Hasta La Gadget!

We have all ideas that the 70b will look mighty weak after next year’s spate of slates, tablets and readers hit the public view at CES, but with a price tag as diminutive as €99.99 ($130), who cares about bells and / or whistles? Spotted first in the FCC’s lairs a few weeks ago, the Archos 70b e-reader is now up for pre-order in Europe, boasting a 7-inch WVGA touchpanel, 4GB of storage, 802.11b/g WiFi and an SD expansion slot. We’re told that the battery will keep things humming for around ten hours (or up to 18 if using it strictly as a music player with the screen flipped off), and if we had to guess, we’d say it’ll probably make the trip through the Panama Canal in Q1 2011. Question is: will you care?

Archos’ Android-based 70b e-reader up for pre-order in Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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E-readers are flooding the market these days, and KDDI has delivered its most recent offering just in time for the holiday season. Since the biblio Leaf SP02‘s specs were first released, battery life seems to have grown to 13,000 pages, with presumably a few extra thrown in courtesy of its solar array. The device utilizes KDDI’s LISMO Book Store and its 20,000 titles to obtain content, and if that isn’t enough reading material for you, the company claims that five times as many titles will be available by 2012. All this can be had on Christmas day for ¥525 up front and ¥1,575 (that’s about $19 US) per month on a two-year 3G contract — if you’re lucky enough to hail from the land of the rising sun, that is.

KDDI’s biblio Leaf SP02 priced, due out Christmas Day in Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Getting sick of cheap Android tablets and e-readers? Boy, we hope not, because E FUN’s Next3 is just one of many being announced in time for CES 2011. As you may have gleaned from the headline, the Nextbook Next3 runs Android 2.1 and has the usual array of specs for its $230 price — a resistive, 800 x 600-resolution 8.4-inch display, a 600MHz Rockchip processor, WiFi 802.11 b/g, 2GB of onboard storage, and an SD card slot. From the looks of the pictures in the gallery and the short press release after the break, it seems to be positioned as more of an e-reader than a tablet — you know, with its integrated Borders eBook Store and all — but you should be able to surf the web and watch some videos on it. No word on what apps are preloaded, but naturally there’s no Market access. We’re going to call a spade a spade here and say this thing looks a heck of a lot like the Pandigital Novel and Velocity Micro Cruz Reader, but we’ll be checking it out in Vegas in a few weeks to get a confirmation on that. Don’t let that stop you from ordering one today, though — it’s only $200 at HSN right now.

Continue reading E FUN Next3 Android 2.1 tablet available for $230, real fun sold separately

E FUN Next3 Android 2.1 tablet available for $230, real fun sold separately originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You had to know the hacking community was going to have a field day with the Nook Color — a $249 Android Tablet hiding behind with a thin e-reader coating. Indeed it didn’t take long to get rooted nor for Android 2.2 to get installed on there, but that particular hack comes with an interesting potential side-effect: small-scale thermonuclear explosions. Enabling FroYo requires disabling the device’s battery monitoring process, the very one that would be responsible for shutting down the device before the cells start overheating and, ultimately, going critical. Yeah it’s unlikely, but it could happen. Meanwhile, another hack has enabled the Android Market, but those instructions begin with a very daunting warning: “Very smart people have failed at this. If the following instructions confuse you, you might want to wait until an easier method has been developed.”

And, thankfully, there might be a much easier way coming, with Barnes & Noble reportedly telling Smartphone Mag that Android 2.2 will be officially coming to the Nook Color in January. Yes, Android 2.3 is what’s happening, but this is still an exciting upgrade as it will finally also allow access to a traditional Android home screen and even enable the Android Market.

Update: Okay, cancel that order for an asbestos carrying case. One of the developers of the Nook Color root wrote in to let us know that there is a secondary temperature monitor which should keep things below the ignition point. Hack away — or just wait a month.

Update 2: Barnes & Noble PR just got back to us to reiterate that Nook Color’s own shop will begin adding apps in early 2011 and that there are currently no plans to enable Android Market. Move along, nothing to see here, folks.

[Thanks, Ryan]

Nook Color getting Android 2.2 and Market in January, current hacks could make it blow up? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has left us with no choice: making sales conclusions based on a single additional letter. The company, notoriously vague on Kindle sales, has announced that “in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles.” In other words, at least two million, and more for Kindle overall if you consider DX (still on sale) and the recent lightning deal blowout of the Kindle 2. Amazon’s Department of Creative Statistics also noted that this elusive sales figure is greater than all its Kindle sales in 2009. How many is that, you ask? No idea — we know “millions” were sold between 2007 and 2009, but parsing it out further would only unravel a mystery Encyclopedia Brown has been spending pages and pages to solve — and still has a ways to go.

New Kindle sells ‘millions,’ bests all 2009 Kindle sales originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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