B&N Releases Nook Tablet To Rival Amazon Fire 183
jfruhlinger writes "It looks like there's competition in the low-cost media tablet space — and that Barnes & Noble is determined not to go the way of Borders. Barnes & Noble today announced the Nook Tablet, an Android-based tablet with better specs than the Kindle Fire (though it's also $50 pricier). The Nook Tablet will allow Hulu and Netflix streaming and sideloading of content, but won't have access to the general-purpose Android App Store."
But (Score:2)
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A buddy of mine is considering one, so can you provide a citation that it will allow the amazon app store?
Amazon Appstore is an APK (Score:2)
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The original NC didn't let you turn that on in stock, so I don't think it's a likely assumption that this one will. I guess it's just a question of whether they locked it down more than they did the NC.
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The Nook Tablet will allow Hulu and Netflix streaming and sideloading of content
That what your looking for?
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Not sure. It depends on what they mean by "content." If they mean apps, then great, but they might just mean putting ebooks, etc. on it without going through the Nook store (with calibre, e.g.).
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The nook color mounts as a usb drive. And content can be added by just copying files over. However you can purchade directly from barnes and noble.com and have it downloaded automatically as well.
It also has a microsd slot allowing you acess content from that as well. My only complaints are the stock browser and email clients suck.
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Right, that's sideloading "content" where "content" is ebooks, images, videos, etc... which is different from sideloading apps.
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Without internet access.
So worse than the current nook? (Score:2, Informative)
I have a nook color, with CM7. I have the google market, amazon market, both nook and kindle app and netflix. I am sure if I cared I could have hulu premium as well.
Re:So worse than the current nook? (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, comparing a third-party firmware for the original Nook with the stock features of this new one isn't valid.
The better question is - Assuming that they don't lock the bootloader this time around, what will this new device be like with CM9?
If I didn't already have a Tab 10.1, I'd go for this... If the flexibility of this device is even close to that of its predecessor, it's going to be a beast with CM9. (It may get CM7 in the interim, but that's probably only going to be short-term.)
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In the case of an Android-compatible tablet, it is valid. I want one of the new tablets. I don't want it for the sake of the OEM build. I want it for the sake of alternate Android builds, and if I can just so happen to access the Amazon store and content (such as Prime, books, etc.) then so much the better. What I really want to be honest, is an iPad + a flash player, but an Android tablet would be
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Not saying I'm going out right away to replace my Nook Color (w/ the NookieComb ROM), but if you want to make a fair comparo give the CyanogenMod guys some time to spin a version for the new Nook Tablet. It won't take long at all and I suspect it's going to make a few of us want to upgrade our har
And in other -- er, actually, the same -- news... (Score:5, Informative)
... the already-exisitng, easily-hackable previous Nook Color is now $50 less--just US$199. [barnesandnoble.com] Nice! Very tempted...
Re:And in other -- er, actually, the same -- news. (Score:4, Informative)
And unlike the Kindle Fire, the Nook Color has an SD card slot.
Re:And in other -- er, actually, the same -- news. (Score:5, Informative)
Any word on if the new Nook Tablet has the same feature?
Fire... hose? (Score:2)
Unlike the Nook Color, the Kindle Fire is part of a successful ecosystem. ;) In all seriousness, I wonder how much Amazon Prime and the rest of the ecosystem, such as book lending, will impact this.
If the Kindle Fire turns out to be a Fire Hose, then there's no comparison.
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I'm not so concerned with who sells more units, than the very specific unit I might buy for myself. The Fire isn't interesting *to me* for many of the same arguments made in TFA. The most important being, you aren't always connected to the cloud. You need enough local resources to get your work done (whatever that is) without signal.
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Well, they're both Android. In another thread, I mentioned that the lack of the marketplace is pretty much a deal breaker, if that's what you're talking about. The Nook Color will boot off its SD card, which makes it a lot easier to install a full featured copy of Android. The Fire lacks an SD card.
The point is, when you're talking about what is rapidly becoming a commodity item, (android tablets) the issue becomes more and more what the individual features are than how many units have been sold. After
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With CM7 it makes a really great tablet. I use mine all the time. You can install the Nook app, so you really lose nothing at all. Netflix works great on it.
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I didn't like the stock reader, nor the Nook app. I guess if I bought my books from BN, it would still be nice, but since most of my stuff comes from places like Project Gutenberg, Baen, etc... I found that I like FBReader much better (need a separate reader for PDFs though, but the stock/Nook app sucks for those, too)
My only complaint with CM7 Nook... (Score:3)
... is that using the touch screen is difficult at the very edge of the screen. This is really only a problem with some applications that put buttons in the corners, like Tweetcaster. Also, the Nook reader is very hard to use unless you pump up the dpi to make the graphical elements larger.
