Hasta La Gadget!

Sony's two new Android tablets, codenamed S1 and S2, come in form factors different than most others on the market. Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com

Sony is betting you’ll buy one of its upcoming tablets for one big reason: They look like nothing you’ve seen before.

Codenamed the “S1″ and “S2″ for now, Sony’s two unreleased Android tablets depart from the usual square, flat slabs we’ve seen so far in 2011. Instead, the S2 design comes as a dual-screen, clamshell device, while the S1 is similar to many current tablets with one significant deviation — its funky, wedge-shaped form factor, which tapers from one end to the other.

“It looks like a magazine with the cover folded backwards,” a Sony spokesman said at a Wednesday event in San Francisco. “And the tablet’s center of gravity rests on the wider end with the hand holding the device.”

Sony's S1 looks like a wedge-shaped slab, a magazine with its cover folded around the back. Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com

The stakes are high for Sony, as the company is one the of latest entrants to the tablet market. Of course, the iPad remains the market leader with a year-plus head start on other tablets, and over 90 percent of the tablet market share. The first Android tablet to debut this year was Motorola’s Xoom, which received lackluster reviews and complaints on the lofty price. A host of other tablets followed in Motorola’s footsteps, but compared to the iPad, customers aren’t opening up their wallets for Android devices. Sony hopes its drastic departure in design will differentiate its two tablets enough for you to snag them up.

To be sure, the changes are drastic. The clamp-down S2 device is wide enough to display five inches of visual real estate when opened, while still small enough to fit in your pocket — “or a purse,” says Sony — when closed. And considering the open-and-shut form, reading e-books on the S2 makes a certain amount of sense. Flipping between pages was effortless, mimicking the act of thumbing through an actual book. It would have been nice to see an animated page flip from one side to another; as it stands, the text only changes without any sort of virtual page flip. Still, it works for what it is.

The S2 fits well in a jacket pocket after you close its clamshell form. Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com

The company is also boasting two of its software accelerated enhancements that come with the tablets: QuickView and QuickTouch Panel. With QuickView enabled, Sony claims web pages load much faster than they would on non-QuickView enabled tablets. In a demo on Wednesday, we saw the same web page load five seconds faster on a tablet with QuickView turned on compared to one without the software.

The QuickTouch Panel enables speedier scrolling on the devices, letting you move up and down a browser page faster, less jerky than you’d be able to on another device (or so Sony says). Scrolling seemed smooth in our demo, though we didn’t have another non-Sony tablet on hand to compare.

Sony’s tablets stack up to others in certain respects. They come with DLNA compatibility, Android Honeycomb, Adobe Flash capability — all mainstays in the Android tablet field.

But other than those broadly sketched features, Sony isn’t saying much more about their devices. We got zero information on hardware specs, pricing, specific release dates or even the actual device names.

We do know, however, that the S1 will be available in a Wi-Fi only version first, and the S2 will come carried on AT&T’s 4G LTE network. As a further perk of going with a Sony device, you’ll have full access to Sony’s PlayStation Suite, where you can access a library of 40 to 50 older PlayStation games on the Sony device.

What’s more, the clamshell-modeled S2 uses the bottom screen as a touch-sensitive, virtual control pad, while the top screen displays your game. It’s like Sony’s Xperia Play smartphone, only in tablet form.

Sony says to look forward to the tablets come the fall of this year.

Research suggests that tablet devices pose a threat to netbooks and e-book readers, but not game consoles. Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

A recent survey shows that the portable and console gaming industry has little to fear from the tablet revolution.

E-readers, netbooks and laptops, on the other hand, should watch out.

Resolve Market Research looked at consumers’ mobile device purchases and intentions in July 2010 and now, and found that 53 percent of consumers do not plan to buy an e-reader after purchasing a tablet, and 42 percent don’t plan to purchase a netbook or laptop after getting a tablet. Both were an increase over similar sentiments from a year ago.

“We think that tablets will replace the need for e-readers, but we also believe, especially among older target groups, that people may still want a single niche device just for reading,” said Elaine B. Coleman, Resolve’s chief research officer.

A surprising statistic their research found was that tablet gaming is not intruding into the console and portable gaming space. “Tablets are encouraging all kinds of play,” Coleman says. “Casual gamers are coming and saying this is fun and entertaining, a nice distraction. But hard core gamers can’t play their favorite games on a tablet.”

E-readers and netbooks have been struggling to stay relevant in the post-tablet era. Efforts like the iriver Story HD e-reader try to blend features like a hi-res display (768 x 1024), Microsoft Office integration, and access to Google books to differentiate itself from other e-readers like the hacker-friendly Nook Touch or the Kindle. Netbook makers like Acer have increasingly pivoted their efforts in favor of the slate trend. As people want one portable device, chunkier options and one-use wonders are increasingly getting shoved to the side.

But tablet owners just can’t get enough (it seems).

Image courtesy: Resolve Market Research

Resolve found that 34 percent of current tablet owners actually own two or more tablets, and 70 percent of current tablet owners expect to own multiple tablets within the next year. 57 percent use their tablet either partially or wholly for work-related activities, eating into a space that previously netbooks and laptops exclusively dominated. Tablets are most often being utilized as a second screen for reading and reviewing documents, browsing the web, and checking e-mail.

“When we have apps that can really produce a spreadsheet, work with documents, and are cloud supported, laptops will be cannibalized at a faster rate,” Coleman says.

