nook

Holy unexpected bundles, Batman!

While supplies last, Barnes & Noble is offering a refurbished Nook Color e-reader and Nook Simple Touch e-reader for $149 shipped.

The deal is available only through eBay. To get it, click the above link, scroll down a bit until you see the Special Offer section, click the check box next to the Simple Touch (which is shown at $79 but will drop to just $20 in your cart), and then click the Buy These Items button on the right.

This is a fairly unprecedented bundle. The Nook Color alone is a steal at $129, especially … Read more

In less than a year, I've gone from mocking e-books to never wanting to buy a print book again. Blame the Amazon Kindle. I've found it a great way to read.

A new generation of Kindles came out at the end of last year, including the Kindle Fire tablet. Here's how I've found them to measure up against each other, over the past four months or so.

Kindle's cool, but e-book high prices and limitations aren't Before I dive into the Kindles, let me get two issues that I hate about the Kindle out … Read more

This is an update of a deal I wrote about a couple months ago.

New iPad, new schmi-Pad. If you're looking for bang for the buck in the tablet department, and don't care about things like pixel overkill and 4G, the deal to beat remains the Lenovo IdeaPad A1. It's the little tablet that could--by which I mean it could prove more than adequate for the majority of users.

For a limited time, Lenovo is offering the black IdeaPad A1 tablet for $189 shipped. (To get that price, apply coupon code FOURDAYDEAL315 at checkout.) That's not … Read more

Barnes & Noble hasn't officially dropped the price of its $99 Nook Simple Touch e-reader, but you can save $20 until March 18 if you buy it with a MasterCard. The deal is available at all Barnes & Noble's stores nationwide and online at BN.com and also applies to the Nook Color, which can be had for $149.

The Nook Simple Touch is an e-ink e-reader that competes with Amazon's Kindle Touch, which starts at $99 for the ad-supported model. Both products have received Editors' Choice awards from CNET. Amazon sells the standard, non-touch-screen version of … Read more

On Friday, Apple's third iteration of the iPad arrives in stores.

With a higher-resolution display, a 4G LTE connection, and a better camera, the tablet isn't a completely new device, but that hasn't stopped it from sending consumer interest through the roof. Already Apple has sold out of online preorders, and analysts are suggesting that the company could sell a record-breaking 1 million iPads on the first day of sales alone.

If you really want a new iPad, my guess is that either you've ordered one already or you're going to get in line on … Read more

One of our biggest disappointments with Barnes & Noble's original 16GB Nook Tablet was that while it was ostensibly twice as capacious as the 8GB Kindle Fire only 1GB of its internal memory was accessible for side-loaded user content. So, unless you invested in a microSD expansion card, you couldn't drag and drop a lot of music and movies for those times where streaming Netflix or Pandora wouldn't cut cut it, such as when you're on a long flight.

Now Barnes & Noble is giving users the option of reallocating the memory partition to leave room … Read more

Truth be told, if I purchase a tablet in the next few months, I'll be buying Apple's new 2012 iPad. Haters gonna hate, but from Bluetooth 4.0 support to the improved camera, incremental changes like this will likely lead to the best tablet on the market getting even better.

Even without the "I am the alpha and the omega" 2,048x1,536-pixel-resolution screen, I'd still choose the latest iPad. The ecosystem, app availability, and smooth and fast performance make it an easy choice for me.

That said, people have different tastes, and the new iPad, despite the hype, doesn't do everything. In addition, not everyone can afford to pay a minimum of $500 for a tablet, and even if you can, you may want a few features Apple doesn't natively provide.

That's where these five tablets come in. Each tablet on the list is a quality tablet that sports at least one feature the new iPad doesn't, be it a more affordable price or better port or feature support. … Read more

Tablet fever will grip more than a third of all U.S. adults by 2016, according to Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

In a report released yesterday, Forrester upped its estimates for U.S. tablet ownership, now forecasting that 112.5 million adults, or 34 percent of the population, will own a tablet in another four years. If that prediction proves correct, it means the industry will sell almost 293 million tablets in the six years from 2010 to 2016.

Europe is also getting into the act.

Forrester expects 105.7 million tablet users to surface in the EU-7 by … Read more

Amazon just took the gloves off.

Less than a week after Barnes & Noble introduced an 8GB Nook Tablet for $199, priced to compete head-on with the Kindle Fire, Amazon has started selling refurbished Kindle Fires for $169 shipped.

I should note that this deal first went live on Saturday, and I've been checking all weekend to make sure they're still in stock. As of this morning, they are.

Also worth noting: it wasn't very long ago that scoring an e-ink-screened Kindle e-reader for $169 was major news. Now, for the same price, you can get a … Read more