Google, Tablet Computer | featured news

Revenue at Barnes & Noble stores fell 10.9% during the holidays, as sales of Nook devices slipped, a sign that the retailer is falling behind in the tablet battle with Amazon, Apple and Google.

Hurricane Sandy may have stopped Google's Android event, but it couldn't stop the Google website. There will be no swanky event in downtown New York City, but Google's Android team has taken to a blog post to announce the latest Android devices, including the long-rumored Nexus 4 phone made by LG and Nexus 10 tablet made by Samsung.

Google says the Nexus 7, its hotly anticipated new tablet computer, is shipping to customers who preordered it this week, amid reports of heavy demand.

Right after the keynote address at the I/O conference in , loaned me a Nexus 7 tablet and, while a couple hours isn?t enough to put it through all of its paces, I have had a chance to try out several of its features. My first impressions are positive.

Google, undaunted by a short-lived attempt to sell a smartphone on its own, is now pushing into Apple's iPad market by selling tablets directly to consumers than an online store.

Google's senior VP of mobile devices Andy Rubin asserts in a Google+ post that the company is now activating 700,000 Android devices a day. That would be 255 million devices a year. Or a billion every four years. That would be, in short, a whole lot of phones and tablets.

Google‘s long-awaited answer to Flipboard, the “social magazine” exclusively on Apple‘s iPad and iPhone, just debuted today. Google Currents offers a similar appearance, except it works on Android devices as well as iPads and iPhones. It’s the latest in a long string of applications, most recently Yahoo‘s Livestand, that seek to turn online content into something resembling print magazines, but without all those dead trees and with 20th century innovations like, say, video.

For two years, Apple has told the world that phones running on Google Android operating system are iPhone rip-offs. Now Apple is about to learn whether a U.S. trade agency thinks its claims have merit.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...