Hasta La Gadget!

B&N has dropped the price of the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight to $119 to match the Kindle Paperwhite (with “special offers”). No sales figures have come out of either camp, but it makes sense for B&N to head Amazon off at the pass, especially since the Paperwhite is shipping on October 1 and could put a dent in Nook sales.

The new Paperwhite has a glowing, frontlit screen that turns the traditional grey drab of an e-ink device into a bright white page. The Nook with GlowLight looks nearly as good and is also a solid device. At this point it basically comes down to which company you’ve already trusted with your e-library.

The e-reader wars are now about platform popularity. It’s the company that can grab the most readers in the shortest amount of time that wins and this price drop is evidence of the high stakes both companies are facing.

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Everybody knows about absolute zero, but what about the other end of the spectrum, absolute infinity, as it begs to be called? As you might be able to guess, there’s a lot more room to go hotter than there is to go colder, but there still has to be some sort of limit, right? More »

It’s pretty common for big groups to go out and eat together, and then split the tab afterwards. But the process of splitting up the bill can be pretty tedious, since someone usually has to break out the calculator (or calculator app) and add up the amount that each person has to pay.

But not with the Go Dutch Bill.

It’s a billing system that automatically churns out split-able (is there even such a word?) receipts so each member of the group can just grab the tab with their order and pay for it accordingly. It’s an extremely fun and novel concept, even though we’ll probably never see it come to light because it might be pretty complex to apply in practice.

But I’d love to be wrong on that one because this concept is totally awesome.

Go Dutch Bill was designed by Szu-Yu Liu and is up for the 2012 iF concept design award.

[via Yanko Design]

Amazon’s shiny new Kindle Paperwhite will start trickling out of the company’s myriad warehouses in short order, but it seems e-reading rival Barnes & Noble won’t let Amazon set foot in the illuminated e-reader market unanswered.

To that end, B&N has announced that it has cut the price of its conceptually similar Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight from $139 to $119 — the same price as Amazon’s ad-supported Paperwhite model.

It’s easy to look at the move as a knee-jerk reaction to Amazon’s impending Paperwhite Kindle launch, but Barnes & Noble claims it’s anything but. Apparently, the price cut has been in the works for “months” now as part of the company’s planning, though I’ve got to wonder if Amazon’s announcement earlier this month may have helped force B&N’s hand a bit. After all, it has gotten to be pretty good at using price cuts to try and disrupt some of Amazon’s thunder — as Kindle Fire HD rumors picked up steam last August, B&N cut the prices of its Nook Tablet line. Of course, Barnes now has some neat new tablets to push, as we head into the holidays, but the move at least keeps those older tablets in competition with Amazon’s earlier Fire.

B&N may have just made the cut official, but a few retailers were perhaps a bit too quick to pull the trigger. Target and Walmart (two companies that have coincidentally dropped Amazon’s e-readers from their inventory) both acknowledged the Glowlight-enabled Nook’s updated price yesterday. Now the B&N site reflects that pricing change as well, and just in time — the country’s annual bout of holiday shopping hysteria is just around the corner, and this move toward pricing parity should force consumers to weigh their e-reading options based on each device’s merits rather than which would hurt their wallets the least.

PSP Comic Store, we hardly knew ye. No really, we hardly knew ye — which is probably why Sony is warning PSP owners that its comic book portal is shutting down after October 30th. Come Hallowe’en, we’ll lose the option to download the necessary app or buy additional titles. Any currently owned comics will be available to download again until mid-January, but readers will be on their own to preserve existing libraries after that. Outside of Japan, that creates significant problems for literary PlayStation fans: while PS Vita owners in Sony’s home country will get a Manga store and reader in October, there’s no equivalent crutch for other countries (or any PSP owners) at this stage. The console maker is non-committal and says there’s nothing it can discuss “at the moment,” which to us is a hint that we shouldn’t plan our reading hours around a PSP or PS Vita in the near future.

[Thanks, Sooraj]

Filed under: Gaming

Sony shuts down PSP Comic Store after October 30th, leaves most of us in the lurch for now originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Sep 2012 08:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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