Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie 11-11-11
This week’s edition of Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie® covers the new low-end tablet wars between the Kindle Fire, the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet and possibly the Kobo. Adobe announces that Flash is dead on mobile devices and Google now allows you to create business pages on its Google+ social network.
If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: Weekly Wrap-Up with Mr. Noobie 11-11-11
Audio Transcript
Hello, this is Patric Welch, otherwise known as Mr. Noobie®. And this is the Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie for Friday, November 11th, 2011.
Before I start, can I just say how cool it is that I’m shooting this video on 11-11-11? Too bad I couldn’t pull off shooting it at exactly 11:11 am. Yes, I’m a total geek.
The tablet wars are heating up for the holidays. And not just with the iPads, XOOMs and Galaxy Tabs. There’s a whole new war stirring up with the lower-end priced tablets. The new Kindle Fire should be shipping any day now. And now Barnes & Noble has unveiled a new Nook Tablet coincidentally priced at $199, exactly the same as the Kindle Fire.
Barnes & Noble claims the Nook Tablet is slightly lighter, has 16 GB of memory (twice that of Kindle Fire), and can be expanded up to 32 GB by using an SD card.
Meanwhile, Rakuten, the company who owns Buy.com acquired the Kobo e-reader for $315 million. Guess they don’t want to be left out of the low-priced tablet gold rush either.
Steve Jobs may be getting a slight chuckle from his grave as Adobe announced they will no long support Flash for mobile devices. Instead, Adobe will embrace the new HTML5 standard. I always told the iPhone haters that said they wouldn’t buy an iPhone because it didn’t support Flash that some day Steve Jobs would get the last laugh. I guess in some weird way, he probably did.
It should be noted, however, that Flash is only dead on mobile devices. As of now, Flash will still be supported on your desktop and laptop computers.
A new study shows that 80% of smartphone users multitask while watching television. Being an avid multitasker myself, I have no problem believing this to be… wait, hold on a second. I need to fast-forward through a couple of commercials here… (pause)… ok, where were we?
Google is now allowing businesses to create profiles on its Google+ social networking site in a move most likely to keep pace with the popularity of Facebook business pages. I quickly created a Google+ page for Noobie but was disappointed I couldn’t set a vanity URL for my page so I could refer to it by name instead of a long, complicated URL no one can remember.
I did, however, find a temporary solution by using a service called Gplus.to that allows me to create a short URL for my new business page. So now you can Gplus.to/noobie!
That’s it for this week’s edition of the Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie®. I’m Patric Welch, otherwise known as Mr. Noobie, and I’ll see you next week.
