Amazon's impressive new Kindle Paperwhite is set to launch in just a couple of days, but Barnes and Noble has decided that its going to put up a fight. Both Target and Walmart are showing that the price of the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight has been cut just ahead of the Paperwhite's launch. The new price of the Nook GlowLight? $119, the same price that Amazon has given the basic Paperwhite model.
The official Google Play store for digital media such as apps, music, and books, has been given a collection of real-life gift cards. This set of gift cards appears in $10, $25, and $50 denominations, and is able to be used on digital media only - no hardware or accessory purchases here! These gift cards will be available immediately if not soon at RadioShack, Target, and GameStop.
If you head to a Target store anytime between now and somewhere around the end of October, you're going to have a tough time finding yourself a tablet that isn't also an iPad. SlashGear has learned from several tipsters (including two Target employees) that they'll not be carrying any tablet computers, other than the iPad, until late in the year, much closer to the year-end holiday season. This of course includes the ill-fated Kindle Fire which you'll no longer find online and is being blown-out on the end-caps at Target stores nationwide.
Despite the method Apple used for massive iPhone sales at the launch of the iPhone 4S this past year, it appears now that the iPhone 4 will be exiting the show before the iPhone 5 hits shelves later this year. Several companies including Target and RadioShack have initiated a $49.99 sale price for the iPhone 4 with Best Buy joining this party just this week. Searches across several online sources (including Best Buy online) have yielded shows of low or no stock on the phone, this very possibly pointing toward the stock change that will certainly occur once the next-generation iPhone 5 hits shelves.
This morning it's been announced that Apple will not only be selling the new iPad from their own retail locations, they'll be working with a series of 3rd party stores as well - this likely spreading the stock thin for everyone involved. This iPad release will have Apple joined by Best Buy, RadioShack, Sam's Club, Target, and Walmart, not to mention the two big mobile carriers giving this iPad its first dose of 4G LTE: AT&T and Verizon. Like last year's release of the iPad 2, customers should expect lines to be long and stock to be short - people are already lined up waiting for the Friday 8AM release, believe it or not!
It looks like Target is at it again with a new trade-in promotion that will reportedly launch this Sunday, February 26. The promotion will be especially enticing for those of you wanting to trade up from your iPhone 4 to an iPhone 4S to get in on all that Siri action. The catch of course is that you'll have to sign up for a new two-year service agreement.
This week we're seeing so much news on the PlayStation Vita that you'd swear it hadn't already been on the market for months in Japan. What we've got though is a launch both in the USA and in the UK with the system showing up in Target stores as early as yesterday and pre-release bundles appearing at places like Gamestop from the start of this week. We've got the device here in the office and will be giving it an extensive review both in operating system and hardware along with the games that are available here at launch, but for now - columns galore!
The following may disturb some of you, but as a loyal Target shopper since before I was born (I'll address this in a moment), I find it sort of awesome: Target has a unique Guest ID for me with a record of everything I've ever purchased. Of course this record is based on the times Target was sure I was the person purchasing items, via credit card for example, and if a coupon was sent to my home and someone used it, they assume it was me and this is recorded as well. With this method, Target has become a superpower in the retail world and keeps us all in the fold with a perfect suggestion: "just buy everything here, why not?"
Target has apparently confirmed plans to open Apple "mini stores" in a select number of its retail locations, with 25 of the special displays set to open. Part of the company's new "the Shops at Target" push, which will include other themed "mini stores" focused on boutique home accessories and pet gifts, Reuters reports, putting upscale items in among Target's more typical budget fare.
Thought Apple is already sitting pretty inside Target stores across the nation inside hyper-controlled displays which noone can touch, they've been tipped to be expanding to store-within-a-store inside the year. According to a source speaking with Apple Insider, Apple is planning on operating Apple-branded mini stores inside 25 larger Target stores throughout the nation later this year. Visitors of the 1,000+ Best Buy stores across the USA may already have noticed similar miniature Apple stores inside the warehouses there - this would be something very similar inside what your humble narrator so lovingly calls the Big Red Living Room.
If you've been following along with the epic telling of Target Superstore's future in the Mobile business with your humble narrator, you know that they're certainly having an interesting time selling Android tablets. Amid the Apple's iPad 2 sitting always at least one aisle away from the Android selection in a MUCH nicer showing than the Android tablets have ever had and the smartphone wall being dominated by two iPhone displays three times the size of any other smartphone, one would think that Apple would be dominating. As it turns out, one Android tablet in particular may be jumping off the shelves.
This week Target will be evolving their mobile selection in several places, most notably in the tablet department, where Android tablets will be much closer to the smartphone selection than the iPad 2. For those of you that follow my analytics of the Target department store chain (whose home is right here in sunny Minnesota), you know that I've had more than one conniption fit over both the placement of Android tablets and the arrangement of their entire mobile section in general. Just this morning while picking up some random oddities, I noticed that big red may well have heard my siren call: the Android tablets are now less than 10 feet away from the smartphones.