Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft has reportedly canceled plans for its Courier tablet, Gizmodo reports.

Microsoft told employees working on the tablet that the project is dead, Gizmodo said. The Courier was never officially announced – Gizmodo first broke the news about the possible device in September.

The Courier was supposed to have two 7-inch touchscreens connected by a hinge for a book-like design. Steve Ballmer showed off the yet-to-be-released HP Slate during his CES keynote this year, but the company has not commented on any additional tablet plans.

Amazon and Target on Thursday confirmed that the online retailer’s Kindle e-book reader will be sold at select Target stores starting April 25.

The Kindle, which sells for $259, will be available at the flagship downtown Minneapolis Target store and 102 south Florida locations, with more stores added throughout the year. Since its November 2007 debut, the Kindle has only been sold on Amazon.com, so the Target deal is the first time it will be available at a brick-and-mortar store.

“We strive to enhance our product offerings to include surprising products and services at great values so we’re proud to be the first brick-and-mortar retailer to sell Kindle, allowing our guests to feel how lightweight and easy on the eyes Kindle is,” Mark Schindele, senior vice president at Target, said in a statement.

Amazon also confirmed the deal on its first quarter earnings call this afternoon.

“It’s starting with a small number of stores but we’re very pleased to be working with Target, and we’re very pleased to have even more customers see Kindle and have the opportunity to purchase Kindle,” said Amazon’s chief financial officer, Tom Szkutak. “So that’s why we’re doing it and we’re very excited to do it.”

The designers of the gaming behemoth, the Maingear Shift, are back with a slimmer model in mind–the Maingear EX-L 15 laptop.

Like its desktop predecessors, the design seems simple, but elegant with a matte black finish. The EX-L 15 (1.5 by 14.75 by 10 inches, HWD) has a 15.6-inch HD screen with a standard 1,600-by-900 resolution. Consumers will have the option to upgrade to 1920 by 1080 resolution for $95 more if they so desire.

The EX-L 15’s chassis features an HDMI out, eSATA prot, Firewire, Express Card slot, 4 USB 2.0 ports, and a headphone and microphone jack.

The system comes standard with and ATI Mobility Radeon 5870 1GB of GDDR5 graphics card, 250GB of storage space, 4GB DDR3 memory, and the latest Intel Core i5 and i7 dual-core, and Core i7 quad-core processors. You will have the option to upgrade to higher calibers of processing power, memory, and hard drive space (or a SSD) for a higher price point.

The EX-L 15 developers have also saved you the trouble of having to remove unwanted programs after brushing off the packing-peanuts, as there is no bloatware installed on the system when you order it. But if you are itching to have some preinstalled programs such as Adobe Reader, Hulu Desktop, or other favorite 3rd party software’s, Maingear will install them for free.

The base price for this pint-sized powerhouse is $1,599. The Maingear EX-L 15 is on sale now and has an estimated shipping date of May 4th.

Where do most Apple fan boys and girls reside? Not surprisingly, California’s San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose market has the most users of Apple products in the country, according to Friday data from Experian Simmons. In that region, which houses Silicon Valley and Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, 32.3 percent of adult residents own or use at least one of the three core Apple products: the iPod, iPhone, or Mac computer.

Coming in at number two is Boston, where 31.3 percent own Apple products, followed by San Diego, Calif., with 31.8 percent.

Nationwide, about 21.6 percent of adults have an iPod, iPhone, or Mac. Rounding out the top five on Experian’s list are New York with 30.4 percent and Washington, D.C., followed by Chicago, Denver, Monterey-Salinas in California, Santa Barbara-Santa Marina-San Luis Obispo in California, and Las Vegas.

Well, that didn’t take long. The hoopla surrounding the Apple iPad has died down somewhat, so naturally, the question becomes, who’s next? If the New York Times is to be believed, Google is next in line for tablet glory.

The paper reported Sunday that Google will soon start selling “its version of a slate computer.” The device would be “an e-reader that would function like a computer,” the Times said.

Apparently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was talking about the company’s tablet at a recent party. It would be Android-based, but few other details have emerged. Google is reportedly operating in “stealth mode” with only a few publishers, the Times said.

The paper also said that Nokia is working on a slate/e-reader of its own, as are Microsoft and HP.