Hasta La Gadget!

Italian design-house Alessi’s new Alessi Tab comes on like a digital photo-frame with benefits. The Android-powered tablet is meant to be used at home – the odd angular shape means it prefers table and countertops to pockets and bags.

Astonishingly, the press release says the Tab is aimed at the ‘young housewife’, who will presumably move the Tab from room to room whilst enjoying real-time news from the ANSA agency, weather from Epson (?), recipes (of course!) from Domus magazine’s Silver Spoon cookbook, internet radio and nutritional information. Further, she can make video calls and watch digital TV broadcasts (it actually has an antenna) while “having fun in the kitchen.”

If all this looks to you like the future as envisioned by Mad Men, you’re not alone. Even the styling has a slick, retro 1950s feel to it. This is all the weirder when you see the specs, which are decidedly up to date:

• 10.1-inch capacitive display
• Auto-rotation sensor (accelerometer)
• Android 2.1
• 1GB RAM
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• DVB-T with detachable antenna
• Front-facing camera and microphone
• HDMI output
• USB port
• SD card reader

There’s no mention of processor speed, but we suppose the average housewife wouldn’t want to worry her pretty little head about things like that. Aside from the awkward shape, though, the Tab looks very capable, and all that installed crapware can presumably be cleaned off.

Price and availability are both still secret. You can be it’ll be expensive, though: Alessi charges $150 for a teapot.

Alessi Tab [Alessi via Uncrate]

See Also:

• $250 Korean Android Tablet Looks Strangely Familiar
• Velocity Cruz Android Tablet: 7-Inch Display, $300
• Android ePad Tablet Reviewed. Verdict: Junk
• Attack of the Pads: Tablets Take On Apple

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Dell’s 5-inch Streak tablet may not be on a tear but the company is still moving forward with plans to introduce its second Android tablet.

Dell plans to launch a 7-inch tablet “in the next few weeks” and a 10-inch tablet within a year, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Dell’s founder and chief executive Michael Dell briefly showed the device at a Oracle conference last week but didn’t offer any details about the product.

Dell’s move to a larger screen tablet is in keeping with the company’s strategy of slowly but steadily introducing new handheld devices. In February, Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com that the Streak aka Dell 5 Mini would be the first in a series of devices.

“We are going to have a family of tablets,” Choubey said. “The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes.”

Since the introduction of the Apple iPad earlier this year, almost every major PC maker has announced that it is working on devices that can rival the iPad.

Just this month, Samsung, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and tablet startup Kno announced new products. Samsung showed a 7-inch tablet called Galaxy Tab that will be available on four major U.S. carriers –AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile in time for holiday season shopping.

Meanwhile, RIM has announced the BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7-inch tablet targeted at business users and consumers. The PlayBook is expected to be available early next year.

Tablet startup Kno is focusing on students with 14-inch single screen and dual-screen tablets that are expected to be available by the end of the year.

Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads so far.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has canceled its planned tablet ‘Courier’ while HP is trying to integrate the Palm webOS into its tablet products.

The 7-inch Dell tablet could make the company a real contender in the tablet space. With its 5-inch display, the Streak is more like a super-sized phone than a real tablet. Dell has also priced the Streak like a phone –offering the device for $300 with a two-year contract on AT&T.

So far, there’s no word on pricing for the 7-inch Dell tablet. But Dell will have plenty of competition to keep it real with its upcoming tablet.

See Also:

• Tablet Wars: How the BlackBerry PlayBook Measures Up
• Build Your Own Tablet for $400
• How the Tablet Will Change the World
• Dell’s Streak Tablet Is Priced Like a Phone
• Attack of the Pads: Tablets Take On Apple

Photo: Dell Streak (Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

The knock on Borders’ E Ink reader at launch was that unlike the Kindle, Nook, or Sony entries, it had no wireless access. The new Kobo Wireless adds that to the mix, along with three color options, as Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel reported this morning.

The new Kobo also keeps its pricing low: $139, identical to the Wi-Fi-only Kindle, $10 less than the Wi-Fi Nook. Kobo’s e-books are also priced competitively compared to the Nook and Kindle stores. Finally, the Kobo costs $40 less than the similarly multi-colored Sony’s Pocket Edition. Like the first Kobo, the Sony has no network capability — but importantly, it does have an optical touchscreen.

