Best Buy, Verizon, Dell launch Cyber Monday deals

Best Buy, Amazon, Verizon, and Dell launched Cyber Monday deals featuring discounted laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Best Buy is calling its sale "Cyber Week" and puts Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba laptops at the top of the list on its launch page. All three come with Windows 7 Home Premium.
Best Buy laptops listed on Cyber Week page:

    Lenovo, $299.99: Model: 1450ABU. 15.6-inch LED-backlit display, AMD dual-core E-450 accelerated processor, 4GB memory, 320GB hard disk drive, and optical drive.
    HP Pavilion, $349.99: Model: g4-1229dx. 14-inch LED-backlit display, Intel dual-core "Sandy Bridge" Pentium B950 processor, 4GB memory, 500GB hard drive, and optical drive.
    Toshiba - Satellite Laptop, $379.99: Model: C655-S5305. 15.6" LED-backlit display, Intel Sandy Bridge Core i3-2330M processor (2.2GHz), 4GB memory, 320GB hard drive, and optical drive.
Dell, for its part, is offering an Inspiron 14R laptop for $399, $100 off regular pricing. It includes a 14-inch HD (720p) LED display, Intel Core i3-2310M processor (2.1GHz), 4GB of memory, 500GB hard drive, optical drive, and Windows 7 Home Premium.
Among other deals, Amazon is offering a Sony VAIO EJ2 Series (VPCEJ28FX/B) 17.3-inch laptop for $691.83, about $108 off the regular price. That model includes a 17.3 1600x900 display, Intel Core i5 processor (2.4GHz), 4GB memory, 640GB hard drive, and Blu-ray player.
Amazon is also offering an Android Honeycomb-based Toshiba Thrive tablet (16GB) for $372, discounted from $399.99.
At Best Buy, don't expect to find many $199 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, however. Most, if not all, of those have sold out over the last week or so at the national retailer.
Verizon is also chiming in with tablet and smartphone deals. With a two-year mobile broadband activation, an Android 3.2 4G LTE Motorola Xoom tablet is available for $199.99, $100 off the regular price.

Amazon's Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet Gird for Battle

Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet now seem locked in open battle.

For each company, the stakes are very different. Amazon needed to expand upon its already-successful Kindle line, which until this point had centered on a series of gray-scale e-readers, in a way that allowed it to

leverage its already-considerable presence in music and video. The result, the 7-inch Kindle Fire, places it in direct competition with other tablets on the market, including Apple’s iPad.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, released a year ago, offered some key advantages over those original gray-scale Kindles. The release of the Kindle Fire, however, blunted that edge; the bookseller is now relying on its new Nook Tablet to establish parity, at least in customers’ eyes, with Amazon’s offerings. The Nook Tablet is priced around $50 higher than the Kindle Fire, although Barnes & Noble executives have argued their device possesses advantages in screen quality and memory capacity.

Amazon began shipping the Kindle Fire to customers Nov. 14. Barnes & Noble followed suit with the Nook Tablet Nov. 16.

The Kindle Fire features tight integration with Amazon’s existing video, music and e-book services, along with its branded Appstore for Android. The 7-inch device also leverages a purpose-built “Amazon Silk” browser that relies on the retailer’s cloud architecture to speed Web page rendering. It requires WiFi to access streaming content.

The Nook Tablet, also 7 inches, doesn’t offer its own streaming video content, instead relying on partnerships with content companies such as Netflix and Pandora. Barnes & Noble also upgraded its gray-scale Nook Simple Touch with more advanced hardware and a lower price point, placing that end of its line on a similar collision-course with Amazon’s recently upgraded gray-scale Kindle devices.

Neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon releases sales numbers for their respective e-readers, although it’s generally assumed that the Kindle maintains a healthy market share lead over the Nook. That being said, the Nook Color managed to carve out some attention and mindshare over the past year. Trust that the two companies, through marketing and other venues, will fight tooth and nail for holiday-shopping dollars, and not only against each other, but also the other color tablets on the market. 

