A lot of conventional wisdom around the Apple blogosphere has suggested that iPads are eating into computer sales, with even Best Buy’s CEO recently saying that Cupertino’s tablet had halved notebook sales. But is it really true?
According to the NPD, yes, iPads do cannibalize computer sales… but it’s not as significant as you may have thought. According to their research, only thirteen percent of those who bought an iPad did so instead of buying a computer.
Computer component supplier SinTek Photronics wants no part of a rumor it is involved in building a touchscreen iMac. The denial follows a recent report the company was sampling capacitive touch panels for the supposed Apple device. The denial follows a report by a Taiwanese industry publication claiming the new desktop unit would offer touchscreens of 20 inches and more.
Earlier this month, the publication said SinTek had “a good chance” of supplying the new iMac.
Nokia has released the N8, a multitouch smartphone with a 12MP camera. It runs Symbian^3, a new version of an old operating system. Nokia clearly hopes it will help carve back some of the profits that the rest of the industry has been losing to Apple, but what are initial reports like?
Are you planning on writing a book? Do you want to be the next Mark Twain? Or are you a starving author looking to cut out the middle man so you can keep all the profits from the sale of your book? It appears that your time has come — Barnes and Noble has announced PubIt! an alternative to self-publishing in the iBookstore.
PubIt! is a new self-publishing platform that will allow authors to directly upload the books they’ve written to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. Once uploaded Barnes and Noble acts as your books distributor. The books will be sold as bona-fide ebooks and the author gets to keep a nice portion of the profits from each ebook sale. Book prices range from $1 to $200. You will earn 65% on books sold for under $10, but only 40% on books that are more than $10.
It works by accepting your book as a digital upload in HTML, RTF, TXT, or Microsoft Word. The file will be converted from one of these formats into an ePub formatted file. In less than a week your book will appear and go on sale in the Barnes and Noble eBookstore. The book will be available to Nook owners as well as Nook app users on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.
Self-publishing is getting a lot easier as PubIt! joins Amazon and Apple by offering a competing service that gives authors another option they can choose from. Authors can keep more of their profits since there is no agent or publisher to share them with. So start your word processors people! Or just dust of your copy of Adobe Indesign and get to work!
The iPad is set to become the fastest selling consumer electronics product in history, with initial sales running at three times that of the current record holder: the DVD player.
“The iPad did not seem destined to be a runaway product success straight out of the box,” retail analyst Colin McGranahan of Bernstein Research wrote in an investors’ note. “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”
I gave up running a long time ago, when I realized that, well, bicycles were just plain faster. But if I were to start running again, an app that figured out my pace and looked through my library for music with a beat that matched might be a pretty cool running partner.
We start off another week of deals with a blast from the past: a 1.26GHz G4 iBook with 12-inch screen and software for $250. Next is a Kensington Battery Pack and charger for your iPhone or iPod. This unit includes a dock connector and flip-out USB tip. Finally, to help keep your private personal information secure, there is a deal on “Hands Off!”, personal information security monitoring software from MacUpdate.com for just $12.50.
We’ll also take a look at other items, along the way. As always, details on these and many other gadgets can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Place that laptop on your lap for too long and you may get burned, doctors say. Though computer manufacturers warn against placing portable computers on skin (see Apple’s MacBook Pro manual excerpt above), people do it — and toast their skin.
Medical researchers recently reported on cases of skin blotches caused by hot laptops on legs. In one, Swiss researchers found a 12-year-old boy developed a criss cross blotch on his left thigh after playing computer games a few hours every day over a period of several months.
‘He recognized that the laptop got hot on the left side; however, regardless of that, he did not change its position,’ Swiss researchers wrote in the respected medical journal Pediatrics. This is the youngest of 10 reported patients with what is known as laptop- induced dermatosis, nicknamed “toasted skin syndrome,” since its first description in 2004.
Here’s a bit of fun for any would-be street magicians among you. Card2Phone lets you do tricks with playing cards and common American, British, European and Australian coins.
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Back in the days before the iPad, there was the ModBook, a MacBook-to-tablet conversion that could be expensively undertaken by those willing to send off their laptops to the plucky boys over at Axiotron along with a check for $900 bucks. I imagine the iPad has killed off a good chunk of their business, but there are always going to be some people disappointed that Apple’s tablet took the approach of a “big iPhone” when what they really wanted was a convertible OS X tablet / notebook.
If you’re one of those individuals, great news: instead of giving Axiotron your $900 bucks to convert your MacBook into a tablet, a hacker over at Enigma Penguin has come up with a DIY approach that costs just $50.
