Amazon New Tablet this week?

Here is an excerpt from an article at Marketwatch.com.

Amazon.com Inc. has slated a news conference for Wednesday, and media speculation focuses on the prospect that the Internet retailing major will unveil a tablet computer to compete with Apple Inc.’s market-dominating iPad.

A new Kindle tablet would combine the retailer’s prominent electronic-book reader with connection to Amazon’sAMZN +0.17%  offerings of MP3 music and digital videos.
And the media talk says the tablet will run on Google Inc.’s GOOG +0.93%  Android operating system, which means access to the Android applications at Amazon’s app store.
The Wall Street Journal’s sources say the new tablet will have a roughly 9-inch screen; other reports say a 7-inch or 10-inch display is likely.

Early this month, TechCrunch.com reported that the Kindle tablet will have a 7-inch full-color screen and start at $250, half the cost of the cheapest iPad. Other analysts talk about $300 or less, reports say. 

Read more here:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazoncom-may-unveil-tablet-this-week-2011-09-25?link=MW_story_popular

Free or $99 Tablets?

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article in ComputerWorld.  Companies may try and experiment with pricing and subsidies (based on consumers purchasing content or services) -- to try and grab business from the Apple iPad -- which cannot be beaten at the $499 price point:

How low can they go?

When price competition hits a market, it usually happens gradually. But in the touch tablet market, the bottom seems to have suddenly dropped out.

HP shocked everyone when it announced last month that it would get out of the tablet business and stop making all webOS hardware. To move excess inventory, it announced a stunning $400 reduction in TouchPad prices.

Apparently $99 is a popular price point. The tablets were completely sold out in a matter of days.

Of course, that's not a sustainable price for HP. Pundits estimate that it costs HP about $300 to make each TouchPad, so the company is probably losing about $200 on every tablet sold.

That's why HP confused everybody when it announced that it would manufacture more TouchPads through Oct. 31 in order to respond to the "stunning" uptick in demand.

Read more here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219715/Elgan_Will_tablets_soon_be_free_?source=toc

Bitcasa: Your hard-drive in the Cloud

Rumors of the Google Gdrive have recently heated up -- but in the meantime, other firms are coming up with useful products.  One product that looks interesting is Bitcasa -- which will put your hard-drive in the cloud, available where you have internet access!  It will be available in a beta version soon (free for a capped storage; $10/month for unlimited storage; there will also be a free version).  Sign up for the beta version here:
 
https://www.bitcasa.com/beta-signup?share=4435534

With Bitcasa, in concept anyway, users no longer have to worry about a single local hard-drive failure eating their data, since everything is mirrored on the Internet. Users also get all their data on all their devices, and every time you get a new computer, you just point it to your account and all your data appears on your local device. Whether it's actually there is another matter, but if Bitcasa is fast and smart enough, you'll never know nor care.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20105562-250/bitcasa-moves-your-hard-drive-to-the-cloud/#ixzz1XsURaHmv

Read more here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20105562-250/bitcasa-moves-your-hard-drive-to-the-cloud/

Coming Soon: Amazon's Color Kindle

From TechCrunch.com

It’s called simply the “Amazon Kindle”. But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android.
Rumors of Amazon making a full-fledged tablet device have persisted for a while. I believe we were one of the first to report on the possibility from a credible source — the same person who accurately called Amazon’s Android Appstore. That source was dead-on again, it just took Amazon longer than anticipated to get the device ready to go. They’re now close.

This initial version of the device will be WiFi-only. Amazon is supposedly working with carriers to possibly product 3G-enabled versions (as they have with their other Kindles), but that won’t be the case at launch.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/amazon-kindle-tablet/