Samsung brings Bada 2.0 to world with Wave 3

Google’s Android OS is currently the only dominant smartphone platform that isn’t exclusive to one hardware maker (BlackBerry and iOS are owned and controlled by RIM and Apple). About half of all smarpthones now run Android, and this is making manufacturers like Samsung nervous. In 2011, the company renewed its attention to its Bada OS and has made headway in turning it into a competitive platform in many regions around the world. The Samsung Wave 3, which launches in France today, is the manufacturer’s latest move to become a player in the OS space.

The Wave 3 has a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, 1.4GHz single-core processor, HSPA+ 14.4Mbps connection speeds, 5MP rear camera, VGA (0.3MP) front camera, and is a world phone. It’s currently available in France, but will launch in Germany, Italy, and Russia by the end of the year.

Samsung has been consistently improving the OS, which, in its 2.0 release now looks quite similar to its Android offerings. It is expected that the goal is to slip Bada into some good looking phones without consumers even noticing.

The Wave 3 was unveiled back in August, along with the Wave M and Wave Y next-generation Bada phones.

AFP launches iPad App in Spanish and Portuguese

Agence France-Presse (AFP) has launched its iPad application in Spanish and Portuguese providing access to the latest stories, videos, pictures and graphics from its network of correspondents around the world.

The application, the first in Spanish and Portuguese by a leading international news agency, can be downloaded, free of charge, on Apple's iTunes page: http://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/afp-ipad-edition/id448339846?mt=8.

"The launch of the iPad application in Spanish is part of the investments AFP is currently making in Latin America," said Emmanuel Hoog, AFP's chairman and chief executive officer.

"Our objective is to bring the agency closer to a public keen to receive international and local news which only a global network of 1,500 journalists in 150 countries can offer," he added.

News in real time - text and pictures - can be accessed directly from the application’s homepage.
Sections on Latin America, World, Sports, Economy, Science and Technology, Culture, Lifestyle and Environment are accessible from that page, along with a header listing news alerts.

A special edition of the application, with items of specific interest, is also available for clients from Spain.

With one click, the reader can access a selection of the top pictures and videos of the day as well an Analysis section which deals in depth with major issues.

Some of this content is also available on the iPhone application launched by AFP in January 2010 in five languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Arabic). iPad applications will be launched in November.

AFP is a global news agency delivering fast, accurate, in-depth coverage of the events shaping our world from wars and conflicts to politics, sports, entertainment and the latest breakthroughs in health, science and technology.

It delivers the news in video, text, photos, multimedia and graphics to a wide range of customers including newspapers and magazines, radio and TV channels, web sites and portals, mobile operators, corporate clients as well as public institutions.

RIM downgraded as $200 PlayBook vanishes

Last week, Research in Motion cut the price on its low-end PlayBook tablet to just $200 for a limited time in an effort to woo Thanksgiving holiday shoppers to the device just as competitors like the Barnes & Noble Nook tablet and Kindle Fire went on sale. However, just as quickly as the $200 PlayBook appeared, it seems to be vanishing: retailers appear to be in the process of removing the $200 PlayBook devices from their online catalogs, and some Best Buy customers have reported their orders for the $200 tablets have been cancelled.

Complaints in Best Buy customer forums were first reported by Electronista. Quick checks of other retailers that had previously been offering the $200 tablets (Staples, Office Depot, Walmart, and RadioShack) finds the only $200 tablets listed as available are refurbished models.

The move could indicate that RIM’s idea of “a limited time only” was indeed just a period of a few days surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday, or that the $200 promotional price proved popular with consumers, even as the Kindle Fire hit the streets. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu notes the company is facing serious competition from the likes of Samsung, Apple, Amazon, and HTC, and that significant service outages in October have damaged RIM with its bread-and-butter enterprise and government customers.

Comparison: Nook Tablet vs Kindle Fire

Here is a comparison of the major features of Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Nook Tablet computer and Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire:

Price: The Nook Tablet costs $249; the Kindle Fire, costs $199.

Connectivity: Both tablets connect to the Internet only through Wi-Fi.

Screen size: Both tablets have displays that measure 7 inches diagonally. That's about three times the size of an iPhone screen and half the size of an iPad screen.

Software: Both run modified versions of Google Inc.'s Android software. Neither one has direct access to Google's Android Market for third-party applications; Amazon and Barnes & Noble run their own stores.

