Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola Xoom is not the iPad, or even the Samsung Galaxy tablet–and the sales show it. Sales have fallen short of expectations, and now some people are expecting a production cut.

 Here’s what analyst Peter Misek had to say about the Xoom sales,

Xoom sales have been underwhelming. While marketing has just started we believe MMI will likely have to cut production if it already has not done so. We believe the device has been a bit buggy and did not meet the magic price point of $500. We believe management knows this and is hurrying development and production of lower cost tablets. Importantly we believe management will likely have to make the painful decision to accept little to no margin initially in order to match iPad 2’s wholesale pricing.

Motorola has not released figures yet, however, IDC didn’t even list the device in its break down of tablet market share. Motorola has plans to lower the $800.00 price soon, which might help a bit.

Via ZDNet

Nintendo has pulled a Ubisoft Wii game called We Dare from the UK market, due to risqué commercials within the title. 

The commercials hit the Internet a few days ago, showing spanking, and other acts deemed more mature than the game’s PEGI 12 rated audience. Once the videos circled to UK, the local Government demanded it be pulled due to the inconsistent rating given by PEGI.

The commercials have since been banned in the US, but are still on Ubisoft YouTube channel being listed as private. No word on if other European countries will allow We Dare to be released.

Via Ars Techica

If you’re Motorola, today might not be the day to try to get the world to pay attention to your new tablet. After all, everyone is a bit fixated with that other device at the moment. The one that’s launching today. You know, the one with the 90 percent tablet market share.

Contrary to reports floating about the web, the Motorola Xoom isn’t getting Adobe Flash Player 10.2 today — rather, the tablet is getting updated to support Flash, which will actually arrive in one week. Adobe now says that Flash Player 10.2 will be ready to download from the Android Market on March 18th, supporting only Honeycomb tablets (in other words, just the Xoom) to start, and will eventually be available for Android 2.2 smartphones — again, contrary to what we’d been told, but we can’t really complain on that count supporting Android 2.2 (Froyo), Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and a beta version for Android 3.0.1 (Honeycomb) at release. Froyo devices won’t get the full battery-friendly Stage Video rendering pipeline and deep browser integration like their Honeycomb tablet brethren, but dual-core phones will reportedly see a performance improvement nonetheless, and there’s a new tweak that’ll let Flash web apps pull up a virtual keyboard if needed for full functionality. PR after the break.

Update: Adobe contacted us to clarify that Flash 10.2 is, in fact, headed to all three of the most recent versions of Android on March 18th — the Honeycomb tablet version will simply sport a beta label, and the smartphone builds will lack full functionality as described above.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, supports Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo (update)

Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, supports Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Instapaper 3 makes a good app better

Instapaper, one of the best apps on any mobile device, has just been updated to v3.0 in time for you to enjoy on your new iPad 2. There are some big new features, but if you want to go right along and continue reading articles you saved earlier, then you can carry on as if nothing had changed.

And if you never used Instapaper, here’s a refresher: You click a bookmarklet whenever you see a web article you’d like to read later. Fire up Instapaper — later — and you’ll find all the articles saved and beautifully formatted for easy reading.

The biggest new feature is social integration (no, don’t groan — developer Marco Arment has got this just right). The button to “star” favorite articles has been replaced by a “Like” button, and your friends can browse and read these articles.

Friends come from the usual places — Facebook, Twitter, your contacts list, Tumblr (Arment was a founder and the developer of Tumblr), and also Pinboard and Evernote. Once you have added friends you can click to browse a list of their liked articles. It actually works really well, and is a lot better than the previous system, where you had to subscribe to another Instapaper user’s email address. In fact, so hidden was this feature that you likely didn’t even know it existed.

Next up are editor’s picks. This section gathers various long-form journalism aggregators: Give Me Something to Read, Longreads, The Browser and Longform.org. Tap one of these and you are taken to the relevant website (using the new, redesigned built-in browser) from where you can pick what you want to read, whether now or later.

There are lots of other less noticeable updates, too. Better image quality for stored pictures, full search of downloaded articles (great for research) and what Marco calls a “smart rotation lock,” which pops up a button to switch on rotation-lock if it thinks you have tipped your iDevice too far by accident. This is fantastic for people who prefer to use the iPad’s toggl-switch for muting, not rotation lock, and is one of those tiny, smart touches with which Marco peppers his software.

It’s a solid upgrade, and free. And if you don’t use Instapaper already, shame on you — it only costs $5.

Instapaper 3.0 is here! [Instapaper Blog]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• Preview: Instapaper Pro for iPad
• New Version of Instapaper Knows When It's Nighttime
• Instapaper Update Adds Pagination, Dictionary and Browser