GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

In Apple’s earnings call Monday, CEO Steve Jobs derided some upcoming tablets for their lack of size.

Presumably referring to Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy Tab and Research In Motion’s PlayBook two 7-inch tablets hitting stores soon Jobs said these devices were too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience.

“7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” said Jobs, adding that competing manufacturers were struggling to meet the price point of the iPad, which starts at $500. Both Samsung and RIM have not announced pricing on their tablets.

“These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival,” Jobs said during the earnings call.

With his aggressive statements, Jobs is clearly attempting to mark the tablet space as Apple’s territory. For several years, scores of tablet PCs have come and gone after failing to fulfill more than a niche. Though the iPad is not the first tablet to hit the market, it’s the first slate-based computer to succeed as a mainstream, general-purpose device.

The iPad has its numbers to back it: During its earnings call, Apple said it shipped 4.2 million iPads during the fourth fiscal quarter. At this selling rate, Bernstein Research noted thatiPad adoption rates are the fastest in electronics product history.

Jobs’ comments on 7-inch tablets pour cold water on rumors claiming that Apple was preparing to release a 7-inch iPad to compete with rivals. In response to the rumor, Apple watcher Jim Dalrymple explained that Apple had already made a 7-inch iPad at the same time as its available 9.7-inch model, and opted for the latter.

“Why did Apple choose to go with the larger model instead?” Dalrymple wrote. “Only Steve Jobs knows that for sure.”

Jobs appears to have answered that question during Monday’s earnings call. But take his word with a grain of salt — Jobs has been known to denigrate a product category, only to unveil a similar product later.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apple had a great year relative to the rest of the PC industry, with desktop and laptop sales growing by 24.1% when most of its competitors shrank or stayed flat. The growth in sales and share is even more impressive when you factor in the launch of the iPad. In fact, if you count PCs plus iPads, Apple could now be said to have the highest share of the computer market in the United States.

“The iPad,” writes Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore, “is driving a rapid, unprecedented shift in the structure of the computing industry.” In a note for clients issued Monday, Whitmore took PC share data from the International Data Corporation’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker and added in figures for iPad sales. The result is the chart above.

Part of what’s happening here is a struggle to define “personal computer” in a world of convergent and crossover devices. IDC’s data for PCs includes desktops, laptops and mini notebooks and doesn’t include “handhelds” or servers. The iPad and other tablets count as handhelds, along with smartphones, e-readers and media players. Even though tablets and ultraportable laptops fall in the same price range, perform many (although not all) of the same tasks and compete with each other for buyers’ attention and dollars, they’re not grouped in the same category.

It’s not clear what the numbers would look like if you factored in all tablet computers, not just Apple’s. And there may be good reasons, from different form factors to different operating systems, to keep PC and tablet sales separate. In fact, by keeping the numbers separate, you can see just how well Apple’s PC business has done, even in the wake of the iPad.

But three things are clear: first, that the market for tablet computers is enormous; second, that Apple has essentially recreated and owns it; and third, that if the iPad is cannibalizing sales of PCs, it’s not doing it to Apple’s.

All of this makes this week’s Apple event — and the possible presentation of a new device somewhere between a laptop and an iPad — just that much more interesting.

What if the iPad were a PC? [Fortune Tech]

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There’s not much to say about the Bad Elf GPS, and that’s a good thing. The tiny, plain plastic unit, about the size of a box of matches, plugs into the 30-pin connector of any iOS device and magically adds GPS capability. It has a green LED to tell you it is working and a MicroUSB port for pass-through charging/syncing of the host iDevice. It costs $99, $10 more than the TomTom car-kit for the iPod Touch, and half the price of the Dual iPod cradle which also adds a battery.

The Bad Elf won’t turn your iPad into a Google Maps machine – you still need an internet connection to use GPS with online services. If you have an iPod Touch or iPad partnered with a MiFi device, or you use apps that store their maps locally, then you’re good to go – just plug the dongle into the port, wait for a lock and your apps will believe they’re running on a GPS-equipped machine.

This little box is probably more useful with the iPad than the smaller iPod, if only because the iPad had a battery beefy enough to sustain a notoriously power-hungry GPS radio. If you’re planning on adding GPS to your iPod, then you should probably pick the Dual for its extra battery.

If you really want GPS, though, buy the 3G iPad. It’s just $130 more than the Wi-Fi-only model, and you have a SIM-slot so you can always choose to add a data-plan later.

Bad Elf GPS [Bad El. Thanks, Brett!]

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Apple may be selling millions of iPads today but in a few years Android tablets are likely to surpass the iPad in market share, says a Wall Street analyst.