Apps: Barnes & Noble says there are about 1,000 third-party applications available for the Tablet. Amazon has nearly ten times as many.

Storage: The Nook Tablet has 16 gigabytes of storage plus a memory-card slot. Of the built-in memory, all but 1 gigabyte is reserved for content bought from Barnes & Noble. The Kindle Fire includes 8 gigabytes of internal storage and no memory-card slot.

Battery life: Barnes & Noble claims up to 9 hours of video on the Nook Tablet, Amazon says 7.5 hours on the Kindle Fire.

Thickness: They're nearly identical: the Nook tablet is 0.48 inches thick, while the Kindle Fire is 0.45 inches.

Weight: Again, nearly identical. The Nook Tablet weighs 14.1 ounces, the Kindle Fire half an ounce more.

Movies: Both come with apps from Netflix and Hulu, which provide streaming movies and TV shows to subscribers. The Kindle Fire also provides access to downloadable and streaming movies from Amazon.

Droid 4 and Galaxy Nexus to be released on December 8

The already crowded Verizon smartphone line up might be getting a few more phones in early December. According to Droid-Life, the elusive Galaxy Nexus and the almost unheard of Droid 4 will be released for Verizon on December 8. Both of the phones will join the Droid RAZR and iPhone 4S as top of the line devices for Verizon’s customers.

There has still been no official word out of Verizon or Motorola about the existence of the Droid 4, so it is surprising that a marque phone would be released without any marketing to date. The rumored specs for the Droid 4 match up very closely with the recently released Droid RAZR. The biggest differences would be that the Droid 4 will have a slide out keyboard and a smaller 4 inch Super AMOLED Advanced display instead of the RAZR’s 4.3 inch display.

We already know pretty much about the Galaxy Nexus device, expect the release date and the price. When it was first announced Google said it would be available in the United States sometime in November. Recently we heard that that date has been pushed back to December but no date was confirmed. The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s latest reference device that will be the first phone or tablet to be launched with the newest flavor of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Droid line up has been an anchor in Verizon’s Android line up, and the Galaxy Nexus might be the most anticipated Android phone release in over a year.

Thousands line up to buy Blackberry Bold 9790S

Thousands of Indonesians jammed into a glitzy shopping mall to get hold of the first BlackBerry Bold 9790s being sold worldwide.

Fearing a riot, hundreds of police were deployed outside, tying up traffic in the heart of the capital for hours.

With a 50 percent discount on the $540 phone for the first 1,000 buyers, lines started forming in front of Pacific Place mall on Thursday night. By daybreak, impatient shoppers started rattling the gates.

And when rumors spread that the new smartphones - commonly known as Bellagio - had already sold out, the crowd of 3,000 went crazy. Several people fainted in the crush.

Indonesia, a nation of 240 million people, has experienced a come-from-nowhere tech frenzy in recent years.

With 6 million users, BlackBerry dominates the smartphone market.

HP TouchPad top-selling tablet in US after iPad

Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad, which is being axed by the company, was the top-selling tablet computer in the United States after Apple's iPad in the first 10 months of the year, said market research company NPD Group.

The TouchPad accounted for 17 percent of the 1.2 million non-Apple tablets sold in the United States between January and October, NPD said, edging out Galaxy tablets from South Korea's Samsung, which had a 16 percent market share.

Taiwan's Asus accounted for 10 percent of the non-Apple tablets sold during the period followed by Motorola, maker of the Xoom tablet, and Taiwan's Acer, each with nine percent market share, NPD said.

Apple sold 11.12 million iPads last quarter alone.

HP, citing disappointing sales, announced on August 18 it was discontinuing the TouchPad - just seven weeks after it hit the market - and abandoning the webOS operating system acquired from Palm that powered the device.

Two weeks later, HP said it planned one last production run of the TouchPad, which became a hot seller following a price cut from $499 to just $99 and the announcement that it was being abandoned.

Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, said there are US tablet buyers interested in a device other than an iPad.

"Seventy-six percent of consumers who purchased a non-Apple tablet didn't even consider the iPad, an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business," Baker said.

"The market is filled with long-time personal computer and phone brands as well as low-cost entrants," he said. "With a limited amount of shelf space and challenges in overcoming the iPad's first mover strength, not all brands will be successful."

One that is expected to be successful is US online retail giant Amazon, which began selling a tablet computer last week, the Kindle Fire.

A survey by ChangeWave Research of 3,043 North American consumers published Monday found that 65 percent of future tablet buyers plan to purchase an iPad but 22 percent said they will buy a Kindle Fire.

