Amazon pulled back the financial curtain for Q3 2011, revealing $10.88 billion in net sales for the quarter, a 44 percent jump over this time last year. Net income, on the other hand, decreased 73 percent year over year, down to $63 million. The quarter also saw the company’s “biggest order day ever for Kindle,” according to CEO Jeff Bezos — September 28th, the introduction of three new reader devices from the company. The company’s Q4 report will likely be affected by the coming launch of the
Kindle Touch and the long-awaited
Fire tablet.
Continue reading Amazon net sales up, net income down for Q3 2011
Amazon net sales up, net income down for Q3 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You may have noticed a trend recently — pairing slightly less powerful cores that sip power, with more robust ones that can chug through demanding applications. NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 will be packing an underclocked fifth core, while ARM’s big.LITTLE initiative matches a highly efficient 28nm A7 with the beefy A15. Now Freescale is planning to use the same trick, but you won’t find its asymmetrical CPUs in your next tablet or smartphone. Its platform, which marries a Cortex M4 to a Cortex A5, isn’t meant to compete with the latest Snapdragon. These chips will find homes in factories and in-dash infotainment systems which have increasingly sophisticated UIs, but don’t need to push thousands of polygons. Software development tools will land before this quarter is out and the first batch of silicon will be announced in Q1 of 2012. Looks like the era of “dual-core” meaning two identical cores has officially come to an end.
Continue reading Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings
Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Still unconvinced we’re headed towards a
post-PC future? We can at least conclusively say we’ve entered a post-netbook present, as Q2 2011 marks the first time their numbers have been eclipsed by tablets, according to
ABI Research. 13.6 million
slates were shipped in the quarter, besting the 7.3 million the
diminutive laptops were able to clock in. When compared to the prior quarter, that works out to 112 percent or 7.2 million increase (!) for the former, and a 1.1 million decline for the latter. Cost apparently isn’t a driving factor, as the firm notes that tablets pack an average price of $600 — nearly double that of their trackpad-toting brethren. Oh, and in case you were wondering, 68 percent of tablets shipped were of Cupertino’s flavor. More cold hard facts await you in the PR after the break.
Continue reading Netbooks slip under tablet shipments, achieve has-bEeen status
Netbooks slip under tablet shipments, achieve has-bEeen status originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In July we got our first taste of Aliyun OS, running on the W700. Now, with the Gregorian calendar year coming to a close, Alibaba is prepping its second wave “cloud-powered” hardware. First up is the W800, the successor to the original Aliyun handset. As far as specs go, the two look more or less the same — with the latest version still rocking a 1GHz Tegra 2. The one obvious difference is the slightly larger 4.3-inch display gracing the front of the W800. Perhaps more interesting though, is the still unnamed tablet which also clearly bares NVIDIA branding. Speed and exact model of the CPU inside is anyone’s guess, but we’re assuming this isn’t a Kal-el device. Price and release date for both are a mystery, but the W800 is expected to land sometime before November is out. Of course, you probably shouldn’t expect these to show up in your local Best Buy, but you’ve got a friend in Hong Kong who can send you one, right?
Alibaba unveils W800, second-gen Aliyun phone, and unnamed ‘cloud-powered’ tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The days of air-punching invisible
Daleks and making your own sound effects are over: a team from
Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction course have built a glove that does it all for you. The Augmented Hyper-Reality Glove can identify upper-cuts and karate chops using flex and tilt sensors and play the accompanying sound effect using an
Arduino-powered
Adafruit wave shield. We can see some potential downsides — flirtatious finger-gun fusillades accompanied by the sound of cannon fire might just ruin your date. If you’re undaunted by such social faux pas, see the toy your inner-child always wanted in action after the break.
Continue reading Arduino-powered glove brings real sound effects to your make believe gun show (video)
Arduino-powered glove brings real sound effects to your make believe gun show (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sit back and take notes while we… talk about Supernote. This note-taking app quietly debuted on the
Eee Pad Transformer and
Slider earlier this month, when ASUS rolled out an
OTA update to Android 3.2.1, but the company has now provided substantially more details on the feature, which promises to “revolutionize the way you take notes in class.” With Supernote onboard, students can write or scribble using either the keyboard or their own fingers. That isn’t exactly enthralling, in and of itself, but what’s cool is the fact that Supernote will convert each hand-drawn item into an image, allowing users to seamlessly modify or delete their own characters as if they were typed text. The tool also makes it easy to insert graphs or charts, thanks to an “Add Annotation” option that integrates diagrams directly into your lecture notes. And, perhaps best of all, the app will even let you insert photos, meaning you can just take a shot of your professor’s blackboard and worry about understanding it later. Intrigued? Check out a demo video, after the break.
Continue reading Supernote lets you take some pretty super notes on your ASUS tablet (video)
Supernote lets you take some pretty super notes on your ASUS tablet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What exactly is this mystery device that just shuffled through the FCC? Well, it’s definitely a Motorola tablet and a member of the Xoom family, but beyond that we can’t tell you much. The FCC ID, which ends in 56MJ3, makes it clear that this is part of Moto’s flagship tablet line, but whether this an upcoming Xoom 2 or simply a souped up variant of the original Honeycomb slate is unclear. The filing makes no mention of cellular connectivity, only WiFi and Bluetooth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any on board. We do know that, whatever this turns out to be, it sports an HDMI out, 1GB of RAM, a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU, a 1200 x 800 screen and comes in 16, 32 and 64GB varieties. If you’re in the mood to dig through the test reports yourself, check out the source link.
Mystery Moto tablet swings through the FCC, refuses to take any questions originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Developers wasted no time bringing Siri to the
iPhone 4, and nine days later, it’s been brought to the iPad as well. This version, running on a first-generation
jailbroken Apple tablet, suffers from a similar problem as past non-iPhone 4S ports: it’s still not talking to Apple’s data servers. This means that until devs manage to get voice commands recognized and initiated, the iPad’s unofficial virtual assistant will remain effectively gagged.
Siri ported to iPad, still getting silent treatment from Apple servers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Nexus One, grandaddy of Android’s latest pure-bred wonder, appears to have some fight left in it. Developer drl33tmd has managed to coax the old man into running an early port of Ice Cream Sandwich, although it’s not perfect. The somewhat unstable build is a bit sluggish, and suffers from media playback issues and a distinct lack of WiFi. Check out the demo after the break to see the original Google smartphone struggle up some increasingly steep software stairs.
Continue reading Nexus One takes a bite out of Ice Cream Sandwich, chews slowly
Nexus One takes a bite out of Ice Cream Sandwich, chews slowly originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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“Great looking books.” That’s what
Amazon is promising to deliver with Kindle Format 8 (KF8) — a new, HTML5-based file format for
Kindle books. According to the company, KF8 will allow publishers to produce picture books, comics and graphic novels with greater ease, thanks to the platform’s rich formatting capabilities and design elements. In fact, this format brings more than 150 new formatting tools to the table, including fixed layouts, nested tables, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics, among others. It should be noted, however, that audio and video are not included on the list of supported HTML tags and CSS elements. At first, content creators will only be able to use KF8 for the
Kindle Fire tablet, though Amazon says it’ll gradually expand to its entire lineup of devices and apps “in the coming months.” No word yet on when KF8 will become available as an update to Amazon’s Kindle Publisher Tools suite, but you can find more details at the source link, below.
Amazon’s new e-book format brings HTML5 support to your Kindle library originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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