(Found via our sister blog, Gadgetell.)

I wonder if this means they’ll be replacing it with a “Nook” app, the way the B&N eReader for iOS transformed into a Nook app? Most of the commenters on the story don’t seem to think so, and I would think if it were the case B&N would have said so in the announcement. I find it more than a little strange that B&N is dropping support altogether for one of the most popular smartphone platforms in the country.

(Found via our sister blog, Gadgetell.)

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 wifi keyboard version is priced exactly the same as the new Touch wifi version, and the 3G keyboard version is only $10 less than the 3G Touch (or the same without ads). Given that you can order a $79 ad-supported Kindle right now, it’s hard to imagine this offer appealing to anyone save for die-hard physical keyboard admirers. On the other hand, it does give Amazon room to discount even further as the holiday season approaches.

Meanwhile, Amazon is playing coy about the 10” Fire device rumored to be in the offing for next year. Writes Tim Stevens for Engadget:

We just asked Amazon Kindle vice president (and thinking man) Russ Grandinetti when we might expect a larger successor. With a smile, Russ said "Stay tuned," and left it at that. If you’ll recall, RIM’s Ryan Biden told us at a past Engadget Show that there was "no reason" the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook couldn’t be shipped in a different size, and given recent rumors that both outfits were working with Quanta, it’s not too tough to read betwixt the lines.

Stevens also reports Amazon gave the same response about the Fire’s international release since its November launch is US-only.

Launching the 7” version now and the 10” version later is a pretty clever move on Amazon’s part. It manages to avoid a direct comparison to the larger, costlier iPad, and instead casts the Fire perhaps as more of an upgraded e-reader. They’re not trying to compete on the full-sized tablet market…yet.

And even when the 10” one comes out, they’ll probably call it the “Fire DX” and cast it as an improvement over the Kindle DX rather than an iPad competitor. It’s a truism of the market that “you can’t beat Apple at tablets,” so they’re trying to come in under the radar as a “color e-reader” instead. (It reminds me of the approach taken in the novel Cyberbooks by Ben Bova, in which the protagonist marketed his e-reader as an electronic toy after the publishing industry showed no interest in marketing it as an electronic book.)

Indeed, if it does compete directly against any Apple product, it is most likely the iPod Touch. When you consider that for $30 less than the price of the lowest-end iPod Touch you can get a wifi-capable color multimedia device with the same 8GB memory but four times the screen real estate…heck, it’s starting to tempt me. (Though the Fire does only have half the pixel density of the current “retina display” iPod Touch, so about the same overall screen resolution despite the bigger size.)

It may not really be fair to consider the Fire an “Android Tablet”, however. Its ecosystem is going to be as closed in its own way as Apple’s is: no access to any app store except Amazon’s own and a complete reskinning to remove most traces of the Android underpinnings mean that it can’t really be directly compared to most other Android devices.

Amazon has been working on getting more content providers on board, as well, cutting a deal with Fox to bring movies and TV series including 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Amazon Prime—and, not coincidentally, to its tablet. And several major magazine publishers have signed on with Amazon as well (though some, such as Time Inc., are still holding out over terms similar to the ones they’ve disliked from Apple).

Siegler has some more details about the on-board hardware of the Fire. It use a TI dual-core OMAP chip, and Siegler guesses the speed to be 1.2 GHz, which will make it much faster than the current Nook Color’s single-core 800 MHz chip. But he also has some details about the forthcoming Nook Color 2, which will be using the 1.2 GHz chip and base its OS on Android 2.3. (Fire’s is based on 2.1.)

Finally, Siegler notes some rumors about the tablet’s pricing. It had been thought to be $250, the same as the Nook Color’s, but Siegler has heard “whispers” that it might be $300 instead. And he’s also heard rumors that the free Amazon Prime may not be included with the tablet after all. Perhaps, he suggests, there could be two versions: just the tablet for $250, or tablet + Prime for $300 (which would still offer a savings over Prime’s usual $79 price).

However, one analyst differs with Siegler’s take in a few important respects. At AppleInsider, Josh Ong has information from Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who expects the device, codenamed “Hollywood”, to launch not in late November but in late September—that is, that Amazon will be shipping it as soon as it reveals it. Kuo also expects Amazon could price the device as low as $199, rather than $250.

