Last Friday, the New York  Times' Bits blog ran an interesting Q&A-style interview with John Lagerling, Google's Android director of business development, "about the company's strategy with the Nexus brand, one that revolves around lower prices," as the interview's intro explains. Lagerling, as it happens, was involved with negotiating the new Nexus line's decidedly low price points. "Basically," he says, referring to the Nexus 4, "we felt that we wanted to prove you don’t have to charge $600 to deliver a phone that has the latest-generation technologies." Regarding the low price of the new Nexus 7, he says this: "For Nexus 7, we were able...

  PRESS RELEASE Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content delivery solutions, is powering the new Bowker "Book as an Android App" with its iPublishCentral software platform. "Book as an Android App" allows authors and small publishers to use Bowker’s www.myidentifiers.com to create Android-compatible e-book apps from any PDF or ePub document, opening new sales channels such as Google Play and the Amazon App Store. "We’ve partnered with Bowker to make available to their customers a simple option for creating their own eBook app, which helps authors and small publishers better market their titles to potential readers,” said Sameer Shariff, founder and CEO of Impelsys....

The Verge is carrying what it considers a mostly credible rumor that Google is preparing a low-end $99 Nexus tablet for release by the end of the year. Among the company’s rumored manufacturing partners is Quanta, known for putting together OLPC’s XO-1 and XO-1.5 budget notebooks. The Verge discusses the possible hardware configurations to be found in such a device, which is interesting enough but not really relevant here. We’ve already seen plenty of cheap Chinese tablets that have mostly proven the worthlessness of cheap Chinese tablets, but is the time right yet for a major name brand to come out...

The man with one clock, they say, knows what time it is; the man with two clocks is never sure. Where does that put me, the man with 11 Android tablets? I don’t actually have 11 tablets, of course. My current total is four, of which one is out of commission and one is too slow to be much use for anything. But up until yesterday Amazon thought I did. Why? Because the tablets occasionally crash, and I then have to reboot them and reinstall all the software. The first time this happened I also had to download all the apps from...

One secret of Microsoft’s success is the rapidity with which they eradicate their older software versions when they bring out new ones. Just like last month’s copies of Playboy at the newsstand, last year’s version of Windows disappears very rapidly from shops and other outlets when this year’s comes out. Only on eBay can you find copies of Windows XP, and as for Vista, it might as well never have existed. Doctors bury their mistakes; software companies shred them. Desktop Linux, of course, is at the opposite extreme, with old versions, new versions, spin-offs and forks all existing more or less comfortably in...

  If you've been shopping for a handheld 7-inch tablet—you know the kind: smaller than an iPad, bigger than an iPhone, about the size of a paperback book (remember those?)—now must be tempting time to shine up the old credit card, close your eyes and just buy one already. But hold on, partner: You might be kicking yourself a month from now if you rush and buy one today. There are plenty of alluring options out there now. The new Amazon's Kindle Fire HD and the even newer Barnes & Noble's NOOK HD, for example, both boast terrific, iPad-quality screens and low...

Many TeleReaders will be familiar with the Calibre e-book collection manager, that astonishingly powerful and ever-developing software tour de force from Kovid Goyal and his associates. For those that aren’t, Calibre is a free open source multi-platform interface which stores, and provides access to, a collection of hundreds or thousands of e-books in over a dozen different formats. It will find and display your e-books, convert them from one format to another, download cover images and metadata from the Internet, produce a list of titles and authors, and much more. The drawback with Calibre from a tablet user’s point of view is the way it stores its...

By Jeremy Hill | for Gadget Tell  Pocket (previously known as Read it Later) released an interesting update for its Android app last week: Known as the "Listen" feature and part of the Android 4.2 update, Pocket can now read your articles to you. It's easy enough to use: You simply open any article you've previously saved, press "Listen," and then sit back as Pocket reads the article to you, word for word. It’s a neat update, but is it practical? Here are our impressions: I think Google’s artificial intelligence voices are among the best in the industry. For example, the voice assistant within Google Now sounds...

When the Kindle Fire HD was announced, a number of developers initially suggested the device might be hack-resistant, since it was shipping with locked bootloaders.  (What the heck is a bootloader, you ask? Here's a good, non-techy explanation.) As it happens, though, Amazon's new tablet has already been rooted, and you can find how-to instructions on a few different tech sites. If you're in need of a how-to guide that's relatively jargon-free and easy-to-follow, take a look at the instructions posted earlier today by Redmond Pie. You can also scroll down to check out a 15-minute how-to video from REV TV. WARNING & DISCLAIMER: It's important to note that if you...

In earlier articles I’ve covered the proprietary Kindle and Kobo apps, and this time I want to turn my attention to PDF reading on Android tablets. I’ve covered four prominent apps, but there are many others. The basic functionality of all Android PDF apps is fairly similar, but there are some useful and interesting differences in the peripheral options they support. Whether these are worth the time, effort and expense involved in seeking them out, only you as a user can decide. Adobe Reader for Android                               Adobe ported its popular free PDF reading platform across to the Android OS quite early. When I...

By Robert Nelson | Gadget Tell Ematic has announced its latest Android tablet, the EXP8. The tablet is available in three colors (black, gold and copper), and you can pick  one up at walmart.com. Those interested can expect to pay $179.99, which, honestly speaking, seems to be a bit on the high side given the current crop of competition. That being said, lets cover the specs so you can come to an educated decision on your own. The Ematic EXP8 features include: - 9.7-inch Capacitive Touch IPS display - 1.2GHz processor with 400MHz GPU - 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage - 5GB of cloud storage - A microSD...

Toys R Us has officially listed the latest Android tablet that has been designed specifically for children. The model is known as the Tabeo, and it brings a 7-inch display along with a slew of aimed-at-children features such as a drop-safe number and child-friendly interface. The tablet will be running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, and will come pre-loaded with more than 50 educational and gaming apps, including Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, and the ever-popular Temple Run. The Tabeo Tablet is currently available for pre-order only, and it's priced at $149.99. The Toys R Us listing is showing an...