From the press release: NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–iPad and Android media tablet users have become and will remain avid app users over the next five years, averaging more than 31 downloads per year per media tablet. A new market intelligence study on emerging tablet applications found that 11 of the 13.7 billion app downloads forecasted for iPad and Android media tablets in 2016 will be focused on four categories: games, digital publishing, social networking, and e-commerce. ‘Media tablet app consumption will mimic smartphone app use in some ways, but in many ways, it will be very different,’ says Mark Beccue, senior analyst. Digital...

For those interested in reading ebooks on an Android tablet (other than the Kindle Fire) Samsung is the obvious choice.  Their tablet lineup, however, is very confusing.  GottaBeMobile has an excellent round-up of the current Samsung offerings, along with comparison tables and recomendations.  Here's the beginning: Samsung’s newest tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, goes on sale this weekend for $249. It will be the fourth 7-inch Galaxy Tab the company has released in the past couple of years and is very close in design and hardware to the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which came out at the end of last...

For the past few months, Barnes & Noble has been offering deals on their Nooks if you purchased a 1-year digital subscription to the New York Times. I have been a long-time subscriber to the print version of the Times, but have been unhappy at the regular price increases for the print subscription. Alas, as unhappy as I proclaim myself to be over the price increases, my unhappiness was not enough to get me to cancel the subscription. The Nook deal looked good to me. The digital version of the Times costs $20 per month; the regular print subscription was costing...

That's the title of an article in TabTimes: The New York Times reports that the Association of Magazine Media (MPA) is to announce a set of voluntary guidelines on tablet publishing later today (Monday). The guidelines are reported to have been drawn up with help from magazine publishers Bonnier, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst and Time Inc. The guidelines are expected to lay out how magazines measure their tablet editions, detail the vocabulary used in those definitions and offer a rough time frame for when reader data will be released. The measures will include the total number of a publication’s digital issues, the...

Remember that lawsuit from Hasbro complaining about Asus naming its new Android tablet the “Transformer Prime,” out of concern that consumers might confuse it with Hasbro’s popular transforming robot toy line? It’s still going to trial, but a judge has expressed sufficient skepticism over Hasbro’s claims to deny the company’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have stopped Asus from continuing to sell its tablets pending the outcome of the trial. The judge didn’t find sufficient resemblance between the Android tablet and Hasbro’s toys to warrant worries over consumer confusion, and noted Asus’s case is strengthened by the...

One of the more annoying things to owners of e-readers who travel is the restriction against using electronic devices during taxi, take-off, and landing. The FAA’s regulations restrict using these devices out of concern that they could interfere with the avionics of the airplanes. And while the FAA has said that airlines are free to request exemptions for particular devices, the testing required to request that exemption is costly enough that most airlines would prefer to let their passengers go on being annoyed. However, Nick Bilton of the NY Times’s “Bits” blog reports that when he called the FAA last week...

Ad Age reports that Condé Nast is going to open a program offering more information on the habits of tablet magazine readers to all its advertisers. The program started out with a trial run that only provided the information to select advertisers. The information will cover ten weeks after each issue comes out, and include the number of paid subscriptions and single-copy sales, the number of people who actually read the issues, the total number of times they opened it, and how much time they spent reading it. Premium advertisers will get extra information based on how customers engage...

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: The number of college students who say they own tablets has more than tripled since a survey taken last year, according to new poll results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the second-annual survey, which asked 1,206 college students and 204 college-bound high-school seniors about their tablet ownership. The results suggest students increasingly prefer to use the devices for reading. One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace ...

From the press release: Barnes & Noble has updated its popular, free NOOK for Android app, bringing NOOK Comics to Android tablet customers. With the version 3.1 update, Android tablet users can now access Barnes & Noble’s expansive collection of comics, graphic novels and manga on their 7- to 10-inch devices (Android OS 2.2 and newer). With exciting graphics in stunning color that virtually jump off the page, NOOK Comics enables customers to explore favorite super heroes and characters in landscape and portrait and pinch and zoom to dive into even the tiniest ...

From Shelf Awareness: There is a significant difference in usage patterns between owners of dedicated e-readers and tablets, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said during a panel held at the Financial Times Digital Media Conference in London last week, as reported by TabTimes. "The people buying these devices (e-readers) are reading more frequently than those with tablets," Serbinis observed. "They read for longer sessions and are more committed. We definitely see tablets as for casual readers. These readers are reading a book every other month, which is a lot less than the average for those using e-readers. Some...

It’s a slightly unsettling and sinking feeling I get whenever I hear discussion about booksellers and others moving away from E-Ink based ereaders towards tablets. It’s not a hatred of backlit screens and the like, in fact I like them quite a bit. Rather it’s that such a move is an implicit acceptance that the stand-alone ereader device is moving from a top priority to a secondary one. The concern for me is that as apps, movies, tv shows, music and games become bigger and better businesses for these players, books become less and less important. With such a shift, books become simply...

From a report in FierceWireless about Forrester Reasearch's latest: According to the research firm's report, Apple still controls 73 percent of the tablet market, and other OEMs are struggling to catch up through improvements in services. Forrester found that Samsung has a 5 percent market share, Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) has 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. Interestingly though, the Android tablets that have made the biggest inroads so far are Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook line, mainly because of what they bring consumers in terms of value-added services. "Forrester's data shows that the top reason consumers don't...