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Continue reading Amazon net sales up, net income down for Q3 2011

Amazon net sales up, net income down for Q3 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever wanted to soar majestically through the clouds? Good news, freedom from your earthly ties is a 5.3-inch display and S Pen away. All that and more in the Galaxy Note ad after the break — though as we can attest, the whole creating beautiful landscapes thing isn’t quite as easy as Samsung’s simulated images make it out to be. No one ever said freedom was simple.

Continue reading New Samsung Galaxy Note ad: freedom’s just a stylus away (video)

New Samsung Galaxy Note ad: freedom’s just a stylus away (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They’re so cute when they’re young, and even make for trendy fashion accessories, but eventually that new pet is going to need training, cleaning, feeding, exercise and a long list of other responsibilities you never realized were part of the package. So here are seven tools that allow pet owners to avoid as much of that muss and fuss as possible. More »

Most of the interchangeable lens cameras we’ve seen to date seem to follow a standard mold: they have similarly sized bodies, comparable designs and either an APS-C or Micro Four Thirds sensor at the core. But recently, some manufacturers — namely, Nikon and Pentax — have begun shrinking camera bodies in an attempt to make them even more appealing to point-and-shoot users. The result: a smaller, lighter, more fashionable ILC — that also happens to have an itsy bitsy image sensor. Sensor size, not megapixel rating, translates directly to image quality, but also lens and body size, so you can either have an incredibly small body with an incredibly small sensor, or a larger body with a larger sensor. Are you willing to pay a premium for the “world’s smallest” interchangeable lens camera, even if it has the same size sensor used in many point-and-shoot cams available for a fraction of the cost? Pentax seems to think that you are — to the tune of $800.

The 12.4 megapixel Pentax Q is tiny — it’s so small, in fact, that you wouldn’t be alone in mistaking it for a toy. There is a fully functional camera inside that petite magnesium alloy housing, though it’s admittedly not as powerful as you’d expect an $800 camera to be. The pricey kit ships with an 8.5mm f/1.9 lens, and you can grow your collection from Pentax’s modest selection of Q-mount lenses, which also happen to have laughably small focal lengths (a 3.2mm fish eye, anyone?), due to the 1/2.3-inch backlit CMOS sensor’s massive 5.5x multiplication factor. So how does the Q fare when it comes to performance and image quality? Jump past the break to find out.

Continue reading Pentax Q interchangeable lens camera review

Pentax Q interchangeable lens camera review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire aims to upend the tablet industry with its low cost and smaller form factor. The Fire has been dubbed the one serious contender to the iPad, which should have a holiday season stranglehold on tablet sales to the tune of 73 percent of the worldwide market. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re seeing other manufacturers following Amazon’s lead into the 7-inch display space.

The ViewPad 7e is ViewSonic’s new budget tablet option, matching the Kindle Fire’s relatively low price of $200 dollars.

Specs-wise, the 7e isn’t terrible for a $200 mobile device, but it doesn’t compare favorably to the Fire, at least in terms of raw processing power. The 7e runs a 1GHz single-core chip based on ARM’s A8 architecture, whereas the Fire runs a dual-core 1GHz chip. Both tablets will include a modest 512MB of RAM.

There’s only 4GB of internal storage in the 7e — 4GB less than the Fire — but that storage can be augmented with a microSD card, expandable up to 32GB. The Fire, meanwhile, is not expandable. The 7e also sports both rear- and front-facing cameras, two items that Amazon’s hardware lacks.

But all this hardware talk is arguably inconsequential, as taking on Amazon in a specs war is a losing battle. Amazon’s hardware is backed by a vertically integrated app store, a movie and TV show rental service, and a free month of membership to Amazon’s premium shipping service, Amazon Prime. What’s more, the ViewPad 7e won’t even ship with the Android Market app because ViewSonic’s hardware doesn’t meet Google’s requirements. Instead, the 7e will rely on Amazon’s Appstore for content. Ironic.

We’ve seen tablets from ViewSonic before, and they haven’t been pretty. The ViewPad 10 — a dual-boot Android/Windows device intended to appeal to many, though loved by few — was a disaster in our testing, freezing up often when we attempted to boot into Android. What’s more, the 7e lacks Adobe Flash support — a feature typically seen as one of Android’s main draws over the iPad — and its battery life clocks in at a dismal three hours per charge.

So that’s what we know at this point, and there’s nowhere to go but up for the 7e. Expect to see ViewSonic’s tablet in stores come this November.