Tech wrap: HP’s TouchPad sell-off
Hewlett-Packard has finally discovered the magic price point for its TouchPad tablet: $99. The tech giant announced the new low price for the 16 GB model of the recently discontinued device over the weekend, also dropping the price for its 32 GB version to $149. Retailers such as Best Buy, Staples and Walmart followed HP’s lead by offering TouchPad fire sales of their own.
The response: overwhelming. According to PC World, many retailers had sold out of the devices by mid-day on Saturday. By Monday morning, the TouchPad had climbed to the No.1 spot on the Amazon best-seller list for electronics. Expect the selling frenzy to continue this week: HP said on Monday it intends to deliver more of the tablets until the supply runs out. HP originally launched the smaller model with a $500 price tag, but reduced it to $400 soon after its July 1 release in an attempt to spur demand.
Separately, HP launched a new desktop on Monday, days after the technology company revealed that it might spin off the world’s largest PC business — part of a wrenching series of moves away from the consumer market, including killing the TouchPad. HP billed the new computer — the HP Compaq 8200 Elite All-in-One Business Desktop — as the “first all-in-one PC” aimed at corporate and public sector customers.
Is the patent arms race over in the mobile phone sector now that Google has announced it’s buying Motorola Mobility Holdings? Reuters correspondents Poornima Gupta and Bill Rigby take a closer look in a new analysis: “The bubble in mobile phone technology patent values may just have popped. Now that Google has agreed to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings — scooping up a trove of 17,000 phone-related patents to give itself some ground to defend its Android operating system — the most motivated buyer looks to be off the market.”
Skype is beefing up its mobile communications services. The Internet calling company said on Sunday it was buying GroupMe, a New York-based startup that lets people communicate in private groups over cellphones. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sony: Our tablets are coming… eventually
Sony teased out a few more details about its new Android tablets — codenamed S1 and S2 — and let reporters briefly handle prototypes.
AT&T will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the S2, a double-screened device that bears a close resemblance to Nintendo’s DS handheld gaming device. Sony showed off how users could turn it into a book.
Executives stressed that the tablets can connect to other Sony products, such as Blu-Ray players, TVs and PlayStation content, something Apple can’t offer. Like the Sony Ericsson Experia Play AKA, “the PlayStation phone,” the Adobe-Flash enabled tablets will come pre-loaded with the retro game“Crash Bandicoot”.
Sony once again vowed to take the No. 2 tablet spot behind Apple despite still not revealing when its new tablets would come out or how much they would cost. That news could be more than a month away but the tablets should be released this year, the company said.
Why would a customer choose a Sony tablet over an iPad? Phil Molyneux, Sony Electronics president and COO, said customers looking for a faster, smaller device that can fit in your pocket will turn to Sony’s dual-screen S2 tablet.
“You can’t do that with other devices unless you have bigger pockets,” he said.
Tech wrap: Sony admits PlayStation Network privacy breach
An unauthorized person stole names, addresses and other personal data belonging to about 77 million people who have accounts on Sony’s PlayStation Network, Sony said. The person gained access to people’s names, addresses, email address, birthdates, usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and more, Sony said on its U.S. PlayStation blog.
Amazon.com’s quarterly sales beat expectations but earnings fell steeply as it spent heavily on everything from online multimedia services to its Kindle e-reader. Net income for the world’s largest online retailer was $201 million, down 32.8 percent from $299 million, a year earlier. Revenue was $9.86 billion. “This is another investment year…It’s probably not going to be until Q4 that we see some leverage from that,” Lazard Capital Markets’ Colin Sebastian said.
Facebook began offering users in five U.S. cities Deals coupons, offering discounted prices or access to limited-availability goods. Facebook became the latest Internet heavyweight to jump into the daily deals market pioneered by Groupon. Last week, Google began marketing a new daily deals service called Offers to users in Portland, with plans to expand to San Francisco and New York, and Amazon.com invested $175 million in LivingSocial in December. Facebook will take a cut of each transaction, though declined to say how much.
