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Dec. 22, 2009

Across the board, consumers now have a much broader choice of eBook Readers available and they can get them from a lot more vendors than less than six short months ago.

Now you can read e-books on similarly focused products, new and updated, including the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader and Interead's Cool-er. And oh yes, there's also the lesser-known Aluratek Libre... The list is growing rapidly and it seems that more and more makers are getting on the eBook Reader bandwagon.

A rapidly growing number of companies that didn't launch an e-reader this year are now announcing their intentions to get their feet wet in this market which is still currently mostly dominated by Amazon.

Now you have Plastic Logic with its Que eBook Reader. Spring Design now offers its Nook-tangling Alex. Entourage, the maker of the Edge Reader and Zen maker Creative, which offers its new MediaBook.

If all these new choices and categories are starting to confuse you, you're not alone!

Just as e-readers made a strong end-of-decade showing, so did smartphones, which seemed unfazed by the global economic downturn.

In the third quarter of this year, vendors shipped a record 43.3 million of the new reader devices, up 4.2 percent from 2008's third quarter and up 3.2 percent from this year's second quarter, according to market researcher IDC.

Additionally, non-hardware makers angled in to get on the networked TV action as well! For instance, Yahoo showed off its widget channel, a software foundation that can house programs for browsing photos, using the Net's abundant socially connected services, watching YouTube videos, or digging deeper into TV shows--and through which Yahoo will be able to show advertisements it claims.

Well Yahoo's share of the search market is rapidly dropping, so the company dosen't have any other choice than to go in new directions, and an eBook Reader seems to make sense to them. Time will tell of course...

Also, 3D is now assuming a prominent place at big trade shows such as CES, Ceatec and IFA, and many big names in consumer electronics and now pushing not only 3D cinema, but watching 3D movies and playing 3D games at home.

A few specific devices, of course, grabbed the market share of smartphone headlines: the launches of the Palm Pre, the Motorola Droid, in particular, drew lots of hype, even if their first-day hoopla didn't come close to matching the madness of iPhone launches.

Thin and light were the buzzwords when it came to laptops. In the span of just a few months, Dell tantalized users with a glimpse of its soon-to-arrive Adamo laptop.

Then Sony announced a new Vaio X series, also less than half an inch thick and weighing a mere 1.5 pounds. Asus debuted its own line of thin and lights, and Samsung got in on the action with its X3 UltraThin laptop.

On the home media front, Internet-connected TVs continued to grow in popularity, with set makers such as Samsung, Panasonic and Sony competing to up the ante and come out on top.

Vizio, for example, announced its Via HDTV with integrated 802.11(n) Wi-Fi--which means no separate dongle for connecting to the Web--2GB of flash memory, and a well-thought-out remote control.

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Source: IDC.