Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Google unveils $199 tablet, challenges Kindle Fire

Google’s price is aggressively low, considering that the Nexus 7 has more features than the Kindle, including a front-facing camera.

Google on June 27 said it will sell a 7-inch, $199 tablet computer bearing its brand in a challenge to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The Nexus 7 is designed specifically for Google Play, the online store that sells movies, music, books, apps, and other content—the things Amazon.com Inc. also sells for its tablet computer.

Google’s announcement that it’s putting its brand on a tablet comes a week after Microsoft Corp. said the same thing. Both moves risk alienating Google’s and Microsoft’s hardware partners. Those companies, in turn, could be less inclined to work closely with Google and Microsoft.…Read More

Review: Nook Tablet is a worthy competitor to Kindle Fire

The Tablet improves on the Nook Color mainly by beefing up the processor and the memory and extending the battery life
The Nook Tablet improves on the Nook Color mainly by beefing up the processor and memory and extending the battery life.

Last week, Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson reviewed the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s $199 tablet that aims to challenge the iPad. This week, he reviewed the new $249 Nook Tablet from bookseller Barnes & Noble, which he called “a solid product, worthy of duking it out with [the] Kindle Fire.”

Here’s what he had to say about the device…

“Like the new Kindle Fire, the [Nook] Tablet has a 7-inch, touch-sensitive color screen, about half the size of the iPad’s. It’s the same screen as on the Nook Color, the eReader Barnes & Noble launched a year ago. I thought it was the best eReader yet when it launched.…Read More

Review: Kindle Fire sacrifices to get under $200

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet went on sale Nov. 14 for $199.

Amazon.com caused quite a stir in early October when it announced a new tablet computer for less than half the cost of Apple’s iPad. The Kindle Fire went on sale Nov. 14 for $199, but Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson cautioned in a review that Amazon’s tablet doesn’t quite measure up to the iPad—in screen size or in other features.

Here’s Svensson’s review…

“The Kindle Fire is the first full-color, touch-screen Kindle. … The Fire is the best Kindle yet, no doubt about it. It’s amazing that it costs half of what the first Kindle cost, just four years ago, yet does so much more than display books. … But it has to be weighed against the competition. When you do that, it becomes apparent just how spare Amazon had to keep the device to limbo under that $200 price level.…Read More

Will Amazon’s $200 tablet spark interest among schools?

The Kindle Fire only has 8 MB of storage space, but Amazon is offering users free web-based storage for any digital content they buy from the company.

Amazon’s unveiling of the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer that costs a few hundred dollars less than Apple’s iPad, sends a bright-hot message: The online retailer is ready to rival Apple in an effort to be the world’s top provider of digital content.

It might sound odd coming from a company that pioneered online sales of physical books in 1995. But since it first entered the digital market in 2006 with its video download store, Amazon has bet consumers will pay for high-quality digital content.

Besides the millions of physical items it sells, Amazon’s trove of digital content now includes more than 1 million eBooks, 100,000 movies and TV shows, and 17 million songs. This is about 1 million fewer songs than iPad maker Apple Inc. sells, but more than twice as many eBooks and many thousands more TV shows and movies.…Read More