Hasta La Gadget!

Well, this had to happen eventually: someone from an Apple tablet partner—McGraw-Hill’s Harold McGraw III—has confirmed the tablet’s coming tomorrow, that it’ll run an iPhone-style OS, that it’s “terrific”, and that he’ll probably never work with Apple again.

MacRumors caught the slip during a CNBC segment, in which the anchor lobs a softball closer question about the—excuse me, a—tablet, from Apple, maybe. Instead of deflecting, Mr. McGraw just started talking about it as if it’d already been announced:

Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.

Holy hell, guy. So, now we know a few things about the tablet! It’s real, it’s going to have a wide media strategy that at the very least includes textbooks, and it may be exactly what we predicted it will be, and apparently it doesn’t suck, according to this man in a suit who is heavily invested in its success, or at least was, until he barfed up his NDA all over CNBC’s anchor table. We reached out to the company regarding the slip, they’re not calling back.

Don’t worry, McGraw-Hill guy, you’ll still get a Christmas card from Steve this year. Just make sure to have it checked for anthrax. [MacRumors]

Developer BioWare seems to have cornered the market on this new breed of RPG, following up Dragon Age: Origins with Mass Effect 2–which has quickly become the first critical darling of 2010.

Hey, if you’re a New Jersey AT&T subscriber and you paid a flat-rate ETF between January 1, 1998 and November 4, 2009, you’ve got a tiny bit of $18 million coming your way. That’s the settlement amount AT&T’s agreed to in this latest ETF class action — as usual in these cases, it’s far cheaper for AT&T to just throw out some cash than it is to fully litigate this thing, especially with the FCC breathing down its neck. Expect individual settlements to be relatively minor, while all the lawyers receive platinum underpants trimmed with only the finest jewels.

Update: It’s for all AT&T subs, not just the kids from the Shore.

Update 2: AT&T just sent us a statement about the settlement — the carrier wants to highlight that it’s the old ETFs that are involved here, and not the new pro-rated ones that we hate just as much. Check it:

We strongly deny any wrongdoing, and no court has found AT&T Mobility committed any wrongdoing regarding these fees. However, we have agreed to settle to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation.

It’s important to note that the litigation involves old early termination fee policies of the old AT&T Wireless and Cingular. In 2008 we introduced a new, more flexible early termination fee policy, in which we pro-rate the ETF if you are a new or renewing wireless customer who enters a one- or two-year service agreement.

Cool — now let’s talk about how customers who pay full price for handsets should pay a lower monthly fee that doesn’t include an equipment subsidy. That’s a policy we could totally get behind.

[Thanks, David]

Continue reading AT&T settles ETF case for $18m

AT&T settles ETF case for $18m originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mustek MER-6T is another Twilight-loving touchscreen e-reader originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Users of Panasonic plasmas are reporting lighter black levels after extended periods of use.