But that kind of stuff is pretty trivial.
Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet, especially if it's as hackable as the original.
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I thought that was just me and my fat fingers. Glad to know I'm not alone (And I do love CM7.1 now that they've mostly addressed the battery issues). Mind cluing me in to where/how to pump up the dpi like you mentioned?
$199 Android tablet is no BFD (Score:2)
Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet
A few years ago, that was true. Today, Android tablets are as cheap, or cheaper. The Lenovo Ideapad A1 costs $199 at Amazon. The Vizio 8" costs $189 at Costco. And BF is coming up.
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What I can't understand is why it's so expensive. What causes it to cost so much? My Acer cost $250, and doesn't have a touch screen but does have a keyboard and mouse pad and 180 gb of drive space, as opposed to this device's 8 gig. Are touch screens really that expensive?
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They really are. And there's the question of the storage being solid-state instead of a notebook hard drive, plus the minimization of the parts to cut down on the weight.
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Not quite - if you install the standard Nook app, you lose "More in Store" and "Read in Store" - I assume the stock Color had these. (My eInk Nook does.)
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Not only that, you can install CM7 to boot directly off the SD card, so if you wanted to go back to the stock firmware it is just a simple matter of booting without the SD installed. If you go this route, make sure to use a Sandisk SD card though (even the class 2 Sandisk is faster than the class 10 of most other brands for this use case, since the other cards are only fast at very large block transfers).
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Android screens are rendered widget by widget, pixel by pixel for every screen modification (scroll, zoom, item state changed, etc.) and that means a lot of work is being done for every frame. This is a legacy of the original spec not requiring a dedicated gpu. Modern devices are getting them but the acceleration is sort of hacked into that gpuless model. iOS on the other hand didn't start with such a limiting assumption and paints everything to an open gl surface with a fixed camera. Most screen modifi
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Meh, tell that to my old iphone. It took 20-30 seconds to display text after I typed it. You can imagine what scrolling around webpages felt like. The thing was painful. :(
iPhone 3G on iOS 4.0? Been there and it was painful. I missed calls because of the crappy performance. Web pages would take 3 forevers to load... Still, once they did, they scrolled flawlessly in the "you're moving a page with your finger" sense. No choppy animation or pixel by pixel jumping of the page contents. Score one for using the device's GPU to do your UI rendering, huh?
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I can't figure out if it was oversight or intentional, but that thing was unusable. Oddly I had problems moving the pages too, iirc. Maybe I'm remembering it worse than it was... but it was definitely a bad experience.
Incidentally (Score:2, Interesting)
It should be noted that Apple is publicly happy about the Amazon Fire and its rivals [businessinsider.com] because it further contributes to Android fragmentation.
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err. no. They do.
Aside from the whole steve jobs breathing fire over Android's UI... Their entire approach wasn't to steal market share or to be #1. They're entire objective was to make something they liked and make a profit off of it.
Given that their profit figures are up quarter after quarter, year after year, and LG is asking for investor support to shore up their smartphone division, i'm more inclined to believe that everyone else has no idea how the market works.
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Or- more likely apple are trying to put a spin on their dwindling market share to try and win consumers back by trying to pretend to the consumer that they're not the only one-off operating system.
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Dwindling? Really?
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Citation available all over the internet.
Re:Incidentally (Score:4, Informative)
Really. [eweekeurope.co.uk] 44.8% Android to 27.4% iPhone is already dwindled, but when the huge hype of the iPhone 4S release produces only a 0.1% increase in market share, the months after initial release will doubtless show further dwindle.
The much smaller market segment that is tablets also shrank [gmanews.tv], from 75% to 67% iPad, while Android's share grew to 27%. The iPad lead is dwindling, and by the time tablets are as substantial a market segment as are smartphones, the iPad share's further shrinkage in the minority will contribute to the overall dwindling of Apple's share.
Apple is a great innovator, and a terrific survivor. But the company has never been much of a sustainer of market share. The diversity of large markets works against the total platform control that Apple always builds its products on, even as it helps Apple's kind of mass market but quality innovations and its tenacious survival. The middle phase is where most of the money is, and Microsoft and now Google (and its partners, the further development of the Microsoft corollary) come to dominate most of the time by owning it through relative openness.