But with regards to e-readers, Derek Phillips, a director of marketing for Freescale Consumer, believes they’re not out of the ball game. Freescale Semiconductor is the maker of the processor in the iriver HD Story and other e-readers.

“We definitely believe there is a market for coexistence,” says Phillips. “It’s still the best device for reading — the single application that works best is reading novels.”

It’s not that tablets couldn’t, he continues. They just don’t do it as well.

Phillips says the e-reader market didn’t even really take off until the iPad was announced (a statement corroborated by stats from the Pew Research Center). According to that study, e-reader ownership continues to rise. E-readers’ unique reading-friendly display and extensive battery life are what differentiate them from their function-filled, LCD-toting cousins, and keep them from going extinct.

“If screens get so cheap that they could be integrated onto a tablet,” Phillips says. “E-readers could disappear.”

Although it looks like e-reader, netbook, and laptop interest are on the decline, it’s really up to tablet improvement and innovation to see if they can fulfill the needs that those devices currently (or used to) fill.

Resolve Market Research’s study was sponsored by HP, ABC, and Avaya and performed in partnership with Decipher and Cint.

See Also:

• Nobody Needs a Tablet. So Why Are We Gobbling Them Up?
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Will iPad Knock Out Kindle? Numbers Aren’t Pretty for Amazon …

Now you can — finally — adjust the look of the Kobo Touch’s display

Kobo has added a much-needed update to its Touch e-reader, bringing new fonts and layout options. Previously, the not-too-bad e-ink Kobo was limited to a choice of just two font, with no way to control the way these were represented on-screen. The free 1.9.5 update fixes this.

First up are the fonts. You can now choose between 7 typefaces — Amasis, Avenir, Delima, Felbridge, Georgia, Gill Sans and Rockwell. I picked Amasis, and not just because it’s the first on the list: to my eye it’s the least obtrusive when reading.

Next are the typesetting options. Now you can control font size, line spacing, margin size, justification (off, full or ragged-right) and something called “Kobo Styling.”

The margin setting is the big one here. The IR beams that detect your finger to activate the touch-screen mean that the screen is set farther back in the case than in, say, the Kindle. This a casts small but not insignificant shadows at the edge of the screen. Previously, the text ran right to the edge, into these shadows. It was a big distraction. Now, the shadows are still there, but the text can be moved out of the way.

You can also add your own fonts via the Kobo desktop software.

Finally, about that “Kobo Styling” option. I though I was going crazy, clicking it and seeing no effects. It turns out that it really doesn’t do anything. According to a forum posting by Kobo intern George Talusan, “The checkbox is vestigial. We’ll remove it in a future release but in the meantime have fun clicking it.”

The update is either already installed on your Kobo device, or will turn up soon, over the air.

Kobo Touch Edition Software Updates [Kobo]

Kobo Touch Firmware 1.9.5 [Mobile Read Forums]

See Also:

• Kobo Launches Touch-Screen E-Ink Tablet
• Why Borders' Kobo E-Reader Still Falls Short

Motorola reduced the price of its Wi-Fi only Xoom tablet to $500. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Motorola announced on Wednesday that its Android tablet is now available for a hundred bucks cheaper than before, now priced the same as the entry-level iPad 2.

Originally priced at $600, Motorola’s Xoom tablet is now available for $500 in its Wi-Fi only version. The price reduction was announced via Motorola’s Twitter account, and first reported by The Business Insider.

Motorola’s Xoom was the first device to run Google’s tablet-optimized version of Android, (Honeycomb), beating all other major tablet manufacturers to market with its February release date. Sporting Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, an interface which eschews physical buttons and a fancy black matte finish, the Xoom looked like the tablet to beat in 2011.

The head start, however, doesn’t seem to have worked in Motorola’s favor. Critics of the Xoom denounced Motorola’s high prices right out of the gate — $600 for Wi-Fi only, and a whopping $800 for the Verizon 3G capable version. Compare that to the entry-level iPad 2’s $500 price tag, or even the fellow Android-powered Acer Iconia A500, priced at $450. A $500 base price tag is the predominant standard for the field, originally set by Apple.

It’s unclear whether the 3G-capable version of the tablet will take a price hit, though Motorola’s website shows no change to the price currently.

Verizon Wireless did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 3G version can be purchased at a subsidized rate, however; a Xoom with a two-year Verizon contract will set you back $600.

In this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, the crew shines the spotlight on the TouchPad tablet, HP’s response to the iPad.

What’s so interesting about the TouchPad? HP made the product with the same business strategy as Apple’s: One company designs both the hardware and software of the product — aka “vertical integration.” That allows for the operating system to be optimized for the hardware components, which should provide a smooth and polished experience similar to the iPad.

Despite this strategy, reviewers of the TouchPad found that many parts of the TouchPad’s webOS software felt sluggish and unfinished, and dinged the product for having access to only 300 apps. Our Mike Isaac didn’t have an issue with the small number of apps, however, because the 300 available were enough for him to enjoy the product.

I take a quick peek at Windows Phone Mango, the latest version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Rather than review the software, I’ve taken on an uncomfortable assignment: I’ve removed my SIM card from my iPhone and stuck it inside the Windows phone to live inside the Microsoft world for a few weeks. I’ll have a full report on the experience.

Finally, we wrap up with this week’s rumor that there will be two new iPhones introduced in September. While we believe the iPhone 5 is inevitable, a second lesser model seems unlikely.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #118

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0118.mp3