I’m not surprised. I can honestly say I had half-expected it since I heard Asus was calling its original such device the Transformer, and I completely expected it when I heard the newest version was the “Transformer Prime”. I mean, really, what is any child of the eighties going to think when he hears the words “Transformer” and “Prime” in close proximity?

Yes, that.

It would be nice if Asus and Hasbro could get their differences ironed out enough that they could actually start using the Hasbro Transformers logo on the thing, of course. But I don’t think I see that happening.

Of course, in theory trademarks only apply across the narrow range of products that they are originally applied to. I could start up a company to sell "McDonald’s brand fiberglass insulation” without the McDonald’s restaurant company having a leg to stand on if it wanted to sue me for using the McDonald’s name. But given the long-standing association of the combination of words “Transformers” and “Prime” with the franchise (not to mention the 2010 Transformers: Prime TV series) Hasbro might not only have legs but know how to use them.

Not sure how I missed noticing this. In a desperate effort to stem the tide of its stock slumping yesterday, Barnes & Noble knocked $25 off the price of its Nook Color tablet in an e-mail promotion immediately after the Amazon presentation, along with offering free shipping. It seems to be at full price on the website, however. But I’d expect the price to dip for everyone when the Fire actually starts to ship.

And remember that mysterious $35 tablet from the Subcontinent that sounds too good to be true and probably is? The Economic Times reports that India’s HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has announced the tablet will launch on October 5th. “This is not just a dream, it is a reality,” Sibal said. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be holding my breath. (Found via Engadget.)

Swinging back a little closer to reality, TechCrunch has rounded up a list of “The Top 6 Alternatives to the Kindle Fire”: six relatively inexpensive and powerful tablets that could also view Kindle content by dint of installing a Kindle app. The tablets include the Asus Transformer, the BlackBerry Playbook, the Dell Streak 7, the Archos 80 G9, the Nook Color, and the Velocity Micro Cruz T408. They most notably (and amusingly) don’t include any mention of the $300 7” Fusion Garage Grid tablet, which is in the same price range as several they do mention—not too surprising given the enmity left over from the “CrunchPad” debacle.

Speaking of the PlayBook, a number of different retail channels have been slashing the beleaguered BlackBerry tablet’s prices lately, but manufacturer Research In Motion wants to make it clear that it is not making any permanent price changes to the tablet. The company issued a statement to emphasize that “The official retail price of BlackBerry PlayBook has not changed.” (Found via our sister blog Gadgetell.)

So how can Amazon afford to ship its Kindle Fire tablet for just $10 more than the ad-free retail price of its 3G Touch Kindle? They’re just doing “The same thing we do every night, Pinky!”—intentionally taking a loss to grow the market. CNET reports that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates the total manufacturing cost of each Kindle Fire to be $250, meaning that Amazon would take a $50 loss on each unit.

It’s the old “razors and blades” strategy again. Since Amazon can no longer discount the “blades” due to agency pricing, all that was left was to shave costs off the “razors”. And if Amazon was losing $5-6 from each $9.99 e-book, that just equates to 8 to 10 loss leader e-books’ worth of loss per unit. And Amazon isn’t permitted to take a loss on e-books anymore, so if they can get people to buy a bunch of them, after a while it’s pure profit.

Both the tablet market and the e-reader market just got a whole lot more interesting. It will be fun to see how the landscape looks in a year or so.

The tablets in question include Asustek’s Eee Pad Transformer, Motorola’s XOOM, RIM’s PlayBook, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Overall planned production numbers have declined by 10%, from 81 million units to 73 million units.

It’s not surprising that these competitors’ sales are off to a rough beginning. After all, with the iPad, Apple had a pretty good head start. Of course, it’s still pretty early yet for these figures to spell the doom of the tablet market. It’s also interesting to note that the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is conspicuously absent from that list of tablets that are reducing their build numbers. From all reports, it’s been selling pretty well.

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It also includes a 2MP camera, micro USB, micro SD, 802.11 b/g WiFi, headphone jack, and speakers. Battery life is given as 13.5 hours with a 10-day standby.

The piece doesn’t mention whether the touchscreen is capacitive or resistive, or what e-book formats it supports, though it compares it to an Eee Reader. And the Eee Reader DR900 has a capacitive touchscreen and supports the EPUB format, so it seems likely this device will as well.

It’s unclear how well this device will be able to compete against more popular e-readers, or the color tablet disguised as an eReader Nook Color, but at least it’s got the price range right. And in embracing a sort of halfway position between an e-reader and a tablet, aiming at college students who want to take notes on their classes, it at least seems to be aiming for a niche that no one else has yet tried to fill.

(Found via E-Reader Info.)