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Maybe that's because there was no competing product worth buying a year ago.
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Shipped vs sold and, self reported sales vs. analyst findings.
How many non-iPads actually sold?
Given the statistics with web services, most are finding that an overwhelming amount of mobile traffic are coming from iOS devices.
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But Amazon and B&N are the ones making the devices. They aren't releasing their customized Android for all LCD tablets and creating a compatibility issue that you might see in cell phones.
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Windows fragmentation (how many different brands of computers come with Windows?) hasn't hurt its desktop business. AND there are not only several flavors of Windows (starter, home, professional) and different versions (98, XP, 7, and even a few copies of Vista) of the OS.
As a consumer, I welcome fragmentation. Having the choice of many different Linux distros is a plus, not a negative.
And BTW, why are they using Android rather than a standard Linux distro? The touch screen?
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I'm really getting tired of all the whining about fragmentation. You're absolutely right -- on the desktop market, fragmentation has actually been a good thing. But on desktop computers we call it "competition" and "diversity" and "choice."
From a consumer's point of view, there's absolutely nothing to lose from this fragmentation. Look at the alternative: completely different, incompatible operating systems from each manufacturer. The differences in android version and hardware capabilities are nothing
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Desktop fragmentation hasn't been as bad as Android's fragmentation issue.
Namely, you couldn't bake your own version of Windows that could totally break an app(Aside from bizarre driver bugs or incompatible baked in software; you couldn't fuck with the kernel) or ship Windows 95 when Windows 7 was just shoved out the door.
Second, desktop fragmentation is a huge problem for gamers. Driver conflicts, hardware incompatibility, instability due to crappy specs(ACPI? Really intel?)...
Hell, I wonder how many cra
Android app store is a deal-breaker (Score:4, Insightful)
Without access to the Android app store, it's not much different than the higher end Chinese clones.
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Unlike the "higher end Chinese clones" the kernel sources will probably be available.
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Yet this virtually never happens. Either the old kernel gets reused, or the kernel holds the device back and newer versions of Android never get ported back. Lack of kernel sources inhibits "real" android as much as it inhibits other OSes.
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>full distribution of Android, with the market, on it in the first damned place?
Google charges for that, and keeps some design control on specifications for those who they allow. I am sure B&N would have been required to put GPS and a microphone into the device as well, to be allowed a full google license. The payoff for licensing android from google is full access to navigation, and voice IMHO but then you need mobile internet... All of that now pushes them into the IPAD cost. For those that wan
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It's not an Android tablet. It's a Nook Tablet. It may be built on Android, but they are not associating themselves with Android. Just like the Amazon with the Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble is taking control of the platform.
You might as well ask why you can't get a package manager on your TiVo.
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They have sold 3 million of the original which basically makes it second to the iPad in tablet sales. If B&N has the most popular apps ported over they will have a hit. There is no need to have every android app available as most people won't care about it, they just want their LOL Cats and Angry Birds.
Just add CM7 and put Kindle app on it (Score:2)
Or better yet, get a real Android tablet like Vizio 8" or the Lenovo Ideapad A1.
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Copyright/licensing, most likely. CyanogenMod got bitten by that, too.
Other than that, I'm not sure. The GApps seem to have weird tendrils into each other, from what I've seen, and that's all assuming that you CAN sideload apps and not just "content."
Someone gets it! (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
> [the kindle fire]'s 8G bytes of storage is not enough to hold media for those situations where the user is not connected to the Internet. "You're not always going to be connected to the cloud," he said.
All together now: Bingo!
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Although, from TFA: "The Kindle Fire's 512MB of RAM does not provide enough room to play a game app while reading a magazine or running another app, he said. Its 8G bytes of storage is not enough to hold media for those situations where the user is not connected to the Internet."
Excuse me, what?! The iPad (which I have and use daily) has 256MB RAM ( http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1 [ifixit.com]); the iPad 2 has 512MB RAM (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown/5071/1 [ifixit.com]). Both of those devic
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Both iOS and Android have APIs to help developers trick you into thinking that you're multitasking. They save the state of the app and reload that state when you switch back to it. It's a trick from the old Palm days, and possibly earlier.
And for a huge number of applications, it makes sense. You don't need your magazine app to actually be running while you're playing a game, as long as it gets you back to the page you were on when you switched away.
That said, the same applies for the Nook Tablet, so B&
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As excited as I am for this thing, (even if I can't justify replacing my 5 month old NC, as much as I want to), I find myself wondering about the 1080p claims.
