Following up to yesterday’s post about iPad alternatives, John Paczkowski at All Things Digital reports that inside sources at Hewlett Packard tell him that HP’s Android slate that was supposed to come out in 4Q2010 has been delayed and will not be released this year. Paczkowski speculates that HP may be planning to concentrate on its new subsidiary Palm’s planned WebOS slate PC. HP has said it plans to expand WebOS beyond smartphones to other platforms. Perhaps they are concentrating their resources in that direction, and the Android slate will not be released at all? Regardless, knocking...

As we all know Palm has been sold to HP. Normally I would not consider this a TeleRead subject, but I'm quite a Palm fan and have been since their earliest days. As a matter of fact I still write for the oldest Palm blog on the net PalmAddict. As we see the passing of Palm, I have been following all the articles I can on the subject - after all I knew, and wrote about, most of the major Palm players before the Apple crew moved in (Ed Colligan never did get it when I told him...

A while ago, I reported on Palm putting itself up for sale. It was uncertain whether it would find a buyer—several companies including HTC and Lenovo reportedly considered it but decided “no sale”—but today the announcement came that Hewlett-Packard is slapping down $1.2 billion to take Palm home. There are stories about this all over the place. A couple of the more interesting ones: TechCrunch’s MG Siegler talks with HP VP Brian Humphries about HP’s plans for Palm. I asked Humphries to expand a bit about webOS and how it stacks up to...

Imagine if your e-book reader could sense your finger approaching its screen without actually touching it. That’s the possibility offered by an intriguing new technological development from Cypress Perform, maker of the touchscreen for the Palm Pre. The video suggests it could be used for creating a magnifying bubble over a web browser to allow more easily selecting a link. I could see that being useful for e-book readers, too, especially for books that have footnotes. Certainly it would clear up one of the big problems with touchscreen interfaces for fine tasks: you can’t actually see what’s beneath...

Jeff Kirvin, who formerly ran the “Writing on Your Palm” blog for which I wrote before I joined TeleRead, has posted an editorial comparing Apple’s current position with the iPhone to the history of Palm back in the ‘90s. He makes some pretty good points. It’s not just that the iPhone is the most popular PDA-style platform on the market now the way the Palm was back then. There’s also the fact that the next-generation iPhone (as verified, apparently, by Gizmodo) is doubling its screen resolution while keeping the same dimensions just as Palm did back in...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...

Here’s a bit of sad news. The beleaguered Palm Inc. has put itself up for sale, working with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to try to find a buyer, Bloomberg reports. As we previously reported, Palm has been having a hard time lately as its devices simply failed to find a market. Word of the sale comes as no surprise; sooner or later something like this had to happen. In a way, history is repeating itself, because the original Palm ran out of money and had to sell itself to US Robotics shortly after getting started. If...

Here’s a blast from the past. In 2008, we covered StyleTap’s plan to create a Garnet Palm OS emulator for the iPhone, and the difficulties it ran into due to Apple’s “no emulators” clause. Now Engadget reports that StyleTap has finally come out with the software. There are just two catches, however: first, it only works on jailbroken iPhones (since Apple has not changed its stance on emulators), and second, it costs $49.99—an astronomical amount for an iPhone application. (In fact, for that amount you could probably find a pretty good used Palm on Amazon or eBay.)...

Where the iPhone conquered your pocket, the iPad will conquer your backpack. So says Tim Carmody on the Snarkmarket blog, where he puts down his thoughts about why e-books on the iPad will be more successful than some people think. Carmody starts with five common reasons skeptics give that e-books won’t take off on the iPad, and notes that most of them aren’t all that new. (Though he does not address the oft-heard complaint that people will not want to read from LCD screens.) He points out that those who buy the least expensive, 16-gig...

Fifteen years ago, the device that singlehandedly created the PDA market, and also probably did the most to start the e-book ball rolling, was the humble Palm Pilot. It was truly a marvel for its time—which is why it is so sad to see Palm floundering today, an also-ran in the smartphone market behind Apple and Android-powered devices. Palm’s stock prices hit a 52-week low on Friday after a lackluster earnings announcement, and analysts have downgraded their opinion of the stock to “sell”—with two analysts even lowering their price target to $0 (meaning that they think Palm’s stock prices will...

Steve Riggio has stepped down from the CEO position of Barnes & Noble to become B&N’s Vice Chairman. The new CEO will be William Lynch. In addition to serving as President of the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com, Lynch has an impressive amount of e-commerce experience with HSN.com and Gifts.com (which he co-founded), as well as a lot of involvement with e-commerce and websites for Palm. As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce...

Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, Skiff; Corey Podolsky, Entourage; Nikolay Malyarov, Newspaper Direct; David Donovan, IREX Van Rensselaer: funded primarily be Hearst. They do a representation of the printed version. Building a digital storefront with a platform that can plug into many devices. Not betting on a category or device type. Very keen on epaper, though. When Skiff was formed were no ereader devices on the market that could do a newspaper so created one. Wanted to lead by example so created an end to end system. Will be adding some more hardware partners. Would like more people...