Here are a few interesting netbook-related stories that have surfaced recently.

Augen, More Often

Augen, the maker of the $100 netbook and $150 Android tablet we mentioned a couple of months back, is back, with a 10.2” 800 MHz ARM/256 MB RAM/2 GB internal storage Android 2.1 netbook, the GenBook 108, retailing via KMart.com for $189.99. Of course, the device won’t have access to Google’s Android store, but it could potentially still work as an Android e-reader and web browser, right? (Found via Engadget.)

But before you shell out for this, you should remember that the reviews of Augen’s other devices have been by and large not-great, and for the same amount of money paid to Geeks.com you could get an ASUS Eee PC 1000 Atom N270 1.6GHz 1GB 16GB SSD 10.1" LED-Backlit Netbook XP Home w/Webcam, 6-Cell & Bluetooth (Ebony), or something similar. Sure, it’s two years old and refurbished, but the specs still kick the Augen’s butt—and it can run full-fledged desktop apps, not just Android programs.

(You could also get a refurbished Augen Windows CE machine for $95, but bear in mind that they can’t have new applications installed on them—they’re just toys.)

Dude, You’re Getting a Tabletbook?

Engadget has a story on an interesting 10” Dell Inspiron Duo netbook prototype shown off at Intel’s IDF 2010 keynote that comes with an interesting swivel gizmo on the monitor. The screen is actually mounted inside of a frame, and can flip around 180 degrees so that when the lid is closed it appears for all the world to be a thick 10” tablet. Featuring a dual-core Atom N550 and running Windows 7, it should be out by the end of the year.

The Dell Latitude XT2 convertible netbook/tablet featured a swivel at the base of the screen, turning the entire thing around 180 degrees before closing it to make a tablet. The Inspiron Duo mechanism at least looks significantly less flimsy. And if it works as well as it looks, it would give its users the convenience of a tablet for media consumption combined with the versatility of an available hardware keyboard. Certainly looks like a nifty toy to play with to me.

Asus? Aces!

And speaking of the N550, Asus just introduced a new model of Eee PC, the 1015PEM, using a 1.5GHz dual-core N550 and featuring up to 350 GB hard drive and 1GB RAM. It comes loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition and starts at $349. Not specifically e-book related, but it can read e-books just as well as the rest of them. And again, it serves to show what a poor bargain spending $190 for an Augen Android device really is.

A netbook has the potential to be a decent alternative to a tablet for e-reading, with the added benefit that you can easily do things that are more keyboard-intensive, too. As the above stories demonstrate, there are a lot of choices available, both now and in the near-future—something that stands in stark contrast to the tablet field where there’s the iBook and then there’s…not much else.

As with anything, of course, the standard rule applies: caveat emptor. Be careful what you pay for.

Now Engadget reports that Augen has issued a press release stating the apps were installed on the devices for “testing purposes” during development, and were accidentally left in the production version of the operating system.

Augen says that it and Google have come to an understanding that, though it can’t do anything about the products that have already shipped, it will remove the controversial apps from future production runs of its products and it is working on getting the proper licensing to put them back in.

Not that these devices are any great shakes as hardware when it comes right down to it. For about the same amount of money, you can get a 2 to 3 year old refurbished Asus Eee, which will probably be significantly faster and more capable.

When I saw this story, I had to glance at my new wristwatch, which helpfully provides a display for the year as well as month and day, to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally slipped one or two years back in time. (The watch synchronizes by radio with the atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado, so I can know for certain that it’s still 2010—the atoms say so!) It’s been at least that long since anyone seriously tried to list an e-reader of that size at that price range.

The 9.7” Kindle DX is $379. The 9.7” color iPad starts at $499. That kind of overpricing is what has presumably killed the Plastic Logic Que, which was supposed to cost $649 for a slightly larger e-paper screen. Meanwhile, the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Sony are priced between $100 and $300 depending on model, and mostly between $100 and $200, for 5” or 6” screens. And as the Digitimes story points out, Asus doesn’t have any content distribution deals in place the way Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Border, and Apple have.

Of course, the article only said that the e-reader would be “under $599”. It didn’t say how far “under” it would be. In most commercial cases, “under $599” generally means “exactly $598.99”, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. After all, you could also truthfully say that the iPad costs “under $19,999”, because it certainly does (unless, of course, it’s this one).

Is Asus trying to pull a “Scotty,” perhaps? (“Aye, captain, I said it would cost $599, but I tried really hard and managed to bring it in for $249.” “You’re a miracle-worker, Scotty.”) Or do like Apple did by “leaking” an $800-$1000 price range for the iPad and then bringing it in at $499 to $829?

