Samsung’s Galaxy was looking pretty good until…

Samsung Galaxy…this. See what I’m talking about? How about that 799 Euro price tag. That’s like $1,000 people. For a tablet. For an unproven tablet running Android (which doesn’t cost anything to license, by the way) that’s one hell of a price tag, and it points to one thing: contracts.

A Samsung exec told the Wall Street Journal that the Galaxy would cost somewhere between $200 and $300, which means the rest will have to be covered somehow, presumably via contracts. There is the remote possibility that Amazon got the price wrong – way wrong – but I doubt it. If Samsung is really going carrier contract for the Galaxy, you can bet the only people buying will be very serious Android enthusiasts, likely people hoping to root the device (which could justify the price tag for some).

  

JooJoo only took 90 preorders, 15 of which were returned

Chandra with the JooJoo.The JooJoo lawsuits have unearthed some very interesting information. Apparently the device formerly known as the CrunchPad isn’t doing as well as expected. It isn’t doing well at all. To date there have been just 90 JooJoo preorders, that’s a nine with one zero after it, and 15 of those have been returned (which supposedly hasn’t been easy).

If you’ll remember, the initial run of JooJoo’s was supposed to finance a run into high production and provide the financing to support a legal defense against TechCrunch and Michael Arrington. For some reason I don’t think $44,000 is going to do that.

Part of the problem is that the JooJoo was announced in the same month as the iPad at the same price. Who are you going to buy a $500 tablet from, Apple, or some company you’ve never heard of for reasons other than the lawsuit brought against it because the tablet it’s selling may be stolen IP. I think we all know the answer to that one.

Source: Gizmodo

  

Apple’s real iPad focus: TV

Steven Colbert with an iPad.The iPad may have been sold to the world as the device that will save publishing, but Apple has shown its real focus now that we’re just weeks away from release. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple put the publishing content on the “backburner in favor of focusing on other content,” like a subscription-based television service.

Apple wants to make a sort of “best of TV” bundle available for a subscription fee, as well as offering episodic downloads for a dollar. Content providers have been wary of making any deals, likely because they’re afraid of getting burned like the music industry. Now that we’re years into the digital music business we can see that things haven’t been all bad for the labels, but there are probably some things they wouldn’t have agreed to if given the chance again.

It’s looking unlikely that we’ll see anything by the time the iPad launches, which leaves Apple in a position it knows well – using sales figures to produce contracts. The iPad has already had some nice presale figures. Once version 2.0 rolls out you can bet we’ll see more widespread adoption.

  

JooJoo situation gets a little stickier

JooJoo tablet.With legislation still looming I was completely unsurprised to read this story about Fusion Garage and the JooJoo tablet over at Gizmodo. Apparently this customer tried to pre-order a JooJoo and, after hearing about all the setbacks, decided to cancel his order and receive a refund. That refund was the hard part.

Fusion Garage support claims to have had some problems with refunding the buyer’s credit card through PayPal. After several emails, here’s the final request from Fusion Garage to the buyer to process the refund.

We have checked this at our end and there seems to be a problem with refunding via paypal.

To avoid any further wait time, could you send us your bank name, bank account name, bank account number, sort or swift code and your bank address.

We will have a direct transfer done to your bank account. If you could provide us the details today, we will ensure that the refund hits your bank account by friday of this week.

Please advise . Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Best,

joojoo

Oh yeah? Fusion Garage claims everything is legit, but so does that prince of nigeria that keeps emailing me about transferring money out of the country.

Source: Gizmodo

  

iPad sales estimates show 50,000 units in two hours

Apple iPad from the back.As pretty as the iPad may be, it’s not the magical, revolutionary device the company would have you think. It could be – it likely will be – it’s just not there yet. That hasn’t stopped people from buying it up like crazy. According to a report from Fortune, Apple may have moved as many as 50,000 units in its first two hours of pre-sale.

That’s not exactly gotta-have-it type sales, but it’s damn good for a device in the same category as the Kindle, which has supposedly only sold a couple million over the course of a few years. It’s also possible that the numbers are a good bit higher. The data used to estimate sales were order numbers, a decent chunk of which presumably included multiple iPads.

Whatever the number, the iPad will have no shortage of guinea pigs come April 3rd.

Source: Macrumors