Over the last few days, reports and pictures have surfaced showcasing the new OLPC XO-3 tablet that will be debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The 8-inch tablet will cost under $100 for its target market. In terms of what’s under the hood, The Verge reports: In terms of raw specs, the XO 3.0 has an 8-inch, 1024 x 768-resolution PixelQi display, which can be read indoors and out, a Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, 512MB of RAM, and will be configurable with either Android or Sugar operating systems. Sugar...

Plenty of hybrid tablet/laptop devices are on their way. Dan Ackerman on CNet reports on four prototypes that were shown at CES—tablets with keyboards that flip out from behind, or slide out of hidden slots, and so on. These could offer the benefit of tablets for easy reading and net surfing, then turn into full-fledged Windows netbooks with keyboards when more physical input is needed. Ackerman wonders what the best name for such a device would be, however. “What should one call a tablet with a sliding or foldout keyboard? A laptab? A keylet? A tabtop? A keyvertible?” ...

On our sister blog Gadgetell, Shawn Ingram posts a CES hands-on report with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, the seven-inch device that is BlackBerry’s attempt to compete with the iPad. A photo gallery accompanies the article, including shots of children’s book applications. 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...

Kindle Review sums up the show: Mirasol’s Color eReader is mighty impressive – and not scheduled to release until Q3, 2011. Pixel Qi is pretty impressive too – except the lowest priced version of the Pixel Qi screen Adam tablet is $499. Which means that until Q3, 2011, iPad 2 is the only real threat to Nook Color, and Nook 2 is the only real threat to Kindle 3. Apart from those two potential giants there are just a couple of minor threats. The Paltry line-up of eReaders at CES 2011 As compared to CES 2010, when there were dozens of eReaders anywhere, there...

The Consumer Electronics Show is on, and the RSS feeds are being flooded by scads of posts about this or that new tablet or e-reader. If I tried to cover all of them, I could be here all night. In fact, PC Magazine reports that over 80 tablets are going to be shown at the CES this year, many of them using Google’s new “Honeycomb” version of Android. But how many of those tablets are going to be around by the end of the year? If you’ll recall, 2010’s CES showcased about a zillion e-readers, the majority of which...

CNet has another one of those year-end retrospective articles that start popping up around this time. This one looks at the scads of e-book readers that were introduced in the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and follows up to find out what happened to them all. What do I mean by “scads”? The article is in the form of a photo gallery that has 23 pages (though some readers get two pages devoted to them). Some of these readers, such as the Aluratek Libre, have done pretty well. Many, like Plastic Logic’s Que or Hearst’s Skiff, ended up...

CEA, the Consumer Electronics Association, is the trade organization that puts on CES each year. CEA is not too well known to consumers, but it is one of the largest trade associations and does all the stuff that trade associations do, including engage in economic analysis. Each year at this time CEA invites the press for a pre-CES presentation. The most interesting part of it is the report given by their Chief Economist, which is is the result of extensive research and surveys. I attended the event in New York yesterday and here is some of...

Jon Stokes at Ars Technica wonders whatever happened to all the Chinese e-ink readers that were on display everywhere you looked at CES but are now conspicuously absent from E3. He points to the examples of the Plastic Logic Que (or “QUE”) and the Sprint/Hearst Skiff, two of the most anticipated devices from early days. The Que was supposed to be in release by now, but has been plagued by delays, and Plastic Logic may even be taking offers for sale (though the person who seemed to imply it has since denied it). The Skiff, as we...

Samsung has revealed a new e-ink reader, the E61, this one with a physical qwerty keyboard similar to the Kindle’s. This reader joins Samsung’s E6 and E10 readers from CES to make a trio of new e-ink devices. It uses the standard 6” 800x600 resolution e-ink screens seen in most such devices. Like the other Samsungs, it features a removable battery. New York Magazine reports that Steve Jobs had a “secret” talk with fifty New York Times executives last night—more of an “open” secret now. Jobs reportedly “requested a mango lassi and penne” and showed off the iPad...

In geek circles and indeed here at TeleRead, the big news these days is all coming from the CES show in Las Vegas. As far as the e-book world is concerned everyone seems to be following tablet devices---those being announced at the show and even those not being announced. But for those who are on the lookout for future technology that might actually change the way the world looks at e-readers, one of the more interesting stories seems to have overlooked completely because it's not at the show. Apparently the folks at the One Laptop Per Child program...

I wasn't as impressed with Edward Nawotka's editorial on the recent Consumer Electronics Show as Paul Biba was. In fact, I saw a troubling lack of foresight and even hindsight. A decade or two ago, someone might as well have said that a Walkman was everything needed to enjoy music.  How downright quaint such an opinion would seem now in the post-iTunes era. Likewise, an assertion today that… "at least for the time being, the devices that we already have are good enough for books in their present form" …just seems to me to be oblivious to what needs to come. Indeed,...