Archos Officially Announces Platinum Tablets

Archos annonce la gamme Platinum! [Google Translate]

It’s not like these have been a secret. They were all over CES.

What’s maddening is the subtraction from the Archos 80 Titanium (dual core) to Archos 80 Platinum (quad core). The Platinum lacks HDMI out! Further frustration is that neither tablet includes Bluetooth.

Dimensions and weight are nearly the same:

Archos 80 Titanium: – 7.9″ x 6.0″ x 0.38″ – 15.5 oz
Archos 80 Platinum: – 7.9″ x 6.0″ x 0.38″ – 16.8 oz

The Platinum line — at least the 80 and 97 — are simply re-badges of Chinese Onda tablets.

Not content to flood the world with crap tablets, Archos also plans to do crap phones: EXCLU : Archos 116 Platinum et Archos Platinum 48 en approche [Google Translate]

Previously here:

A Strange Archos Tablet Development
Archos 80 Platinum = Onda V812
The Archos 97 Titanium Tablet Is Garbage
The Archos 97 Titanium Tablet Is Junk
New Archos Tablets Listed At J&R
Charbax Does Archos Platinum

Publishing Inside Social Media

KakaoTalk Challenges Apple and Google with New Digital Publishing Platform

The Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk has over 70 million users and a social gaming platform running in a couple of countries. But the app doesn’t stop there. KakaoTalk has launched Kakao Page as a media and content publishing platform for companies to distribute content.

This is interesting, putting publishing inside of “social media.”

Those seventy million users — if you get a direct mail response rate of one percent, that’s seven hundred thousand!

It will be interesting to see what sell-through numbers turn out to be.

And you can expect this to show up next as The Next Big Thing at the endless book conferences…

That is, unless Amazon does a phone and gets the bright idea to include its own messaging app that incorporates this.

Barnes & Noble Needs To Go Nuclear

In the rebooted Star Trek movie, there’s a scene where Nero is finally backed into a corner, gets desperate, and screams, “Fire everything!”

And today, Barnes & Noble is Nero: Barnes & Noble sees Nook unit loss increasing in 2013

William Lynch — and who knows if it was his original plan or not — has tried to follow the Amazon model. It hasn’t worked.

Now Barnes & Noble finds itself in the position of Nero. Not only is the Red Matter about to kill them, but out of the blue there’s the USS Enterprise — Apple — also gunning for them.

It’s time to fire everything, Barnes & Noble, if you want to save yourself.