If so, they’re being a little clumsy about it. If you’re going to set the expectation with a high price, you should at least make it a realistic one. For $599, I could get two fully-loaded, relatively recent Asus Eee netbooks, which might not be quite as good at e-reading as a dedicated e-ink reader but would certainly do a lot of other things better.

On the other hand, the article does mention they’re looking at offering “bundle sales” through mobile telecom carriers. Perhaps they’re thinking of offering it at a reduced price with a contract? The iPhone does cost $799 without a contract, after all. Even so, it’s hard to imagine any consumer wanting to tie himself to a contract for an unknown e-book reader when he could get a more popular one with no contract (and indeed free 3G connectivity) for the same amount.

Engadget’s find was an Android “smartbook” with a 400 MHz processor and 128 megabytes of RAM, but Branson has one clearanced unit of what appears to be this model listed for $75 (currently out of stock) on Geeks.com, or $67.99 + $9.99 shipping at NewEgg (apparently in stock), a Windows CE “smartbook” with a 248 MHz ARM processor and 64 megabytes of RAM. The unit had a list price of $150, the electronics associate told me, but was clearance priced at $120. Clearly, K-Mart doesn’t always have the best prices.

How did it slip by me that Geeks.com and NewEgg are listing a $75 netbook of any kind? Of course, from the specs, it’s not really much of a “netbook” at all, and the disclaimer at the bottom of the Geeks.com page warns that it doesn’t do flash and is limited to pre-installed applications only (which would seem to suggest installing an e-book reader would be a foregone conclusion). Even the $99 Kmart one seems like a pretty bad deal, judging from Engadget’s review of it.

But this is not to say you can’t find a good netbook in that same price range. Geeks.com is listing some refurbished ASUS Linux Eee PCs and Dell Inspirons ranging from $130 through $245, which from a quality and speed perspective is going to be a much better deal. The 8.9” 900 MHz Celeron with 512 megabytes of RAM for $145 (also available in white, pictured above) makes me see how they got their name: it makes me want to go “Eeeeeeee!” just looking at it.

Even if it is a refurb, this is still both a more reputable brand and a more reputable seller than most of the cheap Chinese netbooks that have been floating around on the ‘net. And you can install additional programs on it.

Granted, there are few commercial e-book readers with Linux versions, but the Linux e-book reader FBReader works beautifully with everything Baen, Cory Doctorow, and other DRM-free e-book sources such as Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, Manybooks, and Closed Circle publish. If there are still any of these refurbs around by the time I get more money in a couple of weeks, I might just have to see about snagging one.

Engadget reports that Amazon and ASUS are teaming up to pre-install the Kindle Reader software on some of the netbooks and laptops ASUS sells through Amazon. Engadget speculates that the pre-installation might extend to ASUS’s forthcoming Eee Pad tablet, but expects to hear more about that at an upcoming industry event.

Also found on Engadget, Amazon’s Kindle 2.5 software is now rolling out to Kindle 2 and DX devices. This update includes implementation of a “Collections” feature, improvement in how the devices handle PDFs, a new “huge” font size, and social networking integration. Still no sign of EPUB capability, alas. We covered the update’s contents in more detail a few days ago.

Found on the MobileRead forum: Stanford researchers have developed a “paper supercapacitor” to go along with paper transistors and paper displays—made by printing carbon nanotubes onto specially-treated paper.

This offers the interesting possibility that in the future, we might see cheap, disposable e-book devices made out of “e-paper”, perhaps available in vending machines or airport shops loaded with a single book much like those single-audiobook mp3 players you can find now.

The UK’s Booksellers Association put its foot in its mouth recently when it said it was going to share member information with Google as part of a deal that allows UK booksellers to sell Google Editions this summer. Subsequently, the BA has backed down and said it will allow members to opt out of the information sharing.

Amid great pomp and circumstance, the staff of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate recently presented the New York Society Library with a copy of the book that Washington borrowed 221 years ago and never returned. The library decided not to pursue the $300,000 in inflation-adjusted late fees that would have accrued over this time.

Just think, if e-books had existed in Washington’s day, his book could have been “returned” for him automatically by the check-out DRM system.

Gizmodo has spotted the Kindle in a slightly unusual place—being used by the evil lizard-aliens on the V revival. Amusingly, the Kindle in question is very blatantly displaying an “empty battery” screen. Gizmodo makes much of the fact that a Kindle, not an iPad, got featured in the show—but as commenters below the article point out, the episode would necessarily have been shot well before the iPad was available.

MobileRead is giving away an iPad (depending on its availability in the winner’s native country) to one lucky participant in a brief e-book device survey the site is running. MobileRead is taking answers through the end of Friday, May 21st, and pledges not to share personal information, including e-mail addresses, with any third party.