ChangeWave said the survey results should have other tablet makers worried.

Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL team up to sell online ads

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are joining forces in an online advertising attack on Google and Facebook.

The alliance is designed to sell some of the less-prized ad space that Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc. have had trouble filling on their own.

Even as they share some resources, the three companies vowed to retain their independence and compete against each other with separate sales teams. For that reason, they said they don't expect U.S. antitrust regulators to object to the nonexclusive partnership before they begin selling ads together in January.

Ross Levinsohn, a Yahoo executive vice president, hailed the alliance as a "fundamental rethinking" of the Internet ad market.

That statement also could be interpreted as a bit of wishful thinking. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all need to change the direction of an online ad market that has been increasingly tilting in the direction of Google and Facebook.

Having already built a moneymaking machine in its dominant search engine, Google has become even more powerful in Internet marketing since it bought DoubleClick's ad service for $3.2 billion in 2008. That deal provided Google with a springboard to leap from text ads that appear next to search results into the graphical messages known as display advertising.

Facebook attracts more advertising as it becomes established as the Internet's most popular hangout. The company accumulates valuable insights into people's interests as its 800 million users share their passions. That advantage has helped Facebook become the leader in U.S. display advertising with a 16 percent share of the online ad market, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc.

Yahoo, the former leader, has seen its share fall from 18 percent in 2008 to 13 percent this year. Google's share of the display market moved from 2 percent in 2008 to 9 percent. Microsoft stands at 5 percent and AOL is hovering around 4 percent, according to eMarketer.

As it has fallen further behind in Internet advertising, Microsoft's online division has piled up operating losses of $7 billion since June 2008. Revenue at both Yahoo and AOL is steadily falling. Yahoo has been struggling so much that its board is mulling whether to sell all or part of the company.

Microsoft may eventually benefit from Facebook's success. It bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million in 2007. By some estimates, Facebook is now worth three to five times more than it was when Microsoft made its investment.

By tapping into each other's technology, Yahoo, and AOL are betting they can save money and sell more advertising.

The partnership will cover a category of advertising that doesn't typically appear in the prime slots on websites. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL believe that space will be in higher demand if they can succeed at creating a more efficient, transparent market that helps connect advertisers with the Web audiences best suited for their marketing campaigns.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Plus 7.0 coming to T-Mobile

The 4G variant of Samsung's Galaxy Tab Plus 7.0 tablet will become available under T-Mobile's wing on November 16, the company has announced.

The 9.96 mm thin device has a 7-inch, 1024×600 pixel screen, a 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 16 or 32 GB of storage space and a 3-megapixel rear-facing as well as a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats.

It also supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 as well as HSPA+, which is the standard T-Mobile uses for fast data transfer - or 4G, as they call it.

The price is $250 after a $50 mail-in rebate, with a two-year contract, and twenty additional interest free monthly $10 payments on top of your data plan. It's just another way to make it look cheap without actually making it so, but then again, if you're strapped for cash, $250 sounds pretty good compared to the regular $399 price tag on Amazon.

Barnes & Noble unveils Nook Tablet, priced $249

Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet just ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season in a bid for more of the growing markets for e-books and tablet computers.

Both Barnes & Noble Inc. and Amazon are challenging Apple Inc. and its dominant and much more expensive iPad for a piece of the holiday pie. The Nook Tablet arrives just weeks after Amazon.com released its Kindle Fire tablet, which sells for $199. Barnes & Noble said its device offers more memory and longer battery life.

The book seller cut the prices on its existing e-readers. The Nook Color is now $199, down from $239, and the Nook Simple Touch black-and-white reader, which has no browser, is now $99, down from $139. The Nook Tablet will be in stores and shipped to customers on Nov. 17. Like the Nook Color, it has a 7-inch color touch-screen.

Unlike Amazon, Barnes & Noble doesn't offer streaming services, but the Nook includes preloaded apps from Hulu and Netflix Inc. that allow users to subscribe to stream movies and TV shows.

Since introducing its first Nook in 2009, Barnes & Noble has spent heavily on its e-book readers and e-bookstore. As people change the way they read, the New York-based company also faces tough competition from discounters and online retailers in the market for traditional books. Barnes & Noble has struggled to turn a profit, and its much smaller rival, Borders Group Inc., sought bankruptcy protection and then liquidated its assets this year.

