IDC has outed a tablet market report for Q3 2014 and it’s good news for manufacturers as the market has soared 11.5% compared for the same period last year. Global tablet shipments reached 53.8 million as competitive back-to-school promotions and strong interest in the US have driven shipments upwards.

IDC notes that Verizon’s winning tablet strategy is to sell LTE-enabled slates, which in the US are sought after. The upcoming Black Friday sales are also anticipated to result in even larger tablet sales. In the US the market growth is a bit stronger compared to the global one and has gone 18.5% year-over-year. Read more »

Lenovo took the wraps of a Yoga Tablet 2 model with 13” display and Windows 8.1. The slate will hit the shelves in November for $699. The price tag includes a bundled keyboard cover.

The latest Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 is powered by an Intel Atom Processor Z3745 with four CPU cores, clocked at up to 1.86GHz). Read more »

Complementing the two 5-inch tablets it announced back in June, Panasonic has today unveiled the Toughpad FZ-B2. This is a 7-inch extremely rugged tablet that is “designed for business”.

It will become available in Europe in December. In the UK, it will be priced at £591 + VAT, which means £709 inclusive of VAT. It should land in the US in February 2015 for $1,299. Read more »

LG G Pad 10.1, 8.0 and 7.0 were launched earlier this year as affordable Wi-Fi-only slates. Later we heard LG is prepping LTE-enabled flavors of those slates and shortly after we saw LG G Pad 7.0 LTE kicking off on AT&T, while the LTE-capable LG G Pad 8.0 went global.

Well, as it turns out Verizon might be getting exclusivity on the LTE version of the bigger LG G Pad 10.1. An LG VK700 model supporting Verizon’s LTE bands has made it through the US FCC recently. Read more »

After picking the iPad Air 2 apart, the team at iFixit focused its attention of the iPad mini 3. Like its predecessor, the latest compact slate from Cupertino received the poor repairability score of 2.

The iPad mini 3’s identical repairability score with that of last year’s model should hardly catch anyone by surprise. Read more »

“The iPhone 6 Plus bends in your pocket!” This sort of titles are still fresh in our minds and now more Apple products have launched – the new iPads. So, will the super-thin Apple iPad Air 2 bend? You can probably guess the answer but someone recorded the test on video to the tune of €490 (at least I’m hoping he wasn’t using a 64GB iPad for this).

The video is 1 minute and 5 seconds long – that’s €7.54 a second! Read more »

Hot on the heels of the Apple iMac with 5K Retina display, iFixit tore down the iPad Air 2. Cupertino’s full-size tablet received the poor repairability score of 2.

As it turns out, despite being even more elegant, Apple iPad Air 2 is just as difficult to repair as its predecessor. Read more »

The HTC Nexus 9 tablet itself went up for pre-order last week. And now you can pre-order both the Keyboard Folio for Nexus 9, as well as the Magic Cover for the tablet from Amazon.

The former of those will cost you $129.99, while the latter is priced at $39.99. The Magic Cover comes in four different hues. You can choose from black, ‘coral amethyst’, ‘lime stone’, and ‘mint indigo’. Read more »

Sony opened the pre-order books for the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact in the United States. The IP68 certified compact slate is available to order directly from Sony’s official online store.

Only the 32GB version of the Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact is available for pre-order for the time being. Read more »

Thinner and lighter than an iPad mini, more resilient to water too. It’s the Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact, the third member of the Z3 family. Like the other two it’s waterproof and has front-facing stereo speakers, a Triluminos display and Snapdragon 801 chipset plus a camera with Exmor RS sensor.

There’s not much to the box – a charger and a microUSB cable. It may be worthwhile to invest in a magnetic charging dock or at least a cable so you don’t have to open the flap that protects the microUSB each time you want to charge the tablet. Read more »

Following the latest iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 announcements, Apple is now offering a total of 56 different tablet configurations with a price starting from $249 and reaching $829.

And to help guide potential buyers into the world of iPad, Forbes has created an infographic that ought to help navigate future iPad owners to the right one for them. Read more »

Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact has not even hit the shelves, yet you can already snag one with a sweet discount. Sony UK is already offering the IP68 certified compact slate on pre-order with £30 off and a case for 1p in the United Kingdom.

The promo brings the price of the entry-level Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact with 16GB of built-in memory below £300. Read more »

The Nexus 9 has been put up for pre-order on the Play Store in India. India is one of the 22 markets worldwide that will be getting the Nexus 9 on day one.

The Nexus 9 is available in two configurations in India. There is the base 16GB version with Wi-Fi, that is priced at Rs. 28,900, and there is the 32GB LTE model that is priced at Rs. 44,900. The Nexus 9 is only available in the Indigo Black color in India for now. Read more »

The Google Nexus 9 has gone on pre-order on Amazon in various countries. The new tablet can now be found on the US, German, and French Amazon stores, and should be up on others soon.

The Nexus 9 is priced at $399 for the 16GB variant and $479 for the 32GB variant. It is only available in black and white for now, and not the sand color. You could choose to get two or three year drops and spills warranty for additional $71.96 and $94.21, respectively. The tablet will be delivered after November 3. Read more »

Apple’s iPad, iMac and OS X Yosemite event is now all done and as we reflect on it there were many highs, plenty of innovation even, but one particularly low point – the new iPad mini 3.

Apple gave the new iPad Air 2 a heap of time on stage because of its new 8MP iSight camera, its over the top 6.1mm frame, its new A8X chipset, its TouchID home button and its gold option. And the iPad mini 3 got a couple of quick slides – as if the company didn’t want to talk about it. And after digging a bit deeper into its specs sheet we think we know why – that’s by far the smallest step forward a device has needed a year to take. Read more »