I'm not much of a video guy, but how does a device with 1024x600 resolution display 1080p?
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> I'm not much of a video guy, but how does a device with 1024x600 resolution display 1080p?
Downscaling. I think "1080p" in this context means it'll accept (display) content in 1080p, downscaling appropriately. One could argue that this is cheating in the specs, but realistically, you won't be able to see the difference on a handheld display, unless the downscaling process introduces visible artifacts.
I still prefer kobo (Score:2)
I still prefer kobo and wait eagerly for the next release.
I have a rooted Nook Color (Score:3)
I'm running CM 7.1 on it and am very happy with it. I have it overclocked to 1.2Ghz and I can run both the Nook and Kindle Android apps on it. I've been playing a lot of Madden 12 on it though and I need to set the graphics to medium or low though for decent performance. I think that B&N will do well if they have most of the popular apps available for it with the speed bump and dual core processor. Having the Hulu and Netflix apps is huge and the ability to have 48 gigs of storage is nice. I rip my DVDs using Handbrake and they run just playback just fine on the screen. I prefer the 7" screen to the 10 inch screen on the iPad and most tablets.
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I have done the same, but I am much less impressed. Especially with web browsing.
I much prefer B&N to Amazon (Score:2)
At the very least, the new tablet will help that.
But honestly, I think the thing they need the most is to open up it's software. Access to the Android App Market would help. But I think the best idea would be to sell it with a Linux OS, and a web browser (firefox/chrome/ whatever) that includes an app for Barnes & Nobles store.
Color E-ink (Score:4, Insightful)
Supply chian (Score:2)
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Android's source of free content is the entire Internet. And also specifically YouTube. This is the Google way: increase access among the many Internet users, help them find their content (free and otherwise), and promote some stuff along with it as paid ads. YouTube content might mostly suck, but broadcast TV is mostly worse (and the ad model is much worse), and cable/satellite TV content people pay $50+ for each month is even worse than that. There's so much more YouTube and general Internet content than
That $50 is going to kill it (Score:2)
B&N is coming to the "media" tablet party a bit late. They should have found a way to trim $50 off the tablet to directly compete with the Fire. By not doing so, they won't be converting too many of the faithful kindle crowd.
Agree. Kindle Fire may not take off either (Score:2)
Why get an LED eReader when Android tables are so inexpensive?
Vendor Lockin (Score:3)
Won't this tablet also be just a terminal for all content served by the BN servers, even if they pass through other content, as Amazon's Kindle Fire is? So all content is mediated by BN.
That's like buying a TV from CBS, to which CBS can send whatever "necessary" modifications to content from other TV networks. Yeah, it's like getting a cellphone locked into a single mobile carrier through which all calls are funneled. But look at how that's working out with cablemodems when the company is Comcast (and plenty of others): competing services, like downloaded movies or VOIP, get substandard service or worse. And any company can go the Comcast route any day it chooses.
Agree - get an Andoid tablet. (Score:2)
IMO: If you want eInk, get an eReader, otherwise get a real Android tablet, instead of trying to convert an LED eReader to an Android tablet, or use an Android phone.
Reasons:
1) Android tablets are as cheap, or cheaper. The Lenovo Ideapad A1 costs $199 at Amazon. The Vizio 8" costs $189 at Costco. And BF is coming up.
2) Android tablets have way more features, like cameras, and GPS, and external micor-SD slots.
3) Don't have to fuss with hacking, or worry about "bricking," or worry about voiding warranties.
4)
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To be clear, all the content is downloaded without going through any BN server or network? Because that chokepoint of control might be benign now, but it's an architecture for standing between you and 3rd party content whenever BN changes its policy later.
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You're like a horse that thinks it's a car. Or rather a cross between a horse and a mule, that thinks it's a cross between a car and a phone.
$50 is $50 (Score:3)
Unhappy with my current Nook Color (Score:2)
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Welcome to Android.
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Welcome to Android.
It's not Android. Some Android devices are plenty fast.
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FWIW: It is easy to convert your nook color to a standard Android tablet. Just get a micro-SD chip, and install CM7. You don't even have to touch the original software - the CM7 gets installed to the micro-SD.
BTW: I found the Color Nook's browser performance to be awful, with, or without, CM7.
As to battery life: it is an LED device after all. Any such device will drain batteries much faster than an eInk device. Just basic physics.