The Google designed Android operating system will be the iPad’s primary competition and newer releases of the OS coupled with choice of devices for consumers could help put Android tablets ahead of the iPad, Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray told Business Insider.

“As in the smartphone market currently, we believe Google’s Android OS will power the stiffest competition to Apple’s iPad,” Munster wrote in a research note to his clients. “Long term, we believe Android could surpass the iPad in tablet market share due to devices from numerous manufacturers.”

The prediction is surprising because Munster is a long-time Apple watcher and in recent years has been extremely bullish about Apple’s prospects.

At least, in the smartphones category Android is surging. More than 20 Android smartphones are available in the U.S. today. Android is now the most popular OS among people who bought a smartphone in the past six months, according to August data from The Nielsen Company. Blackberry RIM and Apple iOS are in a statistical dead heat for second place among those bought a smartphone recently.

Munster says the tablets category might see something similar. Apple launched its iPad in April and since then has sold more than three million devices. But competitors are taking on the iPad. Samsung plans to make its 7-inch Android tablet called Galaxy Tab available through all the major wireless carriers in the U.S. Dell has already released a 5-inch Android tablet called Streak and says it will introduce a 7-inch model early next year. Meanwhile, smaller companies such as ELocity have also introduced a Android tablet.

The release of Android 3.0 ‘Gingerbread’ version could accelerate the development of Android-based tablets says Munster. Android 3.0 is expected to support 1280 x 768 resolution for displays, the same as that on the iPad. That will make it easier for device makers to take the Android OS and port it on to larger displays–something LG has already indicated it will do. Last week, LG said it will hold off on creating tablets till Android 3.0 is launched–later this year or early next year.

For now, though, Apple has little to worry about. Next year, Android will make up just 26 percent of the tablet market compared to the iPad at 57 percent, says Munster.

Photo: (laihiu/Flickr)

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Italian design-house Alessi’s new Alessi Tab comes on like a digital photo-frame with benefits. The Android-powered tablet is meant to be used at home – the odd angular shape means it prefers table and countertops to pockets and bags.

Astonishingly, the press release says the Tab is aimed at the ‘young housewife’, who will presumably move the Tab from room to room whilst enjoying real-time news from the ANSA agency, weather from Epson (?), recipes (of course!) from Domus magazine’s Silver Spoon cookbook, internet radio and nutritional information. Further, she can make video calls and watch digital TV broadcasts (it actually has an antenna) while “having fun in the kitchen.”

If all this looks to you like the future as envisioned by Mad Men, you’re not alone. Even the styling has a slick, retro 1950s feel to it. This is all the weirder when you see the specs, which are decidedly up to date:

• 10.1-inch capacitive display
• Auto-rotation sensor (accelerometer)
• Android 2.1
• 1GB RAM
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• DVB-T with detachable antenna
• Front-facing camera and microphone
• HDMI output
• USB port
• SD card reader

There’s no mention of processor speed, but we suppose the average housewife wouldn’t want to worry her pretty little head about things like that. Aside from the awkward shape, though, the Tab looks very capable, and all that installed crapware can presumably be cleaned off.

Price and availability are both still secret. You can be it’ll be expensive, though: Alessi charges $150 for a teapot.

Alessi Tab [Alessi via Uncrate]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

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Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

There’s a lot of gadget news about Amazon today, so we’re going to take these items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

   KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: ‘kindleReaderDiv’, asin: ‘B003X28734′, width: ’640′, height: ’346′});

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?
   
   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

Source:wired.com

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According to Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn, the iPad has replaced around half of all laptop sales. Further, the little tablet is also slowing TV sales, despite the manufacturers’ desperate push to shift 3D sets.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Dunn said that sales are slowing in general on bigger gadgets, and that the hot products are the iPad, e-readers like the Kindle, and digital cameras. Instead of upgrading televisions, many people are sticking with the ones they own and spending the cash on iPads and other things they don’t already have.

But the biggest surprise is that 50% figure. It’s an internal, Best Buy estimate, but proves what we at Gadget Lab thought all along: that Mom and Pop would switch from cheap, unreliable and hard-to-use laptops and buy the iPad instead, an intuitive device which covers 90% of their computing needs. When the iPad gets a FaceTime camera (and hopefully a video-capable version of Skype) then the only people buying laptops will be those who need the horsepower for work.

These crazy iPad sales are taking their bite out of Windows market-share, too, not the Mac’s. Mac sales, which are mostly notebook sales anyway, continue to grow every quarter. This means that people are dropping Windows for the iPad. With the lack of any viable Windows-based iPad competitor, Microsoft should be getting very worried indeed: after all, the bulk of its business comes from bundling its OS with commodity hardware — the exact hardware that Best Buy has seen drop in sales by half.

