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...

CNET has a 3-minute video that bills itself as a “Buyer’s Guide” for tablets and e-readers, though it primarily focuses on tablets, and mostly the more expensive tablets—the iPad, the Galaxy S, and Sony’s Android tablet (which I hadn’t heard of before). It paints this trio of $499 tablets as the main attraction for buyers this holiday season, then spends a little time discussing the Amazon Kindle and Kindle Fire as alternatives. In the video, CNET’s Donald Bell refers to the Kindle Fire as a “good enough product”—essentially a device that will work well as an e-reader and...

A DigiTimes report that Foxconn is starting development on an 8.9” Kindle Fire has attracted a lot of attention lately. In a story based on this report, CNet suggests Amazon might begin production of the device in May. DigiTimes says Amazon is also developing a 10.1” version, but decided to go with the 8.9” one for now to avoid direct competition with the 10.1” iPad and Galaxy Tab. (Of course, 8.9” is still a lot closer to the iPad than 7”!) The question on everyone’s mind is, of course, what kind of specs will a 9-inch Fire have? The...

Speaking of the Kindle Fire, CNet reports that analyst Richard Shim of market research firm DisplaySearch is projecting that Amazon will ship 6 million of the tablets this quarter. Shim said the timeline for manufacturer build plans was originally at 4 million units. "Shortly after preorders they upped it to 5 [million]," Shim said. "Then, about a week and a half ago as they were getting closer to the actual launch date, they upped it to 6 [million]." The Kindle Fire went on sale November 15. Meanwhile, production numbers on the iPad 2...

Amazon is losing $50 on each Kindle Fire it sells! No, wait—it’s only losing $10! No, wait—it’s making $50 on each device! No, wait—it’s actually losing $2.70! That last is the latest word from IHS’s iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service, which has ostensibly priced each component plus manufacturing costs and come up with a total of $201.70 for the $199 device. Does anyone even believe these estimates anymore? It would be interesting to compare the various different teardowns on a spreadsheet and see how each one priced each component. (I’d do it myself, but I don’t have time right...

People think of the Kindle Fire as an Android tablet, but that’s not quite completely correct. The Fire runs a heavily-modified version of Android 2.3, a version of Android that Google did not even intend to be used by tablets (and consequently blocked access to the Android Store on devices that used it and did not hew to a smartphone profile). ReadWriteWeb reports that this is leading app developers to have to make some tough decisions: do they make an app that can run on Fire’s nonstandard Android but may not run on other devices (or look good...