Surprise surprise. Wired reports that Fusion Garage’s new Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smart phone are remarkably usable, marred by only a few glitches that need to be ironed out before the devices are ready for prime-time. The Wired hands-on piece notes that the devices are built on Android, but use a different interface style than any other Android device. The interface is built around a grid-like scheme, with a sliding window that moves around over a desktop bigger than the whole screen can display at once. Fusion Garage re-thought much of the...

Wired is covering a survey that looks at the effect tablets have on the sales of other electronic devices. One of the major findings of the survey is that tablets are a lot more likely to replace dedicated e-readers (that is, the people surveyed said that after buying a tablet they no longer plan to buy an e-reader) than gaming devices. The survey also identified laptops as a device many new tablet owners no longer felt like buying. The number of people who feel this way for both of these devices increased from 2010 to 2011. However, the number...

Wired.com’s New York editor, John C. Abell, has posted what at first glance looks like another one of those "why e-books aren't all that great" articles that e-book fans either point and laugh or gnash their teeth at. But actually, Abell explains, he likes e-books himself—he hasn't bought anything in print since getting his iPad. Still, he sees five areas where e-books don't quite live up to their print counterparts. Some of these “problems” are more compelling than others: An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it. You can’t keep your books all in one place. Notes in the margins help you...

Wired’s satirist Lore Sjöberg applies his trademark sarcasm to Apple’s in-app subscription requirement and the resulting uproar. Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete. He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious....

Shortly after Apple called it the “best iPad app of the year,” awesome social reading app Flipboard has a major new update out that adds a couple of much-requested capabilities to the social network reader for the iPad: it now supports Flickr and Google Reader feeds. As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do. I tried the new feature out, and it...

And speaking of Christmas gifts, Wired has a guide to what to look for when buying a tablet computer. The article notes that, even though Apple is still the frontrunner, enough tablets have emerged to offer credible alternatives, and offers a number of areas in which to compare each model to decide which one is best for you (or whoever the gift’s recipient will be). One important area of consideration is the type, size, resolution, and dot pitch of screen, which can be important for readability. You should also consider wireless connections, because for media-rich applications it is important...

On his blog at Forbes, Jeff Bercovici brings up another reason that magazine tablet apps may not be as good an idea as they would seem. According to digital design firm founder David Link, they can be as costly to publishers as putting them out in paper, if not more so. The reason for this is that the apps’ hefty size also incurs hefty bandwidth charges. Unlike e-books, magazines tend to need a lot of pictures and graphic design elements. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture that was the same file size as...

On our sister blog Appletell, Ed McKell reports on the way that his iPad apps have, over time, started taking longer and longer, until lately he started the backup before he went to bed and it still was only 2/3 done when he got up seven hours later! McKell learned from research in forums that others were having similar (pardon the pun) issues caused by magazine apps, and decided to experiment with deleting the Wired magazine app which was storing 3GB of back issues, to see if it had any effect. To his surprise, without the Wired app...

The iPad was supposed to be the digital savior of the magazine industry at a time when people are foregoing paper subscriptions to take their media experiences on-line. But is it? Adweek’s Brian Morrissey has an article looking at the way the high hopes of magazine publishers who came out with iPad editions are colliding with reality. Part of the problem is the high per-issue cost of such apps, with no way to buy discounted subscriptions yet. But a larger part of it is that the apps simply aren’t put together in the way that readers would...

Tony Brownfield on Wired has a look at the best free e-books for iPad and iPod that are “actually readable.” But on looking at it, it turns out to be a lot less than I’d hoped it would be. I had hoped it would be talking about books in some particular new format that was especially easy to read on Apple devices. However, I was more than a little disappointed: by “free” it seems to mean “public domain”, and by “actually readable” it seems to mean “that I like”. (Also, it drops an F-bomb. Why?) The titles...

Alan D. Mutter has another interesting post on his “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog. He talks about a French study that highlights the differences in worldview between older and younger generations. Whether accidentally or intentionally, the study uses the same term for the younger generation that Nick Bilton does in his book I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works, calling them “digital natives”. And these digital natives tend to be more untrustworthy of authority, addicted to reading off of screens whereby they can absorb as much data as fast as they can, and intrigued...

Peter Kafka at All Things D’s MediaMemo has an interesting piece looking at the size problems with Condé Nast’s magazine iPad apps, such as the ones for Wired and the New Yorker. Wired’s app weighs in at half a gig for a monthly publication, and the New Yorker is 173 megabytes for a weekly. Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker...