Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve heard a lot of rumors in the last year, but now Barnes & Noble has finally unveiled its first official  plans for taking its Nook tablets and e-readers to markets outside of the U.S. Today it announced that it will be launching the devices, starting first with the e-readers, in the UK in October, along with a new UK online storefront for the Nook digital bookstore (2.5 million digital titles) and “partnerships with leading retailers” to sell them.

The move comes as B&N’s arch rival Amazon gears up to launch the Kindle Fire in the UK — in a deal with leading book retailer Waterstones that includes other Kindle devices as well as e-books. Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook are built on forked versions of Google’s Android OS.

The news also comes at a time when people are scrutinizing how well the Nook line of devices is performing, questioning what sort of an impact Microsoft’s $300 million investment in B&N will have longer-term.

Prior to Amazon announcing a Waterstones agreement, many had thought that B&N would partner with the UK bookseller itself as a way of getting its Nook line of readers and tablets into the UK market. The CEO of Waterstones had publicly praised Waterstones, and reviled Amazon as a devil.

In the absence of a Waterstones deal, B&N now promises “partnerships with leading retailers,” although it has yet to specify any names. It also says that pricing for the Nook readers and tablets will be revealed closer to the date of commercial launch.

Amazon already offers its Kindle e-readers in a number of global markets, and in that sense this is about B&N catching up: “The first products to be available when the company begins offering its products in the UK in mid-October,” it notes, “include Barnes & Noble’s line of…E Ink Readers, NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight.”

The company does not specify when its tablets will be entering the mix.

B&N has for months now been building up its presence in the UK and the rest of Europe, so this may well be a first-move into the rest of the region. In March, the company incorporated in Germany and started to hire there. It has also been running events to cozy up to Android developers in the UK — although in the absence of local billing, and more concrete details on device launches here, that perhaps hasn’t been as buzzy as B&N would have hoped.

The company is due to report its quarterly earnings this week, and all eyes will be on how well its digital and device strategies are holding up, in the wake of people reading less paper books and general problems that have befallen other traditional booksellers like Borders.

Judging by how B&N has marketed the Nook in the U.S., its retail partnerships in the UK will be key to how well it does here. The company doesn’t have any physical stores of its own, and yet its sales strategy in the U.S. has been heavily based on promoting the devices in-store, creating reading areas and offering users free reading time while in the retail location. Whether it will take the same approach here has yet to be made clear. But again the fact that Waterstones, the biggest physical bookseller in the UK, is not going to be among those stocking it will inevitably be a setback in that sense.

The Nook tablet has less than 5% of the U.S. market for tablets at the moment, according to IDC. B&N says that it has sold “millions” of Nook devices to date.

Welcome to Engadget’s back to school guide! The end of summer vacation isn’t nearly as much fun as the weeks that come before, but a chance to update your tech tools likely helps to ease the pain. Today, we’re settling down in front of a few of our favorite HDTVs, but you can head to the back to school hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back — at the end of the series we’ll be giving away a ton of the gear featured in our guides — and hit up the hub page right here!

Students today can catch high-quality video on a variety of screens — computers, phones and tablets are probably always within reach — but nothing can truly replace a TV’s role as the center of entertainment. Whether it’s a quick Madden or Call of Duty session, inviting a friend over to catch a flick or just zoning out after class, having the proper setup makes all the difference, and there are plenty of options at every price point. Of course, walking into any big-box electronics store to peer down aisles of seemingly identical flat screens could drive anyone mad before they ever step on campus, so we’ve narrowed down the list for you, and even suggested a few other items to plug into those HDTVs. Expanding feature sets and universal pricing have raised average prices a bit over last year, but we can find something to fit whether your budget ranges from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars.

Continue reading Engadget’s back to school guide 2012: HDTV

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Engadget’s back to school guide 2012: HDTV originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Does this FCC filing reveal information about the next Amazon Kindle Fire? It’s hard to say for sure because, as exhaustive detective work by the Digital Reader reveals, it was filed by a front company for a front company that’s fronting for someone that’s maybe/probably Amazon. Oh the joys of poring over FCC documents! More »

We’ve heard word in the past that Amazon is working on a sequel to the Kindle Fire, with the company reportedly aiming at a larger form factor compared to the current 7-inch screen. The Digital Reader has done some detective work and come across what may be an FCC filing of Amazon’s next tablet, believing that the online internet retailer may have used a front company to file the documents in order to sneak the tablet under the radar.

The filings were issued by a company called Harpers LLC, with The Digital Reader tracing the company back to an address rented by CSC Entity Services. The listed name on the paperwork, Stephen Facciolo, is apparently the President of Harpers, who just so happens to also work for CSC. Meanwhile, his name appears on LinkedIn for CSC, with the website concluding that CSC is the first front company that Amazon employed to set up the second front company.

The Digital Reader stipulates that this isn’t the first time that Amazon has gone about its FCC filings in such a roundabout way. Amazon reportedly used three front companies for its Kindle Fire submission to the FCC the day before the official announcement back in September 2011. While The Digital Reader may have cracked the code, the actual FCC filing leaves much to the imagination, with little to no details surrounding Amazon’s next Kindle Fire iteration.

Having said that, the aspect ratio of the device indicates that Amazon is moving to a 4:3 form factor instead of 16:9 ratio that many Android OEMs use. Why the company has chosen to do so remains to be seen, but given that the one-year anniversary of the Kindle Fire is rapidly approaching, we may soon find out exactly what Amazon has up its sleeve.

[Thanks, Nate.]

Amazon’s next Kindle Fire may have just hit the FCC is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

An earlier portrait of the second quarter’s tablet market share made it quite clear that the iPad was on a rebound, if it was ever in a slump to start with. All those numbers focused on platforms and not brands, however — we didn’t know how the individual makers were doing. If IHS iSuppli’s figures are on the ball, there’s even more of a discrepancy if you break down the period’s results by manufacturer. The iPad staked out 69.6 percent of tablet shipments in the spring. That wasn’t just an 11-point jump over a year earlier; it was a level of share Apple hasn’t had since the Motorola Xoom was just cutting its teeth early in 2011.

As for the rest? Transformer Pads kept ASUS growing, but it’s not a pretty sight if you’re making an Android reader tablet; both Amazon and Barnes & Noble shed roughly a point and a half each, which is no small amount relative to their size. Samsung also lost share by this after its deliveries of Galaxy Tabs mostly stayed flat. We’d add that there’s some wiggle room as to real performance knowing that units shipped and sold aren’t always one and the same. Most of these companies are leaving clues regarding upcoming tablet refreshes that might level the playing field, some not so subtle, but it’s currently Apple’s game to win.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

IHS iSuppli: Apple iPad takes 69.6 percent of tablet brand market share in Q2, reader tablets take a bruising originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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