The analyst doesn’t see Amazon’s forthcoming 7-inch tablet as aimed at the iPad. Instead, Kuo believes the "Hollywood" project is meant to test the waters for future tablet releases primed for release in 2012. According to him, the retailer is working on a 10.1-inch device, codenamed "Coyote," that will directly compete with Apple’s iPad when it arrives in early 2012. The company is also reportedly preparing an 8.9-inch tablet with an "amazing form factor" for release in the second half of 2012, though suppliers are said to be having a tough time meeting Amazon’s requirements for the device.

And Kuo notes the Fire is not going to be the only new device announced tomorrow—Amazon will also come out with two new versions of its e-ink Kindle: a low-end version, code-named “Tequila”, which could come in at under $100, and a higher-end version, code-named “Whitney”, with features left out of “Whitney” including 3G and touch-screen controls.

Kuo expects Amazon to ship 8 million “Tequila”, 4 million “Whitney”, and 3 million “Hollywood” (Fire) units by the end of the year. He believes a total of 28 million e-readers will have shipped by the end of 2011, with Amazon maintaining a 68% market share.

Of course, as reticent as Amazon has been with its numbers, it’s unclear where Kuo is getting his figures, so all this can be taken with a grain of salt. But regardless of the exact details, Amazon is just about to change the e-reader market again tomorrow, and I’m sure they still have some surprises left in store.

(As an aside, ever since I heard that the new Kindle tablet is going to be called the Fire, I just haven’t been able to get this song out of my head.)

In April, RIM forecast sales of 4-5 million PlayBooks in 2011, the sources noted. However, RIM shipped fewer than 800,000 units during the first half of 2011 and monthly shipments dropped to about 100,000 units in the third quarter, [industry] sources said.

The Guardian suggests that RIM may have as many as 800,000 unsold units stockpiled, and the production cuts suggest RIM may not expect to have cleared its inventory backlog by the end of its fiscal year next May. It reports that RIM’s inventories have grown substantially over the last few years,

Is the PlayBook going to be a casualty of the iPad’s unsinkability? It wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. It lacks either the Android operating system of most popular iPad-competitors like the Galaxy Tab, or or the content on offer from competing tablet manufacturers Amazon or Barnes & Noble. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to buy it save for its integration with the BlackBerry smartphone.

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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Today, Tyler Lessard, the head of RIM’s BlackBerry Developer Relations and Developer Programs team responded on the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog.

Jamie’s posting on Friday raised a number of challenges that he faced while getting started with development for the BlackBerry PlayBook and while registering to become a BlackBerry App World vendor. First off, I’d like to thank Jamie for his candid feedback. Suggestions like his are critical in helping us improve our products and processes. I want you to know that we are absolutely listening.

He goes into detail, mentioning some of Jamie’s concerns point by point and what BlackBerry was doing to address them. It’s fairly impressive that he didn’t even wait until Monday to get the post out, especially considering it presumably had to be run by RIM’s lawyers or publicity department before posting. While much of it is standard corporate-reassurance speak, it does nonetheless provide a sharp contrast to Apple’s overall silence in response to disgruntled developers.

If RIM is able to overcome the problems Murai pointed out and attract more developers to the fold, perhaps it might just have a chance to compete against the iPad after all.

He points out that Apple has done such a good job making the tablet useful in people’s everyday lives that everybody else is still trying to be Apple rather than beat Apple. Every other tablet introduced thus far has looked remarkably similar to the iPad. Even the competitors who come the closest—HP and RIM—still haven’t done anything.

And Apple is only a week away from moving the goalposts again.

Blackberry is bringing its new Playbook tablet to market, of course, but it is becoming unclear how well it is going to be able to compete with Apple. Yesterday, disgruntled would-be developer Jamie Murai blogged at length about how Playbook’s over-bureaucratized, over-expensive, under-useable development process had driven him away from developing for it.

So, my dear RIM, primary supporter of my local economy, I bid you adieu. You have succeeded in your quest of driving away a perfectly willing developer from your platform. On a more serious note, being the underdog, you need to make your process AT LEAST as simple as Apple’s or Google’s, if not more so. You need to make your tools AT LEAST as good as Apple’s or Google’s, if not more so. You have failed at both.

