Hasta La Gadget!

RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie finally gave us a crucial bit of information about the BlackBerry Playbook this morning: price, or at least a threshold. According to a Korean interview, Balsillie said that RIM’s 7-inch tablet will be “very competitively priced” with Bloomberg quoting the man saying that it will be “under” $500 when it hits North America in the first quarter of 2011, expanding globally in Q2. A price that should at least match the 9.7-inch WiFi-only iPad (16GB) and undercut the 7-inch 3G Galaxy Tab which goes on sale on Verizon tomorrow for $599.99. Thing is, by the time Q1 rolls around we’re going to be looking at many, many more viable tablet alternatives including a likely Apple refresh.

BlackBerry PlayBook to cost ‘under’ $500 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 01:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After almost a year of hype, Kno has announced that its oversized reader/tablet will be available just before the holidays.

Prices will run between $600 for a 16-GB single-screen tablet and $1,000 for a 32-GB dual-screen folio — and that’s with an educational discount — the company said, and will be delivered by December 20.

Sound expensive? The 14-inch Kno has the same relationship to the 6-inch Kindle that college textbooks have to trade paperbacks. Textbooks are big, heavy, they cost a lot of money, they’ve got expensive illustrations and the publishers are all different.

At least, that’s Kno’s pitch. Kno doesn’t compare itself to other e-readers, or even other tablets. It compares itself to new textbooks, which may help justify its high prices. Considering the thousands of dollars students spend on books, the company says — and the tens of thousands they and their parents spend on college — $600 for an entry-level unit is a bargain.

“Kno’s extraordinary benefits represent only a tiny fraction of the overall cost of college, but its impact on the student’s career — and the energy it adds to the experience, the thrill of learning, and the ultimate grade — is dramatic,” said Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno. “Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital-textbook costs.”

That figure is misleading, since it assumes a student purchases all their books new and doesn’t sell them used. What’s more, Rashid, founder of textbook-borrowing site Chegg, knows it.

The Kno is an extremely capable device and deserves to be sold on its own merits. It’s got either one or two 1440 x 900 LCD touchscreens that support both fingertip navigation and stylus notetaking. It supports either a virtual or a Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s backed up by an impressive library of electronic textbooks.

It doesn’t have third-party apps, which will make parents happy: It’s built to read, write and browse the web. But it can play the major audio and video formats, including Flash. It’s got an NVidia Tegra 2 graphics chip with an A9 dual-core 1-GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. Despite this giant display of video power, it still claims up to six hours of battery life on “normal campus use” (whatever that means).

The Kno is heavy by e-reader and tablet standards; it’s 2.6 pounds for the single-screen, 5.6 pounds for the dual-screen. But again, that’s not necessarily the relevant comparison. Compared to a bag full of first-year biology and calculus textbooks, 5.6 pounds is light as a feather.

A lot of companies have tried to make e-reading work for academic textbooks and, so far, none have succeeded. It’s more complicated than direct-to-consumer trade publication, because there are just so many stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, authors, publishers, retailers. The timing is tough because the economy is forcing many people to curtail their academic spending, not ramp it up on new gadgets — which is one reason the company is pushing the money-saving angle.

But Kno’s hardware looks good, the pricing is high but reasonably competitive, the company’s strategy is sound and its people understand those complexities as well as anyone.

I think we can expect a gradual rollout of the product this semester for holiday-season early adopters, and if it’s successful, a big push for back-to-school next fall. We’ll just have to see whether it clicks.

Kno Announces Pricing and Pre-Order Availability for Tablet Textbook; Pays for Itself in 3 Semesters [Press Release]

See Also:

• Kno Creates 14-inch Tablet for Students
• Kno Releases Details and Video of Multi-Screen Reading Tablet …
• Dual-Screen Tablet Maker Hopes to Reinvent the Textbook
• Size Matters to Students, Says 14-Inch Tablet Maker
• First All-Digital Science Textbook Will Be Free
• A Free Digital Biology Textbook – Video – Wired
• Startup Gives Digital Textbooks the Ol' College Try

Hello, diversification. The same company responsible for the Vizit photo frame is branching out in a big way — Isabella Products has just introduced what it’s calling the planet’s first fully interactive, connected children’s tablet. Just like mum and pop’s Galaxy Tab, the Fable boasts a 7-inch touchpanel and inbuilt 3G, but details beyond that (hardware wise, anyway) are few and far betwixt. We are told that it’ll come preloaded with children’s titles from partner Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, including Curious George, Martha Speaks, and George and Martha. As you’d expect, it’ll boast a tyke-friendly user interface and will provide a secure, SFW connection to the company’s VizitMe.com content management system. There’s nary a mention of price (nor how much it’ll cost to maintain that 3G connection each month), but all should be crystal clear by the time it launches in mid-2011.

