Apple’s Black Friday has already gone live in Australia, where the Cupertino company is offering Apple Store Gift Cards with the purchases. However, the offers seem to vary from region as the company is offering discounts in place of gift cards in couple of other countries.

Apple’s Black Friday deals are now appearing on the UK, France, Germany and other European Apple websites. The online stores have promotional discounts on the MacBooks, Apple TV, iPads, iPods and other accessories. Read more »

Apple’s Black Friday deal has gone live in Australia and slowly making its way around the world wherever the Apple Online Store is available. Unlike previous years where the company offered discounts on the products themselves, this year it is offering Apple Store Gift Cards with purchases.

The denomination of the Apple Store Gift Card depends upon the product you purchase. If you buy an iMac, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, you’ll get a A$150 gift card. An iPad Air will get you A$75 gift card and the iPad mini, iPad 2 and iPod touch will get you A$ 50 gift card. If you buy the iPod nano, you’ll get a A$ 25 gift card. Read more »

The Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 is a great tablet, especially if you consider its price. But there’s one problem – it’s stuck with Amazon’s customized Android and Amazon’s own app store. With a bit of hacking, you can change part of that.

The Fire HDX has been rooted, which makes it possible to install the Play Store (though it’s not easy). Read more »

Nokia announce UK pricing and availability of the Lumia 2520 tablet. The 4G LTE slate with Windows 8.1 RT on board will be exclusively offered by John Lewis starting next week, on December 4.

The Nokia Lumia 2520 will be priced at £399.99. Read more »

DisplayMate, the website which specializes in rating and comparing display tech of mobile devices and laptops, has sharply criticized Apple’s iPad mini 2 in its latest shootout, pitting it against the Kindle Fire HDX 7 and Google Nexus 7.

The biggest criticisms come in regards to the color gamut and accuracy. The Retina screen of the new mini is way off what the iPad 3, 4 and Air have been offering so far in this respect. Read more »

The launch of the Apple iPad mini 2 was delayed relative to the iPad Air launch and even with the late start, the smaller tablet still suffers from availability issues. Digitimes quotes sources who claim that the production bottlenecks responsible for the low supply have been cleared, though, and everything should be back to normal soon.

It was the new Retina display that caused Apple’s headaches – the 7.9″ 1536 x 2048 pixel display is one of the defining features of the new model. Read more »

Microsoft has released a bunch of new commercial on its official YouTube account. Most of them focus on what the new Surface 2 can do and what the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab 3 can’t.

The videos show some of the Surface 2′s key features – the full USB port, the complete Office package, multiple account support and the gesture support. Read more »

The PC market as defined by analyst firm Canalys – desktop computers, laptops and tablets (devices with 7″+ screens) – is experiencing a major shift. The firm predicts that next year, tablets will make up half of the total PC market. And the PC market is growing (despite the declining shipments of desktops and laptops) thanks to a huge spike in tablet sales.

Tablets are almost there already – in the third quarter this year they accounted for 40% of the PC market and the shipments in terms of units was a hair short of the shipment numbers of laptops. Read more »

Barnes & Noble has had a hard time recently (heck, most manufacturers have had a hard time recently) competing with the runaway success that has become Amazon’s Kindle tablets.

In an attempt to pry away some market share, B&N looks to be working on new versions of its popular Nook tablets line as revealed by the popular GFXBench GPU benchmarking tool. Read more »

Nokia has just released a new commercial about its first slate – the Lumia 2520 running on Windows 8.1 RT. It is one minute long and takes a few jabs at the Apple’s iPad.

The ad highlights the smart keyboard, the fast charging battery and the pre-installed Microsoft Office. Read more »

Nokia is expanding into new categories with a tablet and two phablets, but talk from Digitimes is that Nokia will soon follow up with a new slate dubbed Nokia Lumia 2020. There’s not a lot of info available for the tablet other than that it will run Windows 8.1 RT and that it will have an 8″ screen.

Digitimes sources say the Lumia 2020 will target the mid- to high-end segment, so it most likely won’t cost $200and compete compete with the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HDX. Read more »

Google has rolled out the latest Android 4.4 KitKat update for the Cellular edition of the Nexus 7 slates. It should be available for both 2012 and 2013 models of the tablet.

The KitKat update has already landed on the Wi-Fi only versions of Nexus 7 as well as on the Nexus 4 smartphone. Read more »

As if the Nexus 7 wasn’t already a desirable enough tablet, the 2nd generation model has been discounted to last year’s prices from several top retailers.

The 16GB WiFi-only model can now be had for $199, while the 32GB variant will run you $239. Read more »

Android is the undisputed leader in smartphones but has seen criticism when it comes to tablets as many of the apps for those are nothing more than a blown up phone versions.

With its new update to the Play store Google tries to remedy that somewhat by making the Designed for Tablets view the default one – it lists apps that should be tablet-optimized. Read more »

We expected the Apple iPad mini 2 to launch alongside the iPad Air – many people did – but that wasn’t quite the case. Anyway, the initial hurdle has been overcome (mostly overcome, shipping is sluggish in some markets) and it’s time to look at what could be the new most popular tablet, dethroning the 9.7″ iPad, which held that title for a long time.

The original iPad mini was just reheated iPad 2 in a smaller package, but the second iteration promises to get everything right. Read more »