Samsung Electronics

The US book retailer Barnes & Noble today announced the introduction of a new Samsung-built 8″ tablet. The company has moved away from building its own hardware and now letting Samsung do the heavy lifting. Samsung doesn’t mind, it launches new tablets and smartphones on a seemingly daily…

​Apple and Samsung have led the market substantially since the inception of media tablets. However, the race for third is up for grabs and competition is heating up between Lenovo, Amazon, ASUS, and other emerging vendors. The aggressive nature of the market and substantial increase in emerging vendors has created a stall for leaders in the market giving PC OEMs the opportunity to close the gap between leaders and followers. According to market intelligence firm ABI Research, emerging vendors are forecasted to experience a CAGR of 22.8% between 2014 and 2019.

Barnes & Noble, the bookseller that has struggled to establish itself in the tablet market, is calling on Samsung for some help.

The companies announced Thursday that they will launch co-branded tablets with a mouthful of a name:Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook. The devices will feature Samsung's hardware and customized Nook software from Barnes & Noble. The first Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, sporting a 7-inch display, will hit US store shelves in August.

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she's covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

"They do it all," Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek, California, after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that

 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and Samsung have partnered to make HMH interactive educational material available on Samsung's Android-powered mobile devices and to bring the HMH Fuse app to Android. The collaboration "will also bring hundreds of HMH titles to Samsung's Learning Hub platform," according to information released by the companies.

Call it phablet, phonelet, tweener or super smartphone, but the clunky mobile phone - closer in size to a tablet than the smartphone of a couple of years back - is here to stay.

A surprise hit of 2012, it is drawing in more users, more handset makers and is shaping the way we consume content.

"We expect 2013 to be the Year of the Phablet," said Neil Mawston, UK-based executive director of Strategy Analytics' global wireless practice.

Amazon is going to produce a smartphone running Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform in a bid to both challenge Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and have another vehicle through which it could sell content, according to a Bloomberg report.

The report, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, said that Amazon is contracting with Foxconn International to build the smartphone. The report also said Amazon is acquiring wireless patents that would help it defend itself from potential lawsuits for patent infringement.

Google Inc will soon unveil a tablet co-branded with Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc and priced to compete with Amazon's Kindle Fire device, an Asustek executive said on Wednesday. Amazon's Kindle Fire, which runs a version of Google's Android operating system, sells for $199. Through it users can access Amazon content including books, music and video. "It's targeting Amazon. The Kindle is based on Google's platform but with its own service, so Google has to launch its own service, too," said the executive of the device. Google has its own store for apps called Google Play, but does not

Samsung 'free to sell' Galaxy devices in Australia Follows similar U.S. ruling The copyright and patent battle between the two companies rages on, but Samsung Electronics has won another important round - Australia's highest court dismissed rival Apple’s...

Apple and Samsung have been gradually taking over the US smartphone market, Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley said in a research note Tuesday. Based on channel checks he saw all three iPhone models gain real-world sell-through share in November and the iPhone 4S continue to be the top seller at AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.