Continue reading Isabella Products reveals 7-inch Fable connected children’s tablet

Isabella Products reveals 7-inch Fable connected children’s tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the iPad’s 9.5-inch screen, who needs an iPhone?

Indeed, after six months of using a tablet, I’m ready to ditch my smartphone for something simpler and more reliable.

The phone I want is a feature phone with a 3G connection and the ability to create a Wi-Fi hotspot for tethering my devices to it.

It should have long battery life, be able to grab and hold on to a voice signal with the tenacity of a bear trap, and be compact yet ruggedly durable.

It could even have an E Ink screen for super-low battery consumption. Who cares if the screen is low resolution and has a 1-second refresh rate, if all you’re using it for is looking at the occasional text message? (Thanks for the suggestion, Tim!)

The result would be a device I could use for phone conversations and basic texting. Mostly, though, it would supply internet connectivity to my other gadgets. I’d use an iPad or my laptop for e-mail, reading articles on the web, composing blog posts, Twitter and, in short, everything else.

Basically I want something like the Nokia 3595 I used for years, before getting a first-gen iPhone, except with the addition of 3G data and Wi-Fi tethering.

After six months of semi-regularly using Apple’s tablet, I’m growing increasingly disenchanted with even the iPhone 4’s high-resolution “retina” display. The thing is just too small to use comfortably.

The more I read on my iPhone, the more sad and tired I get. Bending my neck to stare at a tiny, smaller-than-index-card-sized glowing screen a foot or so in front of my face makes me feel as if my world has shrunk to the size of a playing card.

With the iPad, by contrast, I feel like I’m reading a book. It’s too heavy to hold comfortably for extended periods, but I can prop it up in comfortable positions or slouch with it on my lap. I feel more a part of the world.

The iPhone has other problems, too. Don’t get me started on how often AT&T drops my calls or fails to give me a signal at all.

(And I refuse to get a 3G iPad, or pay extra for its month-to-month data service, no matter how good both are. I’m already paying for 3G data with my phone’s plan — why do I need to buy a second data plan?)

I’ve jailbroken the iPhone and am using the amazing app MyWi to give it Wi-Fi tethering capabilities, so whenever I have a signal, it can feed it to my iPad or laptop. That’s a step in the right direction.

I tried the same thing with a Nexus One a while back, and that worked, too.

Unfortunately, the Nexus One and the iPhone, like all smartphones, are still too big and fragile. I don’t know of any feature phones that offer 3G and tethering.

Now if only I had something durable and compact, with long battery life, that did the same thing.

Is my ideal phone out there? Let me know if I’m overlooking something obvious. I’d love to be proven wrong on this one.

UPDATE 11/9/2010: Several commenters, including limimi and GensanBoy, have pointed me to JoikuSpot, a Symbian app that provides Wi-Fi tethering. Versions are available for Symbian Series 60, which means a cheap S60 phone like the Nokia 5730 or Nokia 5320 would work for this.

Others, including diamondgar and Wired’s John C. Abell, have suggested a different route: Get a 3G iPad with a data plan, plus an ordinary, cheap, prepaid phone with no data plan at all. That solution might be ideal for someone willing to commit to an iPad for all wireless data needs.

Thanks for the comments, everyone!

Photo: Jonathan Snyder / Wired.com

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

See Also:

• AT&T Adds iPhone Tethering, Kills Unlimited Data for iPad, Smartphones
• Android 2.2 'Froyo' Features USB, Wi-Fi Tethering
• IOS 4.2 Beta Adds Tethering to iPad
• AT&T Internet Tethering Comes to iPhone OS4 Beta
• Verizon Denies Tethering, Hot Spot Features to Droid Customers

Had any doubts that HP would deliver multiple new phones? Here’s a little something that should make you slightly less unsure. Homebrew hub WebOS Internals spent last week digging through SFR’s webOS 2.0 build for the Palm Pre 2, and surfaced with the names Broadway, Windsor, Mantaray and Stingray, as well as the Roadrunner you’re likely already familiar with. More telling, these five codenames appeared in a string designed to display the message “temporarily not restoring logs for newer devices,” meaning they’re all very likely as fresh as can be. Let’s hope we can pin them to some fancy new hardware before the year is through.

New Palm device codenames revealed in webOS 2.0 code? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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