Saturday 19 July 2014

The Digital Reader

The Digital Reader

New Leaks Show Nvidia Shield Tablet Ships on 29 July, Will Cost $299 and Up

Posted: 19 Jul 2014 07:45 PM PDT

nvidia-shield-tablet_01[1]Rumors have been circulating for a couple months now that Nvidia was going to release a gaming tablet to complement their Shield handhend gaming device, and over the past couple days a trio of leaks have moved this 8″ gaming tablet out of the maybe slot and firmly into the “why hasn’t it launched yet” category.

On Thursday the ever reliable @evleaks posted a leaked product image, and on Friday two separate leaks, one from a French retailer and the other a set of slides,  independently confirmed that this tablet amounted to more than simply the collected hopes and dreams of tech bloggers.

The @evleaks image showed a tablet that looked a lot like the Tegra Note reference design which Nvidia launched last year. It sported two front-facing speakers, but there wasn’t much else that could be discerned from the image:

nvidia-shield-tablet_01[1]One could discount the image as being an obvious copy of the older tablet, but only a day later this leak was followed up by other leaks which showed the same tablet and added a lot of detail.

VideoCardz.com got their hands on a presentation which showed that the Shield tablet will cost $299 and $399, and that it will have an optional controller ($59). The $299 Shield tablet with ship with 16GB internal storage and Wifi, while the $299 model will have 32GB storage and LTE. As you can see in the slides, this tablet will ship in the US on 29 July:

NVIDIA-SHIELD-Tablet-9 NVIDIA-SHIELD-Tablet-1 NVIDIA-SHIELD-Tablet-3 NVIDIA-SHIELD-Tablet-5 NVIDIA-SHIELD-Tablet-4

These slides were later confirmed by a leaked product listing from a French retailer. That listing is no longer accessible, but while it was up we managed to confirm that the specs mentioned in the listing matched the slides.

The Nvidia Shield tablet will indeed be running Android 4.4 KitKat on a Tegra K1 CPU, just like the rumors said. This is going to be an 8″tablet, not a 7″ tablet like the Tegra Note, and it’s going to have specs to justify the high price tag:

  • Screen: 8″
  • Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1200
  • CPU: 2.2 GHz Nvidia Tegra K1
  • Android 4.4 KitKat
  • 2GB RAM
  • Storage : 16GB/32GB internal, microSD card slot
  • 5MP front and rear cameras with HDR support (and auto-focus on the rear camera)
  • 802.11n dual-band, MIMO Wifi
  • Bluetooth 4.0
  • micro HDMI
  • micro USB 2.0
  • 10 hours estimated battery life
  • Dimensions: 8.7? x 5? x 0.36?
  • Weight: 14 ounces

The post New Leaks Show Nvidia Shield Tablet Ships on 29 July, Will Cost $299 and Up appeared first on The Digital Reader.

Hisense Sero 7+ Clears the FCC

Posted: 19 Jul 2014 02:18 PM PDT

sero-7-plus

A replacement for last year’s unimpressive Hisense Sero 7LT cleared the FCC this week.

With a slower but (probably) better CPU and more storage, the  Sero 7+ is a slight improvement on the Sero 7LT. The new tablet runs an unknown version of Android on a respectable 1.2GHz dual-core Rockchip CPU with 1GB RAM and twice the storage of last year’s model.

It has the same screen resolution as the Sero 7 LT, but in addition to the VGA resolution camera found on last year’s model the Sero 7+ also has a 2MP rear camera. The Sero 7+ also has Wifi and a microSD card slot but no Bluetooth. There’s no word yet on when it will ship, but I expect it to show up as a Walmart exclusive in the next couple months.

The Sero 7+ is the second new tablet that Hisense has released this year. A couple months ago Hisense quietly launched an 8″ budget tablet, the Sero 8. I happen to have one on my desk for a review at the moment, and for $129 it is a very nice tablet – if you like 8″ tablets. (I will be posting my review tomorrow.)

Coincidentally, the Sero 8 has the same camera specs as listed for the Sero 7+. The camera resolution might not be impressive but the image quality was surprisingly better than what you would expect on a $129 tablet.

Here’s the spec sheet from the Sero 7+ user manual on the FCC website:

  • 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display
  • 1.2 GHz Rockchip RK3168 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core CPU
  • 1GB RAM
  • 8GB internal storage
  • microSD card slot
  • Wifi
  • 2MP rear camera and VGA front camera
  • 3Ah battery
sero-7-plus sero-7-plus_02 sero-7-plus_03 sero-7-plus_06

Liliputing

The post Hisense Sero 7+ Clears the FCC appeared first on The Digital Reader.

Facebook is Adding Buy Buttons to Ads – Do You Think They Could be Used to Buy/Sell eBooks?

Posted: 18 Jul 2014 06:20 PM PDT

facebook buy buttonOnly a couple days after BitTorrent announced that they would be adding a payment option to BitTorrent Bundles, Facebook started letting a handful of advertisers add buy buttons to their ads.

This crossed my desk yesterday:

Facebook is trying out letting you pay for ecommerce purchases from other businesses without leaving its site or app. For now it won't be charging the few small and medium-sized businesses in the US to test this new Buy button on their News Feed Pages posts and ads. When I asked if Facebook would be charging businesses for the feature eventually, it said "it was not disqualifying that option" in the future.

Facebook is getting ready to take a cut of the retail sales made on their site, something I thought they would have done years ago.

In spite of the way some of the reports on this story have been saying, it’s long been possible to set up a retail store on Facebook (here’s one example). There are any number of companies that support this service, and some even boast hundreds of thousands of customers.

The funny thing is, until I started researching this story I had never heard of anyone doing so, and it in fact has never even been mentioned to me as an option for direct sales. But the NY Times implies that the option has been around since at least 2009.

Got What It Cakes is part of a new wave of online commerce: F-commerce. Social media specialists say the term was coined in 2009 to describe the growing number of businesses that sell through a Facebook page. Payvment, a start-up that provides support for Facebook shopping transactions, says it has 170,000 clients and is signing on about 1,500 stores a week, most with fewer than five employees.

The rise of F-commerce has been largely haphazard, something Facebook did not instigate or promote. A spokesman declined to discuss the phenomenon, except to acknowledge, "Retailers are experimenting in a number of ways."

So do you think the new ads could prove useful for buying or selling ebooks?

Having never bought anything on Facebook, I couldn’t say. In fact, I have so little data that I can’t even guess whether Facebook’s buy button idea is viable or not, so I’m throwing the question open to the floor.

Have you bought or sold something on Facebook? How well did that work?

Thanks, Moriah!

The post Facebook is Adding Buy Buttons to Ads – Do You Think They Could be Used to Buy/Sell eBooks? appeared first on The Digital Reader.
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