Remember how the Nook Tablet will only let you use 1 GB of storage out of its 16 GB internal storage for your personal items, reserving the rest for B&N store-bought content? With the early Nook Color, Barnes & Noble found that people were filling up internal space with their own things and not having enough room left over for stuff they purchased from B&N, so they made the change starting with later shipments of the original Nook Color tablet. But that seems to be changing back now. Perhaps B&N has found that the average device doesn’t need that...

The Verge reports that Barnes & Noble is placing a low-end version of its Nook Tablet in Wal-Mart, launching at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, February 22nd. The device will have only 8 GB of RAM, the same as the Kindle Fire, and is expected to launch at a lower price than the current 16GB model’s $249. (The most obvious price point is, of course, the Kindle Fire’s $199, but B&N and Wal-Mart could surprise us.) Of course, to call it an 8 GB model is something of a misnomer. Unlike the Kindle Fire, it will probably reserve all but...

Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar has a guest post on TechCrunch discussing four major errors that publishers make when importing content to tablets. These mistakes include developing their own platform rather than using one that other companies’ development teams have already made, not enabling social network sharing of their content which could expose it to a wider audience, not creating new brands for their digital content, and concentrating on traditional SEO rather than trying to appeal to new social methods of search (such as, for example, Taptu). It’s interesting just how much emphasis experts are placing on taking advantage of...

Analysts’ predictions are often not worth the electrons they’re printed on, but CNET reports Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley has said in a research note to investors that Amazon could launch an iPad-sized 9-inch Kindle Fire by the middle of the year. Such a device could increase expected Kindle Fire sales from 12.7 million to 14.9 million units this year. He based this information on his contacts with Amazon component suppliers, which does not necessarily mean it will be accurate. This is only the latest in a number of reports that have suggested a 9-inch Fire could launch sometime this year,...

AllThingsD reports on information from anonymous sources who claim that the next Apple event will happen the first week in March, and will debut the next iPad. This one is supposed to do for the iPad’s large screen what the iPhone and iPod Touch 4 did for their small screen: a faster processor and double-resolution (in this case 2048x1536) Retina Display. If 2011 was the year of the iPad 2, will 2012 be the year of the iPad 3? Said a source familiar with the device: “What do you think?” Assuming it really does...

That's the take from this Toronto Star article: Mixed feelings about the loss of a bookstore at Ryerson University and the sequestering of its books, by the students... though not by the article's author. "Poor books. Snubbed yet again, this time by a university, an institution of learning." The article describes the closure of one campus bookstore, causing confusion by students who walked into the building to find it being repurposed as classroom and office space.  Some of the books were moved to the other campus bookstore; the remainder were put into a storage room, and some will be returned to the...

Wow, Notion Ink is still around. After a promising buildup for its “Adam” Pixel Qi-display Android tablet, followed by lackluster reviews of the finished product, the company kind of faded into the background. Notion Ink is moving forward with plans for an Adam 2, powered by a TI OMAP processor rather than NVidia’s Tegra. The company feels it will be able to get more performance out of an Omap than it could a Tegra. On Notion Ink’s “Designing Adam 2” blog, Rohan Shravan promises: Unlike last time where we banked on Tegra without possibly...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...

On iMediaConnection, analyst Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group posts a thoughtful look at what the “decline of print” might mean for media. She points to some of the same reports that we have covered over the last few weeks, such as surveys showing that tablet owners are buying less physical media, and projections that on-line advertising spending will this year surpass that for print advertising for the first time. She also notes that a market is growing for “enhanced” books with multimedia features (though plain text versions of the classics will always be with us). ...

Another ruling from a European court on the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits over the Galaxy Tab’s design has come in, and it doesn’t bode well for Apple. An appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands dismissed Apple’s patent-infringement attempt to get the Galaxy Tab banned from sale in the country, following up on Apple’s appeal after a lower court’s similar decision in August. The court made its decision based on at least two pieces of prior art for each of Apple’s claims, determining that Apple’s claims were therefore narrow enough that they had not been infringed. Next week, a German...

On CNet, Scott Stein writes about why a $79 Kindle has replaced his iPad as his e-book-reading device of choice. The reasons aren’t really new, and indeed have popped up any time anyone has ever compared e-ink devices to tablets for reading: eyestrain-reducing e-ink screens, less potential for distraction, longer battery life, and less potential for being stolen (and less of a loss if it is). It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as screen display technology gets better and lets tablets steal some of the screen-readability and battery life benefits of e-readers. Will dedicated e-readers...

We lately mentioned the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle owner lending library rogram, but iPads and Kindles have another popular lending option that is also exploding. OverDrive reported that traffic to its “virtual branch” websites more than doubled last year, seeing a 130% increase. While much of that increase can be attributed to e-readers, OverDrive also saw a 22% rise in traffic from smartphones and tablets. The increase in lending might be good news for libraries, but it is unclear whether publishers will find it so. If a lent e-book displaces a sale, as some publishers seem to believe, that...