Google’s Android beat out Apple’s iOS in a Nielsen survey of smartphone operating system market share. In March, 50 percent of smartphone owners who bought one in the past six months said they had chosen an Android device; 25 percent said they bought an iPhone; and 15 percent said they had picked a Blackberry phone. Of current smartphone owners, 37 percent owned an iPhone; 27 percent owned an iPhone; and 22 percent owned a BlackBerry. The numbers mean Apple’s market share is “dead in the water“, writes Business Insider’s Henry Blodget.
Sony launched its first tablet computers in an ambitious attempt to grab the No.2 spot from Samsung in a fast-growing market dominated by Apple’s iPad. Sony is banking on the unusual, off-center design of its “S1″ tablet and access to first generation PlayStation games and other networked content to differentiate its products from the flood of tablets in the market. Sony gave no clues on how much it will charge for its glossy black slate or clamshell tablet.
Zynga poached COO of Electronic Arts John Schappert, sources familiar with the matter said. The social games company, which has enjoyed explosive growth with games such as FarmVille and CityVille, is gaining an executive with deep experience in leading a publicly traded video game company, which could help it gear up for an initial public offering, analysts said.
Tech wrap: Amazon offers Android apps, gets sued by Apple
Amazon.com opened its store for Google Android smartphone applications, ratcheting up its fight with Apple after the iPhone maker sued Amazon in a bid to stop the online retailer from improperly using its App Store trademark.
A New York court rejected a class action settlement hammered out between Google and publishers that would allow the Web search leader to scan millions of books and sell them online.
U.S. wireless operators will have to pay higher subsidies for cellphones as they come with more features, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse said during a chief executive panel at the annual CTIA wireless industry conference.
AT&T/T-Mobile USA’s ability to reach 95 percent of the population will mean a better wireless service for consumers, Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes. Fewer phones, higher prices, and the year or two that it will take for customers to notice any appreciable improvement in network quality are reasons why the deal won’t benefit anyone but AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan opined.
RIM’s long-awaited tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, will go on sale through retailers and wireless carriers in the U.S. and Canada on April 19 at a base price of $499, matching the pricing for Apple’s iPad 2. But with no word on distribution plans outside North America, RIM will still be chasing Apple, one analyst said. Samsung said its base Galaxy 10.1 tablet will cost $499.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ordered by a federal judge to answer questions from plaintiffs’ lawyers in a class-action lawsuit that claims Apple created a music-downloading monopoly with its iPod player and iTunes store.
Social network for professionals LinkedIn boasted 100 million users. But while many may have signed up to create an online resume, only a fraction continues to use the service even on an occasional basis, writes VentureBeat’s Sid Yadav.
Tech wrap: Apple’s iPad 2 launches
Hundreds of people across the U.S. lined up to get their hands on Apple’s iPad 2, the update to last year’s wildly popular tablet computer. If you’re wondering how much the iPad 2 could cost you, Michael Hickins of The Walls Street Journal adds up the tab and discovers you could easily spend $300 on top of the $499 price tag for the cheapest model. Tablet sales are expected to surge to more than 50 million units this year, with Apple capturing more than 70 percent of the market.
If you do buy an iPad and you happen to be a politician, you might not want to use how much you paid for it as an example of why inflation isn’t a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood.
Neil Young, the CEO of mobile-gaming success story Ngmoco, tells VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi about his quest to create a multibillion-dollar mobile entertainment company. And how he’s relying on two technologies, Mobage and NG Core, combined into a worldwide mobile social network, to make it happen.
And if your only alarm clock is your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’re “springing forward” for Daylight Savings time this weekend and you want to wake up on time on Monday, you might want to consider a backup, writes Business Insider’s Steve Kovach.
Closer look at Google’s Honeycomb
Google stole the show from Verizon at the opening keynote at CES, showing off its new Honeycomb software, the first version of the Android operating system specifically designed for tablets.
Android developer Mike Cleron wowed a packed hall with a quick spin around its features, including a new-look home screen, pixel buttons, multitasking, smooth video and an eye-catching 3-D mapping tool that lets you ’tilt’ the view to get a better idea of what you are looking at.
Google has posted a video of the new system in action on YouTube.