Barnes and Noble to open Nook Tablet $50 above Kindle Fire(Photo-Video)

Barnes & Noble Inc. this week said it will sell the new Nook Tablet at $249.00.

The Nook Tablet includes a 7-inch 1024 x 600 display, 1.2GHz Dual-Core CPU, 1GB RAM, 16GB Memory, 11.5 hours of reading time or nine hours of video viewing.

The final product will weigh at 14.1 ounces, 10 percent lighter than the Nook Color.

Pre-order sales for the Nook Tablet begin Nov. 7, with units shipping to customers around Nov. 17.

In addition, the Nook Simple Touch e-reader sells at $99.00 and the Nook Color MSRP has dropped $50 to Nook Color holds a price of $199.99.

By comparison, Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle Fire, to be sold Nov. 15, includes a full-color 7-inch multi-touch IPS display, Dual-Core CPU, 8GB Internal Memory, Wi-Fi functionality, and up to eight hours of battery life at $199.00.

Applications include the Amazon Silk Browser, E-Mail, Amazon Instant Video, Amazon Appstore, and Amazon Cloud Drive with unlimited cloud storage for Amazon content.

Finally, each Kindle Fire will include a free month of Amazon Prime membership.

Amazon in Sept. announced new Kindle models including the Kindle at $79.00, the Kindle Touch with touch display and built-in Wi-Fi at $99.00, and the Kindle Touch 3G which adds free 3G wireless functionality at $149.00.

Lady Gaga’s ‘Little Monsters’ Are Pissed At Amazon (Video)

Behold, the power of Lady Gaga. The pop superstar’s new album, “Born This Way,” managed to crash Amazon.com’s servers soon after the retailer offered it on sale for only 99 cents. Consumers, initially wowed by the discount, quickly became peeved by the dragging download speeds, and took to the album review section to complain not of Gaga’s music but of their ridiculous experience using Amazon—one fan I know said it took upwards of six hours to download the CD. 

For outsiders, it might be easy to chalk up complaints to spoiled Gaga fans (aka her “Little Monsters”), who arguably should be happy that they’re even getting “Born This Way” for under a buck. But for Amazon, the deep discount wasn’t a random bout of charity—it represented a huge opportunity to present consumers with an alternative to iTunes, and to introduce its cloud-based music service, which was recently overshadowed by Google’s entry to the digital locker space. Yet with such an opportunity on the line—Lady Gaga’s last release, “The Fame Monster,” was the best-selling album of 2010—Amazon crumbled under the pressure of its own marketing. Indeed, several hours after the servers went down, Amazon refused to elaborate beyond a brief and unapologetic statement. “We have been experiencing high volume on today’s Deal of the Day and downloaded have been delayed,” Amazon said. “All customers who order today will get the full [album] for $US0.99.” But many questions remain. Were high volumes not expected for today’s best-selling artist? Is Amazon not designed to handle high volumes? Does this say anything about the strength of Amazon’s cloud service, if servers crashed from one release alone? Requests to Amazon for answers were not returned. An Amazon spokesperson had earlier declined to give the number of downloads for Gaga’s album, and did not return subsequent requests for comment. In other words, Amazon’s strategy appears to be: Stay quiet and this will all go away. But that strategy seems at odds with the high bar of customer experience expected by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Only several weeks ago, Bezos appeared at a Consumer Reports event, where a moderator described how a recent CR study revealed that “people are livid over their inability to connect with a live person” at Amazon for customer service. In response, Bezos talked at length about the importance of customer experience and support at Amazon. According to Bezos, Amazon prides itself on eliminating the causes of most calls to customer service. “The best customer service is when the customer doesn’t need to call you,” he said. “The number one [reason for] contact has been, ‘Where’s my stuff?’ We have driven that contact down so far, and the way we’ve done that is by delivering everybody’s stuff.” Here, Bezos is referring to physical delivery, but the same holds true in the current context—Amazon has failed to deliver Gaga’s album digitally, and has left numbers and numbers of fans wondering, “Where’s my stuff?”