Remember the uproar over Diana Gabaldon’s blog post about fanfic that we covered a couple of weeks back? Another writer, George R.R. Martin, denounced fanfic in his blog a few days ago. Mike Masnick at TechDirt had a rebuttal.

I would add that one reason fans often give for writing fanfic is that there are no more “official” stories available featuring the characters they love—and George R.R. Martin has gained a reputation for extremely long delays between volumes of his series, A Song of Ice and Fire.

John Scalzi has expanded the substance of a comment he left on the TeleRead post about the Andre Norton Award-winning web book into a blog post about why attempting to “punish publishers” usually does not work. I can’t say that I agree with his point of view, but it spawned some interesting discussion touching on Amazon boycotts, one-star reviews, and other reader protest issues.

BT (formerly known as British Telecom) is planning a tablet computer that is not meant to be an “iPad killer” (at least, according to BT), but rather “the telephone of the future.” With a display sized between the 3.5” iPhone and 9.7” iPad display, the device will place phone calls via Bluetooth headset or speaker. It will also include e-mail, web browsing, and text messaging capability. Said BT’s chief executive, Ian Livingston:

"You can even have little applications that will tell you the weather, or have a rolling stream of news. It’s for when you don’t want to have to turn on the computer to look something up. We’ve talked to a lot of customers about it – it’s not just something we’ve dreamed up. We’ve designed something around what the customers have said rather than around what technologists have said."

E-reading oddities: The CEO of Hanvon, a Chinese company launching a multitouch tablet called the TouchPad B10, smashed an ice sculpture of an apple in front of a crowd of Chinese journalists. Way to send a subtle message, there.

And Bloomberg reports that Asus has hired a 73-year-old Buddhist master as a product tester for Asus’s e-book reader.

“Because of her patience she can do a better job testing than most,” said Jonney Shih, chairman of the Taipei-based computer maker and honorary board member of Cheng Yen’s Tzu Chi Foundation. “Some ideas were a little bit different from normal usage, but I asked my team to sincerely accept that advice.”

You just can’t make this stuff up.

According to Gadgetell no price has been announced.

Though MSI has made computer parts for some time (I have an MSI wifi card in the desktop PC on which I am writing this post), they are relatively new to the laptop/tablet market. However, this past Christmas I received an MSI notebook as a gift, and have been quite pleased with it.

It will be interesting to see how they do with a tablet.

The story also mentions Asustek launching Asus@Vibe, a digital distribution service that can provide e-books as well as other content.

It has a 1024×768 resolution screen and uses SiPix technology, not E Ink. It is only 9mm thick and incudes a virtual keyboard, handwriting recognition, 2GB or 4GB of memory and an SDHC slot, along with a web browser and RSS feed reader. It will have a built-in dictionary and text-to-speech. WiFi will be included and there will also be an options 3.5G HSDPA,WiMax module.

Formats include PDF, unprotected epub, html, text and various audio and picture formats. Price is £250, about US$450, and more details and pictures are here.

Technorati Tags:
e-readers, eReader, ereaders, Paul Biba, Asus

According to BestTablet Review, the Asus DR-950 uses a traditional E-Ink display with a 9-inch touchscreen and a 1024×768 resolution. It will come with either 2GB or 4GBs of internal storage, an SD slot for expandable storage, WiFi, 3G, audio port and USB. The DR-950 features text-to-speech, RSS feeds, internet browsing and translation in addition to supporting ePub, PDF, TXT, HTML, Audible, MP3, JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG formats. It’s a minuscule 0.35 inches thick, measures 8.74 inches high by 6.34 wide and weighs 13 oz.

“Not all the ereader action was at CES. Asus, the Taiwanese manufacturer that pioneered the netbook concept, has given InGear exclusive details of its DR-570 reader, to be released by the end of the year. Asus says it has developed a 6in, high-brightness, OLED colour screen that should run for a whopping 122 hours on one battery charge — and that’s not just when displaying text but under real-world conditions, such as running Flash video over its built-in wi-fi or 3G. If that claim stands up, it would make this game-changing device nearly as energy-efficient as today’s monochrome readers.”

Sorry, I don’t know what the price will be. I’m also curious what tricks other vendors may have up their sleeves with OLEDs, including Apple. Or does Asus really have the sauce all to itself?

If the ballyhoo is on target, this could be great news for newspapers and magazines, which could run color advertisements and videos. Ads may might also start showing up in books from mainstream houses, given the temptations at hand, and we may see a lot more video. No hard facts. But that’s the way it seems to me.

One question some are asking: How will the OLEDs perform in sunlight?

(Via MobileRead.)