Nook Color (Score:2)
I've been pretty happy with the Nook Color. I mostly use it with free or sideloaded ebooks. Paid ebooks are way too expensive considering there's no dead wood, shipping or many other costs as regular books have. I went with the Color over an e-ink reader so that I can use it for light email/web usage while on the road. I dual-boot Honeycomb from a microSD card for apps not available through B&N's limited app store (which is most of them). If The Nook Tablet is as easy to dual-boot as the NC, I migh
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The old nook has a smooth browsing experience. I don't see how Silk is going to help unless you have a hopelessly pathetic Internet connection.
I don't see the advantage. (Score:2)
What does Silk buy you? Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire have only WiFi connectivity, not 3G, so it isn't compensating for low-speed connection. Both have dual core 1 GHz processors, and if you can't render a webpage quickly with that, then something is seriously wrong. The original Nook Color with a single core 800 MHz could handle browsing just fine, although flash was somewhat slow.
So the only thing you gain by delegating some processing to a third party is battery life, but the Nook Tablet alrea
Re:I don't see the advantage. (Score:4, Informative)
Clock the old nook up to 1.2Ghz and flash is fine.
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Flash is not "fine" on my Quad core i7, so I doubt it'll be "fine" on the Nook by any reasonable stretch of the word "fine".
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One of this big draws of the Kindle Fire is that has Amazon Silk built in.
Personally, I'd go a long way to avoid a browser like Amazon Silk and the privacy issues it raises. And quite seriously, if you have trouble loading web pages fast enough over wifi on a dual-core 1Ghz+ processor, then there's something wrong with the way the browser was programmed. Silk sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
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e-ink is usefull for an e-reader but less so for a tablet. e-ink is too slow to respond (even b&w) to be usefull for 99% of tablet applications.
Until e-ink's response time improves it will only really be usefull for eReading and a few other tasks.
I wouldn't want to read eBooks on a non e-ink device. I wouldn't want a table on e-ink though.
Re:Color e-ink display? (Score:4, Informative)
What?
You can add a near-instant capacitive touch interface to a color (only 30FPS/30Hz, but that still seems ok) E-Ink display just fine, though it darkens the screen a bit.
A darn shame the tech hasn't been mass-produced though. No demand for it despite the clear battery life improvement.
Re:Color e-ink display? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which color eInk display are you talking about, exactly? As far as I'm aware, there aren't any commercially available right now.
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There was a report on a tech blog about a company finally manufacturing the devices for commercial sale in Europe, but that was a few months ago. I'll see if I can source it when I get home.
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They're talking about the display's response time, not the touch sensing. Is there a color e-ink that can display 30FPS?
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Forgive my squirrely ignorance, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of e-ink? I thought its big deal was that it only refreshed as needed, thus leading to massive reductions in battery usage.
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The ability to rapidly change content vs. the *need* to actively require power to maintain screen contents are two distinct points. In practice, those two points are in conflict with today's tech. eInk has steady-state properties that allow the display to be 'off' and still readable, but changing the state takes effort and incurs a large time penalty. If eInk had the steady-state property *and* could change between any possible states in under a millisecond, that would still have the battery-saving prope
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Uh, yes. There's one demo showing one playing Transformers (the movie) and the reported battery life is astonishing. But there's little demand for it, apparently.
Hence why my response centered around the actual touch response, because I thought the above was relatively known.
Re:Just One Question: (Score:4, Informative)
I chatted with the Barnes and Nobles sales guy via their website and asked that same question. They said it will be rootable. (Gave me the warning about voiding warranty). So, I'm guessing that it is, although the sales guy is likely ignorant and just repeating what he has heard.
Re:More market fragmentation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy shit, choice! Competition!
I never thought I'd see the day when people would whimper and cry because of it.
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Now if I write a tablet app I need to host it through the Google, Amazon and B&N marketplaces. Though right now I think I would skip B&N as their claim of "over a thousand apps" is not that impressive.
Er, what? Having "over a thousand apps" for the Nook might be a valid reason to skip _buying_ the Nook. (Realistically of course it depends on what those thousand+ apps are, what you plan to do with it, and if you're willing to go through the fairly painless process of creating a boot SD card so you can access Google's marketplace.)
However i can't think of any reason why that would discourage you from hosting your app through B&N. As far as i'm aware putting an app up on different markets doesn't req
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No, not much difference at all -- except for rendering and a few new things, slashdot is pretty much what it was ten years ago. Look in the archives, you'll see news about new Linux distros, new MS OSes, new hardware (especially CPUs).
If you want to see different stories, submit them. If you don't want to see certain stories, vote them down in the firehose.