Ultimately, the big problem I foresee with the new Kobo isn’t the network gap but the interface gap, particularly as it adds the ability to browse and buy books online. One reason the first Kobo didn’t have an on-board bookstore was that adding that functionality to the device typically commits the manufacturer to including some key hardware. But check out a picture of the Kobo from the front and tell me what you don’t see:

That’s right — still no keyboard, just a big five-way controller button.

Now, the Kobo’s store and library navigation look very nice, and I’m sure many people will appreciate the added ability to wirelessly browse best-sellers and genre categories. But the key advantages of shopping in a digital bookstore for most of us are:

1) a gigantic selection, bigger than any physical bookstore;
2) the ability to search for and quickly find EXACTLY the book you want to buy.

Text entry on the Kindle and Nook are not fantastic, but they work. And you can search for and buy e-books on the web site or using the desktop application, but that negates most of the benefits of being able to buy over Wi-Fi. Without 3G, you can’t buy books anywhere; without a built-in web browser, I don’t really see much other use for Wi-Fi connectivity.

Those are the trade-offs that Borders has chosen for Kobo — and the tradeoffs you’d have to weigh as a Kobo Wireless owner. Me, if I had my heart set on hot pink, I’d spend the extra scratch and get the Sony. If I’m giving up on network access and text entry to browse virtual bookshelves, I at least want to be able to flick through them with my fingertips rather than using a Nintendo controller.

Update: Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis chimed in in the comments to this post to note that on the company’s new readers, “there is a virtual keyboard to search for authors, titles, etc. It’s easy to use, and keeps the industrial design clean & simple and focused on reading vs typing, or accidentally hitting a button which does happen often on other devices.”

All images via Borders.com.

See Also:

• Sony Pocket E-Reader Combines Touchscreen, E Ink
• Sony Takes on the Kindle With Touchscreen E-Readers
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Wi-Fi Only Nook for $150 in Best Buy
• $150 Kobo eReader: The Real Kindle Killer?
• Kobo E-readers Offered to Hotel Guests
• Kobo Updates E-Reader with Wi-Fi, Price-Drop

When Research in Motion introduced its PlayBook tablet Monday, it was diving into a market already dominated by Apple’s iPad.

But there’s other competition too, either already on the market or soon to be: The 5-inch Dell Streak is available now, and Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab isn’t.

Since the iPad started shipping in April, Apple has sold more than 3 million devices. In June, Dell introduced the Streak, a device billed as a tablet but priced like a phone. Samsung hopes to bring its tablet, the Galaxy Tab to market in time for holiday-season shopping.

RIM announced its latest device, the 7-inch PlayBook, at its developer conference Monday.

The PlayBook won’t be available till early next year. But it’s not too soon to see how its promised specs stack up with the main competitors it will face when it comes out.

*Battery life  as specified by the manufacturer

See Also:

• Kno Creates 14-inch Tablet for Students
• RIM Unveils Tethered Tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook
• How the Tablet Will Change the World
• Build Your Own Tablet for $400
• Samsung Introduces 7-Inch Tablet to Rival iPad
• Dell’s Streak Tablet Is Priced Like a Phone

Photo: BlackBerry PlayBook/Research In Motion

Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application developed by K-NFB, to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase. K-NFB also launched its own application, Blio, described below.

Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, a vice president for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.

“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”

Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.

Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.

UPDATE: Today, K-NFB is also announcing Blio, its own e-reader application with a built-in bookstore, available for immediate download (Windows only). It appears to be essentially identical to Toshiba Book Place, and the books available are the same format and selection; you could say that Book Place is a Toshiba-branded version of Blio.

It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The Amazon Kindle marketplace contains 700,000 e-books for sale, for instance, while Barnes & Noble’s offers over a million.

The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets. But right now, that looks like a long shot.

Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]

Image credit: Toshiba

See Also:

• Toshiba Dual Screen PC Folds Like a Book
• Why Metadata Matters for the Future of E-Books
• Stephen Fry and Our Transmedia Reading Future
• E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers
• Video Boxes, ‘Notbooks’ and E-Books to Dominate Gadgets in 2010 …