noble’s price cut on the Nook earlier Monday.

The Kindle will still be slightly more expensive than the basic version of the Nook. A Wi-Fi only version of the Nook is now available for $150, while a 3G model will cost $200.

With the latest round of price wars, the distinction between e-readers and tablets is also becoming clear. Tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist by targeting different groups of consumers based on their purchasing power, the extent of interactivity they need and their reading patterns.

That means two sets of products: Tablets with color displays and lots of features that cost $400 or more, and inexpensive black-and-white E Ink-powered e-readers that will soon be available for $150 or less.

Despite the launch of tablets such as Apple’s iPad, e-book readers continue to be popular among consumers. About seven million e-readers will be sold this year, estimates Forrester. A recent poll by consumer electronics search website Retrevo showed 45 percent of casual readers–those who read one book every few months–say they plan to buy an iPad now instead of an e-reader. But among avid readers–those who read more than five books a month–only 14 percent say they will go for an iPad over an e-reader.

“In other words Apple will still attract many e-reader buyers but Kindle owners might buy more books,” says Retrevo in its blog post. The web site polled 1000 people through an independent panel.

That’s good news for Amazon and Barnes & Noble who are betting on sales of more digital books. E-readers such as Kindle and Nook will help them in that goal.

Photo: Amazon’s first generation Kindle (Brian Vallelunga/Flickr)

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