The Nook Tablet weighs less than a pound, has a battery that enables nine hours of video watching and comes with 16 gigabytes of memory and an SD slot to add more.

Another selling point: free customer service at the more than 700 Barnes & Noble stores, CEO William Lynch said.

If you bought a Kindle and had a question about it, Lynch asked, "Where would you go, Amazon's headquarters in Seattle?"

Apple's iPad, now the king of tablets, starts at $499 for a bare-bones version and runs as much as $829.

Analysts at Gartner Inc. predict that three of every four tablets sold this year will be an iPad. Apple has sold nearly 29 million since they first came out in April 2010. Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com Inc. generally do not release sales figures.

The Nook Tablet will be sold online, in Barnes & Noble stores and by a variety of other retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Staples and Fry's.

Amazon Kindle vs Motorola Xoom vs Nook Tablet

It has been almost a year since Apple's iPad 2 was released, and so far no Android tablet has even come close to matching its sales records. The $399 Asus Transformer sold out briefly, due to material shortages, but the first "real" Honeycomb-powered Android tablet - the Xoom - sat on shelves for months before having its $799 price slashed dramatically. The Xoom was widely perceived as bulky and unreliable, and it had very few tablet apps compared to the iPad.

Perhaps the most successful of this year's non-iPad tablets was the Barnes and Noble Nook Color, a half-sized and half-priced gadget which was basically an e-reader with a web browser and apps. Now a new version of the Nook is on its way, and Amazon is creating its own Kindle Fire tablet with a similar price point and specs. Meanwhile, the Xoom is returning as well, in regular and "Media" editions.

The Kindle Fire:
This is the one gadget that abundant details are already available for. Amazon.com's Kindle Fire page shows that it will be a 7-inch tablet (half the size of the iPad), which will cost $199 when it comes out on Nov. 15. Power users and performance addicts probably won't be impressed by its bare-bones specs; it mostly serves as a way to buy books, games, and apps from Amazon's online store, plus movies and music besides.

Amazon Prime members will be able to stream "over 10,000" movies and television shows for free, on the Kindle Fire. However, its "accelerated" Silk web browser has raised some privacy concerns.

The Nook Tablet:
An early leak which may or may not be accurate, shows that the upcoming "Nook Tablet" will still cost $50 more than the Kindle Fire but will have twice the on-board storage and considerably better specs.

Its libraries of books and apps will probably be smaller than Amazon's, and it will likely lack any equivalent to Amazon's Cloud Drive or music and movie stores. The Nook Color tied in to in-store Barnes and Noble specials, though, such as Angry Birds downloadable content and free browsing. The Nook Tablet will probably have similar offers available.

The Xoom 2:
Details are still sketchy about Motorola's upcoming tablet, and it's not even clear if it will be available in the U.S. - all of the ads and promotions leaked so far are for the UK. Both the Xoom 2 and the Xoom 2 Media Edition apparently borrow their styling from the Droid RAZR , and will have prices roughly on par with the iPad 2's. The Media Edition will be smaller, at 8.2 inches, and both devices will run Android Honeycomb, although Ice Cream Sandwich will be available later on.

Canon offers Cinema EOS, new camera for Hollywood

Four decades after winning Academy Awards for its cinema lenses, Canon Inc. was back in Hollywood, unveiling a new high-end digital video camera before an audience of some of the world's most famous filmmakers.

Fujio Mitarai, chief executive of the Japanese camera and office equipment giant, took the wraps of the movie camera, called Cinema EOS, in a packed theater on the Paramount Pictures movie studio lot.

At $20,000 for the body alone, the Cinema EOS is not cheap by consumer standards but is on the low end of what professional digital film cameras cost, which can reach into the six figures. Two zoom lenses intended for movie making will go for $45,000 and $47,000.

Making such costly cameras for professional users is somewhat of a departure for Canon, which makes up more than a third of its revenue from consumer electronics, and more than half from office equipment like all-in-one printer-copier-fax machines.

Mitarai said Canon's move into expensive high-end products for professionals comes in response to the rising yen and the movement of manufacturing to cheaper-labor countries abroad.

"Anything without high added value is now being manufactured in southeast Asian countries and China. So we need to shift into an era where all our products have an added value," Mitarai said. "That is one major trend in meeting the difficulties posed by the strong yen."

The camera draws on the popularity of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a single-lens reflex still camera that the company introduced in 2008 and which became widely embraced by independent filmmakers because of its ability to take full high-definition video at the 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution known as 1080p.