This all must be coming as great schadenfreude for long-time Apple fans, who watched for decades as Microsoft stole march after march on (and idea after idea from) Apple and prospered while Apple languished in relative obscurity. Apple has the tablet bit in its teeth and shows no signs of slowing down.

Ingram is impressed with the device so far, even if its control scheme seems a little awkward. The awkwardness could be, at least in part, a function of the way the device was locked down on its stand, however. The seven-inch size makes it harder to spot individual pixels, and may be more convenient than the iPad while still providing ample screen real-estate for applications.

Of course, it remains to be seen how well the tablet will do in the rapidly-crowding marketplace.

The new rules are not meant to allow let congressmen listen to music or play games, though undoubtedly some will find less serious uses for the devices.

The intent, [Brendan Buck, a spokesman for the Republicans] said, was to let lawmakers look up the text of a bill, check a fact or keep up on the news of the day. Their advisers could also send them important messages. And, especially with the iPad’s bigger screen, lawmakers could abandon paper copies of bills in favor of electronic versions. Or they could use Google on their smartphone to check the accuracy of something a colleague had just said.

The article also points out other politicians’ uses of mobile device technology, such as Obama’s ubiquitous smartphone—and, amusingly, the adoption of a Blackberry by the wife of Obama’s predecessor.

“I had not used a computer in the eight years I spent in the White House, and I didn’t know a thing about BlackBerrys,” [Laura] Bush told Advertising Specialty Institute Radio. “And now, like everyone in the U.S., I have one in my hand every moment. I’m addicted to it.”

The Senate still does not allow open mobile device use, though a leadership aide said that the rules might be loosened at some point.

Rumor places the device at 7” in size, smaller than the current iPad but the same size as the Galaxy Tab (and the rumored 7” iPad Apple is supposedly developing). The device would have Bluetooth connectivity, but would require a BlackBerry smartphone to connect to 3G Internet. It would run an operating system from QNX, which is better known for making embedded OSes for a number of applications (including nuclear reactors). (I also remember QNX from back in the ‘90s when they released a bootable desktop PC OS that would fit on a floppy disk.)

There’s not a lot that’s new about this story, except that we might be getting to see the tablet sometime soon. Will it manage to stand out from the crowd of other tablets and slates that are on their way, and will it be enough to save RIM whose BlackBerry OS 6 has been criticized as slow, buggy, and outdated?

QNX embedded software is used in a variety of devices, ranging from BMW and Porsche car audio systems to medical devices to nuclear power plants to the Crusher robot tank. It has also been released as a downloadable bootable floppy disk distribution, and has a small but active open-source developer community. RIM reportedly hopes to take advantage of this community to promote application development for the BlackPad.

Meanwhile, PreCentral reports that Hewlett-Packard has officially confirmed, during an investor call, that a webOS tablet will be released “in early 2011”. Not many other details were forthcoming, however.

Of course, the big question is how any of these tablets will stack up against the 800-lb gorilla that is the iPad.

CNet ties together some other reports, including a post from Bloomberg in which anonymous sources claim the device is going to be Blackberry’s crack at killing the iPad, having similar specs and pricing to the wifi-only version, and will launch by November.

The tablet will be called the Blackpad, according to Bloomberg. Its touch screen will measure 9.7 inches, similar to the iPad, and the price will be "in line" with Apple’s tablet, the cheapest model starting at $499.

It will rely on wi-fi and Bluetooth to connect to the Internet, rather than 3G, and might well be meant more as a companion device to the Blackberry for people who already own one than as a true standalone.

Either way, Gadgetell notes that RIM and AT&T are planning some kind of special event in New York on Tuesday, August 3rd, and it might well be a natural place and time for such a tablet to be announced.

The Blackberry has had a number of e-book reading apps, including the Mobipocket reader that the iPhone ecosystem still lacks, but has not generally had the multimedia-friendly reputation of the iPhone. Can it turn this around with a Blackberry tablet? Will the tablet, unlike the iPad, run Flash?

Perhaps we’ll get some of the answers on Tuesday.

Though the Blackberry has largely become an “also-ran” to the iPhone, I gather that there are still a number of e-book apps available for it (including Kindle, eReader, and the official MobiPocket reader that is still missing from the iPhone). Of course, compared to the amount you would be shelling out over the life of your service contract, the $200 markdown may actually be quite minor.