Wow, Notion Ink is still around. After a promising buildup for its “Adam” Pixel Qi-display Android tablet, followed by lackluster reviews of the finished product, the company kind of faded into the background. Notion Ink is moving forward with plans for an Adam 2, powered by a TI OMAP processor rather than NVidia’s Tegra. The company feels it will be able to get more performance out of an Omap than it could a Tegra. On Notion Ink’s “Designing Adam 2” blog, Rohan Shravan promises: Unlike last time where we banked on Tegra without possibly...

There are other 7” Android tablets out there than the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. And as if to prove it, Geeks.com has put three of them on sale for under $100 today. The RPAD is $88.99 new, the Pandigital Novel is $98.99 refurbished (available in dark purple and red colors), and the Coby Kyros is $99.99 refurbished (“almost gone”). After that, the price jumps up to $249.99 for a couple of refurbished flavors of Galaxy Tab. Further research indicates that the RPAD is only $10 off what you could get it for on Amazon and has gotten two one-star...

Remember the claims of cold fusion that fizzled when scientists tried to reproduce the results? In that light, Fusion Garage’s name may have proven prophetic, because instead of shipping the promised new Grid 10 tablet, Slashgear reports that the company has just gone into liquidation. It turns out that there just weren’t enough pre-orders of the Grid 10 tablet to save the company, and it couldn’t secure additional funding—so instead of shipping the tablets (and sending a free one to everyone who bought the original Joo Joo) it went under, reportedly owing $40 million to creditors. (It was pretty clear when...

Over the last few days, reports and pictures have surfaced showcasing the new OLPC XO-3 tablet that will be debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The 8-inch tablet will cost under $100 for its target market. In terms of what’s under the hood, The Verge reports: In terms of raw specs, the XO 3.0 has an 8-inch, 1024 x 768-resolution PixelQi display, which can be read indoors and out, a Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, 512MB of RAM, and will be configurable with either Android or Sugar operating systems. Sugar...

Is Amazon going to stay in the hardware business, or is it going to farm production of its tablets out to other Android device makers? CNet carries some speculation on the matter. Pointing out that the Fire’s explosive sales debut (compared to HP’s TouchPad fizzle) proves that devices need compelling content services in order to sell, and that Amazon is (allegedly) selling the Kindle Fire at cost as a way to boost those services, the CNet article quotes analysts who think Amazon will entice tablet makers into partnerships. Richard Windsor, global technology specialist for Nomura Securities, had this to...

After what looked at first like a promising return with its “Grid 10” tablet products, The Verge reports that the tablet manufacturing company Fusion Garage seems to have entirely disappeared. The Fusion Garage website only produces a database error, and Fusion Garage has not been responding to any requests for an update on the October 1 delivery date that came and went without the tablets being delivered. In fact, even Fusion Garage’s own PR firm has had such a hard time reaching the company that it has decided to cease representing it. Of course, we don’t...

We’ve seen a number of different types of books turned into e-books, so why not coloring books? That seems to be Crayola’s philosophy. PaidContent reports the company is partnering with interactive storybook app publisher Ruckus Media to publish a series of coloring e-books for iOS and Android. Presumably they will work like its other iPad apps that let kids “color” with their fingers or a stylus. Sounds like fun, but hopefully any parents who use this will first make sure their kids know to use fingers, not crayons or permanent markers. (And when did Crayola start using that creepy-looking...

The bloom may be off the Kindle Fire rose. The New York Times reports that a number of Kindle Fire users are returning the device with a litany of complaints, including the lack of an external volume control, a power button that is easy to hit by accident, sluggish applications and web browsing, and lack of privacy. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen predicted the Kindle Fire would be a “failure.” Amazon, however, says that the Fire is its most successful product ever, and an Amazon spokesman has told the New York Times that it will be rolling out an over-the-air...

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article looking in some detail at exactly how Amazon has changed Android to form the basis of the Kindle Fire. I had been curious as to the nature of the changes, and this piece lays them out clearly as well as the reasoning behind them. The major change Amazon made was stripping a lot of stuff out of the operating system, the same way it stripped down the hardware. In fact, stripping down the hardware—leaving out things like the camera, accelerometer, or location services—is the major reason for what it pulled out of Android. Without...

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Kindle Fire came out, giving people time to get past their first impressions and see how it actually works in practice. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has taken such a look at his family’s Kindle Fire, and determined that while it may be a “mediocre” general-purpose tablet, as a media viewer it does a few things very well. Schonfeld reports that the Fire has become a favorite device in his family, with everyone trying to steal time on it. He goes over all of its major uses—reading, watching, listening, browsing, and playing—and...

FutureBook looks at South Korean company Kyobo’s new color “e-ink” reader, whose Mirasol screen has the same read-in-direct-sunlight capability as black and white e-ink. The device has a 5.7” 1024x768 pixel video-capable multitouch touchscreen, wifi, and English-language text-to-speech. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1 GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor, and costs $300.  FutureBook’s conclusions are not very complimentary. It would appear to be halfway between a smartphone and a tablet. It reads ebooks but is that its main draw and in our opinion it fails on some basic counts. It is not a smartphone. Size...

Barnes & Noble is listing a refurbished Nook Color (its first-generation Android tablet/e-reader, which is more hackable than the new Nook Tablet) for $119.99 on eBay, knocking $30 off the normal refurb price. Although it is refurbished, it does come with a one-year warranty, which is better than most non-Apple refurb sales get. A couple of my friends picked up this tablet back in the day when it was more expensive and were very happy with it (once they’d jailbroken it). I don’t have the disposable income to snag one myself right now, alas, but don’t let that stop...