Tablets

If your credit cards haven’t melted yet then I have a deal for you.

1SaleADay has Toshiba’s 10″ Android tablet on sale today. This is a powerful premium tablet running the latest version of Android on a dual core Tegra2 CPU. It comes with 32GB Flash storage, an SD card slot, Wifi/BT/GPS. It even has a pair of cameras (5MP and 2MP) as well as a microphone and it can even record 720p video.

This is a refurbished unit, not new, but it comes with the manufacturer’s warranty. This tablet sells for $480 on Amazon, so today’s deal is a good one. It’s even better than the price asked for the Thrive when it showed up on Ebay earlier this week.

1SaleADay

If you passed on the Toshiba Thrive tablet yesterday then here’s your chance to get another good deal.

Woot has the Archos 101 Android tablet on sellout today. They’re asking a reasonably good price for the hardware, but this tablet is refurbished and it’s also slightly long in the tooth.

The Archos 101 has a 10.1″ capacitive touchscreen, and it’s running Android v2.2 on a single core Rockchip CPU. It comes with 8GB of Flash storage, an SD card slot, Wifi, BT, and HDMI out, but no cameras.

This tablet is selling online for $235 brand new, but past sales have brought the price down to $200.

via Woot

If you’re not done with your Christmas shopping yet then Woot has a deal for you. Woot has the Toshiba Thrive 10″ Android tablet on sale today for $290.

This is Toshiba’s flagship tablet, and it’s running Android v3.1 Homey comb on a dual core 1GHz Tegra2 CPU. It has a pair of cameras (5MP and 2MP), a high resolution 10″ screen (1280 x 800), 16GB Flash storage, mike/speakers, a g-sensor, and an ambient light sensor.

This tablet normally retails for $380, and Woot has it for $290. Of course, the unit sold by Woot is a refurbished model, and it only comes with a 90 day warranty. But that’s still a decent discount. If I didn’t already have a 10″ tablet, I would seriously consider getting this one.

Woot

TigerDirect has just launched a new sale for the TouchPad. They’re selling a $250 bundle which includes the 32GB TouchPad, a case, and Bluetooth speakers. This bundle is a slightly less good deal than the $150 that this TouchPad went for during the first clearance, but this is still an excellent price for a premium tablet.

The TouchPad was launched back in the first half of this year, and it hit the market in July.  Both reviews and sales were lackluster, and HP decided to kill the tablet in less than 2 months. Ever since then it has been on and off sale, dead and alive, and it’s death throes have provided a lot of writing material for tech bloggers.

TigerDirect

An email was sent to HP employees earlier this week announcing a new sale on TouchPads. This email of course leaked, and now everyone knows about the coming sale.

HP will be selling off the last of its TouchPad 10″ tablets on Sunday at 7pm eastern. You’ll only be able to find them on Ebay, and it looks like only refurbished models will be sold. But on the upside, prices will start at $99. There’s also going to be a $79 accessory bundle, which includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. And the warranty will only be good for 90 days; clearly HP does not want to have to deal with these tablets anymore.

I wouldn’t necessarily expect to get one. This sale is going to be a feeding frenzy of immense proportions. Ebay will likely be barely accessible on Sunday and it might even crash entirely.

In other news Meg Whitman, the CEO of HP, announced that HP was planning to abandon webOS and would open source the OS. From now on the survival and future health of the TOuchPad and webOS based smartphones will depend on independent developers.

HP Ebay Store

Apple is no longer the only game in town when it comes to tablets. To help you navigate through the sea of tablets out there on the market, we’ve put together a list of our favorite tablets out there in the market this season.

1. iPad 2, $499: While iPads are more expensive than the competition, Apple is the original tablet maker and the iPad is magical. And since apps were first invented for iTunes, Apple’s got the edge when it comes to app content though Android is quickly catching up.

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I hope you didn’t blink while reading gadget news on Saturday, because you missed your chance to bid on one of the rarest tablets in the world. HP’s 7″ webOS tablet mysteriously showed up on Ebay Saturday night.

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A couple days ago Asus posted the demo video above. It shows a new cover that Asus will sell for the new eeePad. It’s not quite as sophisticated as the cover on the iPad 2, which was its inspiration, but it does show a clever design. If you fold the cover in the right places then you can use it as a stand.

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Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry Playbook, seems to be getting ready to kill off the tablet. Last week the Playbook went on sale for $199, and today you can get one for $150.

Best Buy is carrying the refurbished base model with 16GB of Flash storage for that price, and they also had the 32GB model for $170 (it’s sold out).

That’s a decent price for this struggling 7″ tablet, but the repeated sales are not good signs. It looks like RIM mught be planning to sell out their remaining stock and abandon the Playbook. If that happens the major developers probably will too. It doesn’t have very many apps (compared to Android), so even as a cheap tablet it wouldn’t be very useful.

Best Buy

Joshua Tallent likes tablets, but says they are not ideal for reading. The founder/CEO of eBook Architects, a company that formats eBooks for authors and publishers, spoke to mediabistro.com in more detail about tablets, eReaders and formatting eBooks.

He told us: “There is a lot of hype around tablets, but I still think that a black and white e-reader is the best device to read a book. I don’t think there is a comparison between e-readers and tablets. They are different things; I don’t equate the two. I have an iPad, but I don’t use it for reading that often. Most of the time I use it for other kinds of things like watching videos, surfing the Web and playing video games. Tablets have the benefit of being multimedia devices, but they aren’t the best way to read eBooks. Dedicated e-reading devices are a better experience for reading, and they lead to greater consumption of eBooks.”

Tallent will be speaking at our upcoming Publishing App Expo, where you can learn more about app publishing and eBook formatting. Click here to read the rest of his “So, What Do You Do?” interview.