paidContent

How much in content sales does it take for Amazon to earn a 20 percent profit margin on its Kindle Fire hardware? About $10 per month, which generates $3 once Amazon takes its 30 percent cut. Senior analyst at ABI Research, Aapo Markkanen, estimated by doing the math last week, saying this incremental $3 revenue would be required over the life of the hardware to maintain such a profit margin.

Maybe 1 Million Surface Tablets Were Sold in Q4

Venture Beat

Analyst estimates of Surface sales for the holiday quarter have been in the 600,000 to 1,000,000 range … or about 3 percent of Apple’s sales of iPads in its recent record-breaking quarter. In other words, Microsoft desperately needs more models and better price points: A Surface Pro can cost more than a MacBook Pro, or double what many Windows 8 laptops run.

$125 Tablet Hits the Market

SlashGear

The tablet market is positively oozing with competition in the low-end segment. One of the hottest segments of the tablet market continues to be the seven-inch screen size and the segment has new products from Pardo Group this week. The new tablet series is called the Canvas Tablet.

AllThingsD

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg looks at three PCs that resemble tablets:  the HP Envy x2, the Asus Taichi 21, and Toshiba’s Satellite U925t.

145 Million Tablets Will Ship in 2013

Slashgear

ABI Research is predicting a big year for global tablet shipments in 2013. ABI Research predicts that in 2013 145 million tablets will ship. ABI isn’t the only company predicting huge tablet shipments in 2013. Previously research firm Gartner predicted that global PC shipments would decline in 2013 as tablet shipments increased.

Apple Sells 22.9 Million iPads in Q4 2012

Apple (press release)

Apple sold a record 22.9 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 15.4 million in the year-ago quarter.

Microsoft Blundered Getting Into Tablet Business

Yahoo! Finance

Josh Brown, vice president of Fusion Analytics and author of the widely read “The Reformed Broker” blog, says Microsoft has no business being in the hardware business.“The public is not clamoring for a Microsoft product,” he said. “I don’t know if the Surface launch accomplished anything other than ‘hey we’re in this business now.’”

Wired

Forget phablets. Touchscreen Android devices designed expressly for kids with bright colors, durable cases and rubberized surfaces are making a big splash in the tablet space.  A market for kid-friendly tablets has emerged, lead by options like Polaroid’s aptly named Kids Tablet, the Toys ‘R Us Tabeo and the OLPC XO Learning Tablet. The offerings are diverse, yet strangely similar.

Sony Introduces Ulta-Light Tablet Z in Japan (For Now)

PC World

Sony has expanded its portfolio of Android-based products with the Tablet Z, which is thinner and lighter than competing products from Apple and Google.  The product stands out because of its thickness and weight. It is 6.9 millimeters thick, which compares to Apple’s latest iPad at 9.4 millimeters and Google’s and Samsung Electronics’ Nexus 10, which is 8.9 millimeters thick. At 495 grams, the Tablet Z is also lighter than the other two tablets, which weigh from 652 grams and 603 grams, respectively.

Sharp Slices Production of 9.7-Inch iPad LCD Panels

The Inquirer

Sharp, which produces displays for a number of Apple products including the iPhone and iPad, has reportedly cut production levels of 9.7in iPad screens. The firm has cut production by such an amount that it is barely producing any 10-inch panels, according to reports.

The Wall Street Journal

Buffeted by declining advertising, which accounted for about 75% of their revenue historically, magazines are turning to tablet computers and digital editions to boost circulation revenue. In doing so, they are hoping to reset decades of subscription discounting so deep that a year’s supply of magazines like Esquire currently costs just $8.

The New York Times

Smaller, lighter tablets are better, argues writer Brian Lam.  But there are exceptions.

PC Manufacturers Struggle to Stay Competitive with Tablets

The Huffington Post

Personal computer makers, trying to beat back a tablet mania that’s eating into their sales, are making what may be a last-ditch attempt to sway customers by mimicking the competition.  Many of the laptops to be unveiled around the world in coming months will be hybrids or “convertibles” – morphing easily between portable tablets and full-powered laptops with a keyboard, industry analysts say.

Nexus 7 Becomes More Popular Than iPad in Japan

CNET

Based on a survey of 2,400 consumer electronics stores in Japan, Google’s Nexus 7 tablet had 44.4 percent of the market versus the iPad’s 40.1 percent, according to Nikkei, Japan’s largest business daily. The survey was done by market research firm BCN in December.

Rolling Stone App (Finally) Available for iPad Owners

paidContent

In a May 2011 interview with AdAge, Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner memorably described magazine publishers’ embrace of the iPad as “premature” and spurred by “sheer insanity and insecurity and fear.” A little under two years later, Wenner Media has decided the time is right for the classic music magazine to embrace the tablet: Rolling Stone‘s first iPad edition hit Apple’s Newsstand app Thursday.

High Click-Through Rates Make iPad Popular with Advertisers

Seeking Alpha

Advertisers favor showing up on iPads over any other device, and they’re willing to pay for it. Sky-high click through rates on iPad have helped it surpass the iPhone in popularity amongst advertisers despite competition making iPad placements the most pricey. The data are from mobile ad platform MoPub’s Q4 2013 study of 90 billion ad views.

The New York Daily News

City schools should ditch textbooks and replace them with tablets, City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn proposed yesterday.  Quinn said the $100 million spent on textbooks every year by the school system would be enough to buy tablets for every student.

Parent Donates Tablets to Son’s Elementary School

CatonsvillePatch

Ellie McIntire’s son is a first-grader at Hillcrest Elementary School in Catonsville, MD, and she decided to give them a different kind of holiday present a few weeks ago.

McIntire wound up donating 24 brand-newAndroid Tablets to the Hillcrest technology department.

11 of the Coolest Tablets for 2013

Gadget Review

Includes the Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon, Archos 97 Titanium and the Vizio Tegra 4.

Dutch Court:  Samsung Tablets Don’t Infringe on Apple’s iPad

CNET

Samsung’s Galaxy tablets do not infringe Apple’s design patents relating to the iPad, a court in the Netherlands ruled today.  In a statement given to the Reuters news agency, Samsung said: “We continue to believe that Apple was not the first to design a tablet with a rectangular shape and rounded corners and that the origins of Apple’s registered design features can be found in numerous examples.”

CNET

Microsoft sold just 1 million Surface RT tablets in the fourth quarter, projects UBS analyst Brent Thill, down from a prior forecast of 2 million. In an investors note, the analyst cited two reasons for his dour projection in a single sentence:  ”Surface RT is a consumer device with [fourth-quarter] sales suffering from the difficult iPadcompare and narrow distribution.”

TIME Picks the Best Tablets Displayed at CES

TIME

Includes tablets from Vizio, Archos and Lenovo.

Dubai Retailers Running Out of Tablets

Emirates 247

If you are planning to buy a smart phone or a tablet this Dubai Shopping Festival, do it now. Retailers are sending out warnings that brisk sales and growing demand has resulted in stocks evaporating much faster than anticipated.

Delta iPad App Shows Ground View from the Flight

The Guardian

The glass-bottomed jet … sounds as cartoon-like as a flying car but a newiPad app created by Delta Air Lines has a nifty feature called just that, which allows passengers to watch the ground below as they fly.

Digital Book World’s E-Book Conference Starts Today

Digital Book World

The three-day New York-based event kicks off today with preconference workshops on content  creation and e-book production.