Retailers Turn to Gadgets [WSJ]

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Dell Streak and Accessories, from Dell.com

The Dell Streak was always an odd fit for the consumer market — smaller than other tablets, bigger than other smartphones. But Dell sees a bright future for it in enterprise in general, and medicine in particular.

Dell’s Jamie Coffin and Scott Jenkins recently mapped their healthcare strategy for ZDNet. Because Dell healthcare services already provides IT infrastructure for over 350 hospitals, they can integrate their portable devices and software with the systems already in place — an advantage Apple, Samsung, and other tablet makers can’t match.

Devices that store and handle medical information have to fulfill a very strict set of requirements. Besides hooking into a hospital or healthcare network’s systems, there’s HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act, a 1996 law that protects patient privacy.

There are also security nightmares whenever a device storing confidential information is lost or networked communications are transferred without encryption or or other security protections. Finally, medical devices have to be rugged, germ-resistant, and capable of working in disaster scenarios without ready access to electricity or a data network. This is one significant reason why hospitals’ information systems frequently seem so low-tech; it’s not recalcitrance, but redundancy by design.

For these reasons, medical devices are usually provided by specialized providers who can meet these requirements. They’re typically expensive, with patents or scarcity preventing competition, and UI is (ahem) not particularly a priority. Consumer devices, on the other hand, can beat specialized devices on price and usability. Dell thinks that they can leverage their consumer and enterprise positions to offer the best of both worlds.

Also, it really is just the right size for a lab coat pocket.

Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences [Dell]
Dell’s enterprise Streak plan: Target verticals like healthcare [ZDNet]
Dell Streak may soon be streaking into lab coat pockets [TeleRead]

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SmartCellar Menu Application, from Incentient.com

One promise of tablets and e-readers is that everything we read that can be held in our hands, not just books and web pages, could end up moving from static paper to a dynamic screen. Some restaurants are already taking the plunge, handing out iPads instead of menus.

The New York Times recently profiled a number of these future-thinking restaurants, from London bistros to Atlanta steakhouses. They report that customers love them, sales are up, and that so far, no one has stolen or spilled their drinks on the tablets. Hijacking them for playing video games and checking-in on Foursquare have likewise been minimal.

Traditionally, restaurants touting their extensive wine, beer, or liquor collections have consecrated that authority with large tomes bound in deluxe leather. (“Here is the Bible,” a waitress whispered to a reporter for the Economist at a French restaurant in London’s Covent Garden.)

But these books aren’t terribly functional for search. Customers have grown used to finding beverage information on their smartphones; software-based tablets are a natural way for restaurants to meet their clientele halfway, keeping them (and their stewards) in on the action. And as the devices have quickly accrued some of the same prestige as the old codex menus.

For the customer, digital menus are interactive, searchable, and can easily incorporate text with images. For the restaurant, digital menus can be edited on the fly, reflecting new items, prices, specials, and availability (or lack thereof) without having to launch an entire reprinting. They can also augment the catalog with reviews, suggestions about food pairings, even multimedia. Master sommelier Fred Dame told the Times, when I saw this thing and saw the applications, I said, Oh, man, thats the end of the print shop.

I can imagine a future where customers have a restaurant’s interactive menu on their own devices, logging in, and reserving a bottle of wine (and even a particular table) before they step out the door.

Don’t expect to fiddle with a high-end touchscreen menu at your neighborhood family restaurant anytime soon; the cost-benefit curve just doesn’t turn sharply enough yet. But we can expect them to continue changing the look and feel of the fine dining experience.

Source:wired.com

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Amazon’s new commercial puts the Kindle in the best possible light: poolside, in the hands of a beautiful, bikini-clad woman. It even works in a dig at the iPad and other LCD tablets; the dweeby guy next to the Kindle reader can only see his own ugly reflection.

This video has been percolating around the tech blogosphere for a couple of days, but I don’t think anyone has gotten it quite right. (I was off yesterday. Sorry.) I honestly don’t think it’s about competing with the iPad, or touting the benefits of non-reflective screens, as much as it’s about re-positioning the Kindle in the popular imagination.

Think back three years to when the Kindle was first announced. Yes, there was a splashy cover story about the future of reading. But everyone agreed: the device itself was ugly, it was expensive, and its market was limited to rich bookwormy dorks who needed something to read on airplanes where the physical world could vanish behind the virtual mindspace of a not-quite-real book.

Now, the Kindle is stylish; it’s relatively inexpensive; and the world in which you read it doesn’t look like a place you’d want to escape from at all. That is, apart from your nosy neighbors and their self-involved not-quite-pickup lines.

Source:wired.com

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Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

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All images via Got Medieval.

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Source:wired.com

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