Tablets could offer Research-in-Motion a second act
Could tablets offer Research-in-Motion a second act? The company, whose Blackberry phones were the hottest mobile devices of the decade until the iPhone and Android phones showed up, badly needs something to revive its growth.
Just last week, ComScore said that the Blackberry’s share of the U.S. smartphone market fell to 35.8% from 39.3% while the iPhone inched up a percentage point to 24.6% and Android grew by six and a half percentage points to 23.5%. Another survey by Nielsen showed that people planning to upgrade from feature phones to smartphones prefer Android and iPhones. Only 11% of those surveyed are most interested in buying a Blackberry.
Analysts are starting to worry that the trend will be repeated in overseas markets. On Wednesday, Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros. said he expects RIM’s stock price to erode because Android’s market share is growing as prices of Android phones come down. RIM’s stock is down 3% since Monday as investors mulled such concerns.
On Thursday, the blog Boy Genius Report showed a nine-minute video demoing the Blackberry Playbook, a new tablet from RIM. It’s still a work in progress, and the demo didn’t show how the device connects to the Internet, but it offered enough of a glimpse to suggest that the Playbook could be a strong contender in the growing market for tablets.
The Blackberry Playbook is powered by an operating system that uses technology from QNX, an Ottowa-based software company that RIM bought in April. The navigation is smooth, intuitive and in some ways superior to the iPad – allowing the user to scroll down to see all apps, or to flip sideways to see apps organized by category.
The Playbook’s multitask function makes it easier to jump between apps than the iPad does. Videos can continue to play in the background as they would on a laptop browser when another app, say email, is opened. Swiping along different borders of the tablet’s screen adds new navigation features, making it easier to call up a keyboard or minimize screens.
14.2 million units is impressive, 5.1M _new_ accounts is even more impressive, with all the talk about how android will kill’em all
took a look at the Q results and the R&D expenditure was about 40% higher than a year ago; some shorters try to make people think that RIM has somehow suddenly stopped innovating 
as if hTC or Samsung or Apple _can_ and RIM (being, ya know, canadian and a dinosaur for that) can not
just curious what products they’ll introduce next !
FT hearts tablets so much, it’s spreading the joy among staff
It’s not hard to see why newspaper companies, saddled with plunging circulation and big iron presses , are so ecstatic over tablet devices. They bring a form of hope that hasn’t crossed this industry’s path since newspapers dominated classified advertising in the 1980s and 1990s making them fat with revenue and profits. Tablet computers, like Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, just might spark renewed interest in wilted newspapers among consumers and help ease the legacy costs of paper and ink.
Consider News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch who has often expressed his love for the iPad and is busy building a team to produce a tablet-only newspaper The Daily.
The Financial Times is just as enamored and is spreading the joy offering its employees a nice chunk of change to go toward the purchase of an iPad or other tablet.
Reuters European Technology, Media and Telecoms Correspondent Georgina Prodham reports FT staff can claim 300 pounds, 350 euros or $480 towards the cost of a tablet for their personal use — about two-thirds of the cost of the most basic iPad in Britain or Germany before tax, and almost covering the whole cost in the United States.
“The FT is making this investment because digital channels and tablet devices are becoming increasingly important for us and the media industry in general, and as a recognition of your contribution to our strong performance this year,” FT Chief Executive John Ridding wrote in an email to staff.
The FT Group, owned by British media and education group Pearson, increased its sales by 11 percent in the first 9 months of this year, boosted by revenues from the FT.com, whose subscriptions rose by 50 percent to more than 180,000.
The FT’s iPad app has been downloaded more than 400,000 times since its launch in May, and has driven about 10 percent of digital subscriptions. FT.com subscriptions cost between 198 and 285 pounds ($317 to $456) per year and are the envy of newspapers eveywhere as they scramble to come up with an online paywall strategy.
I just overclocked my Touchpad to 1.5Ghz and I installed the Hulu fix so I can watch Hulu on my Touchpad! Here is the step by step instructions:
http://www.fatdeals.net/forumdisplay.php ?f=10
Very easy to follow instructions!