It didn't take long for its popularity to reach Hollywood. The Mark II was used in the final episode of the last season of Fox's television show "House M.D.," as well as in the car racing scenes of "Iron Man 2" and certain scenes in "Captain America: The First Avenger," movies that Paramount distributed.

The Cinema EOS is similar in shape to a traditional still camera but works with a variety of mounts.

Mitarai said the camera's digital images had the warmth of film and brought out skin tones well. The company showed a number of short films that used the camera to show off how it functioned in action sequences, especially in tight areas that made use of its compact size.

The camera is compatible with an array of around 60 "EF," or electronic focus, lenses that work with Canon's still cameras. The company also introduced seven new lenses that are precise enough to work with super high-definition movie cameras made by other companies using a standard known as 4K.

"This is the camera that gave us the opportunity to work with you today," Mitarai told the crowd.

HTC to launch new tablet model next year

HTC Corp, the world's No.5 smartphone maker, said it will launch a new tablet model next year, its first since a debut model in February.

"It's a market we would like to try and test, to see whether we can make ourselves stand out and prevent a me-too product," said HTC CEO Peter Chou.

Last Monday, HTC warned its sales in the fourth quarter, traditionally a bumper sales season for smartphones, would drop below the previous quarter and analysts' forecasts as the Taiwanese firm struggles to compete against bigger rivals.

Nook Tablet to be unveiled Monday

When Amazon unveiled its first tablet, the Kindle Fire, in September, most tech experts and analysts predicted it would be the first real challenger to Apple's iPad.

Now, before the Kindle Fire has even debuted, Engadget is reporting that a familiar foe is also entering the tablet market - Barnes & Noble.

The company has invited journalists and analysts to a news conference in New York November 7, where everyone expects Barnes & Noble to unveil the Nook Tablet.

As of now, the Nook is an e-reader, but one with a lot of different versions. Some are black and white, some are color, some offer Internet access and others don't.

The tablet is expected to be a lot like the Nook Color Reader, though one would expect there to be some more features.

Like the Kindle Fire, this tablet seems to be reusing a popular brand name - Nook - and will have a seven-inch screen.

According to various tech blogs, it will be priced at $249 - $50 more than the Kindle Fire.

HTC Rezound Price, Release Date, Specs Compared

Taiwanese manufacturer HTC's answer to the iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus has finally been unveiled, in the form of the HTC Rezound. Powered by Google's open-source Android operating system, it sports top-tier specs and a distinctive textured case.

Price, release date, and carrier:
The HTC Rezound will be available from Verizon, starting on November 14. The $299 price tag (on a 2-year contract) will include a pair of Beats Audio earbuds, which are designed for deep bass and exceptional sound quality.

The Galaxy Nexus will release soon on Verizon, for the same price tag. Apple's iPhone 4S is already available on Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T for $199 on a 2-year contract.

Hardware and display:
The HTC Rezound has a thick chassis, with a bright red textured back. It has a full 720p HD display, comparable to the one on the Galaxy Nexus, but its screen is a bit smaller than the Nexus' at 4.3 inches across.

The iPhone 4S has a smaller, aluminum chassis, and its 3.5 inch Retina Display has a slightly lower resolution, but displays pixels so fine that they cannot be seen by the unaided eye.

Android operating system:
The HTC Rezound will be running last year's Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system on its November 14 launch. HTC has announced that the Rezound will be "Ice Cream Sandwich ready," but it will probably be upgraded to the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android operating system in early 2012. It uses the latest version of the HTC Sense customizations, which feature large full-screen widgets and sleek black styling.

As Google and Samsung's flagship phone, the Galaxy Nexus will ship with Ice Cream Sandwich already installed, and feature limited carrier and manufacturer customization. Upgrade dates for other Android smartphones vary, and many low- to medium-range smartphones will not receive an upgrade at all.

The iPhone 4S features Apple's proprietary iOS 5 operating system, and most existing iPhones of earlier models have already received a free upgrade to the latest version.

Under the hood:
The Rezound is equipped with a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GBs of internal storage plus a 16 GB microSD card, and an 8 megapixel camera with the ability to record 1080p HD video. This places it in the top tier of smartphones, along with the Galaxy Nexus, and may allow it to post benchmark scores similar to the iPhone 4S'.

As a 4G LTE device with a large screen, though, it will probably have several hours' less battery life than the iPhone 4S does.