Tumblr, the high flying free micro-blogging service, recently issued a minor update to their Android app. While the bug fixes are important to people experiencing problems with the app, the bigger news is at the end of the blog items announcing the release that provides a near future road map for the app.
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Gogo provides in-flight WiFi service for several of the major airlines in the U.S. So, if anyone knows about what and how WiFi is used in the air, it is Gogo. And, their data provides a few surprises among the more expected results.
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Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the “record” (CD) business have all been dramatically affected by the digital revolution that took places in the past few decades. Physical book stores have been hit especially hard by the combination of online book sales as well as ebooks. While Borders Books announced its shutdown earlier this year, CNET reports that Barnes & Noble reported an uptick in both sales and revenue. This is despite the fact that books sales at the physical stores were down during the reported quarter.
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There’s a pair of mobile browser related news items this week. First up is a preview of Firefox for Android tablets. Then, we learn a bit about the Dolphin browser migrated over from Android to the iPhone.
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With the exception of Apple’s iPad, it is hard to point to a tablet computer that can be considered successful. The only two slate form factor devices (other than the iPad) that have captured any mindshare at all are Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color. The Nook Color became a general purpose Android tablet earlier this year although it does not have a camera, GPS and other hardware features now commonly associated with tablets. Speculation is high that Amazon will enter the tablet market with its own Android based device very soon.
In fact, the New York Post reports that an unidentified source with knowledge claims that Amazon’s tablet will be hundreds less than the $499 16GB WiFi-only iPad.
Assuming “hundreds less” is at least $200 less, that would bring Amazon’s tablet in at $299 or less. Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color is $249. So, we can guess that Amazon will at least match that price to remain competitive in price. In fact, I would not be surprised if the Amazon Android tablet price was at $199 with a $150 advertisement subsidized version to sweeten the deal.
Vizio, best known for their reasonably priced LCD TVs, entered the Android tablet market this summer with a sub-$300 producct, the WiFi-only Vizio 8. It has an 8-inch 1024×768 pixel capacitive touch screen, 4GB of internal storage with the option to add up to 32MB using a Micro SD card, and a front-facing VGA (640×480 pixels) camera. It runs Google’s Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) designed primarly for phones and not tablets. While it might be behind the times with its hardware specs and OS choice, it has one advantage over other tablets. It is the first to be able to stream Hulu Plus video.
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Image courtesy of Memory Alpha
Android-based tablets have captured 20 percent of the tablet market, according to a fresh data release from ABI Research. A flood of lower cost devices and Android fragmentation are considered to be the key factors in the increasing market share.
In what would have been called a “Labs tool” before Google Labs was shut down, Google launched a Hotel Finder experiment this week. It does exactly what you might guess: Help someone find a hotel.
http://www.google.com/hotelfinder/
One of the first things I do when I learn of a new Google web product is point a mobile browser at it. Google’s Hotel Finder does not have a special mobile web version for phones or tablets in particular. However, its simple and clean design works well on an iPad. You can see an example of Hotel Finder on an iPad in the screenshot here. Interactive elements like expanding panels and maps work as expected on the iPad. Even the interactive shape editor that lets you search a specific area defined by an editable quadrangle works. Touching a vertex of a quadrangle lets you change the area covered by the shape.
While Google Hotel Finder is not specifically designed for use on tablets, it serves as a good example of how to design a single website that works equally well on desktops as well as tablets.
Via TheNextWeb: Google launches ‘Hotel Finder’, a new
There are a relatively small number of apps that determine whether or not a mobile platform is “feature complete” from the end user’s point of view. Some of these defining apps are Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook and Twitter. If these apps are missing from a mobile platform, the platform feels incomplete. I would also add Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader app to the list of apps that define a platform. And, HP announced this week that a beta for its webOS based HP TouchPad tablet is now available.
Now you can curl up with a good book (or two, or three, or 950,000) on your TouchPad (HP Palm Blog)
I found it interesting that HP did not provide any screenshots of the app and that Amazon does not even mention it in their Kindle mobile app list or in a press release.
A person commenting in the blog notes that PreCentral.net notes that the app is geo-locked to the U.S. This means that the app is only available to TouchPads in the U.S.
