Gadgetory

it's Monday December twelfth 2011 I'm Wilson Tang on cnet com and it's time to get loaded Amazon's Kindle Fire was released to great demand a few weeks ago according to the online retailer that fire was the most successful product it has ever launched but enthusiasm for the fire may be waning user and professional reviews across the web are panning the user interface and awkward button placement or just lack of buttons all together in the face of turning opinion amazon has declared that it will be releasing an update in the next two weeks that promises to improve performance across the board and think some outstanding user interface issues still for just two hundred dollars we can't help but feel that the fire is still a steal speaking of low-priced tablets HP we started its touchpad fire sale this sunday night at seven p.m. eastern and units sold out within minutes the 16 gigabyte touchpad sold for just a hundred dollars while the 32 gigabyte version sold for a hundred and fifty dollars the original webOS tablets from HP may have failed but that doesn't mean that the operating system is dead after weeks of speculation HP's new CEO Meg Whitman announced on Friday that it will be open sourcing webOS the move while a dramatic change considering HP bought software and company for 1.2 billion dollars was viewed by many as the safest way for HP to capitalize on some of the developer and tech enthusiasts love for webos the company however says don't expect any new webos products to be available in 2012 a more mobile OS news google has updated the web version of its android market with new sorting and display options that hopefully will help would be at buyers find better apps each review will now display the mobile device that it was reviewed on and users can sort reviews by helpfulness date or rating the new features haven't made their way into the android market app yet though a more apt news Apple announced that the Mac App Store has officially surpassed the 100 million download mark the pc software app store is available only on Mac OS 10 version snow leopard and lion and while 100 million apps sounds like a lot keep in mind that apple recently reported that the mobile iOS App Store averaged 1 billion monthly downloads and over 18 billion apps have been downloaded since its in 2008 finally in some industry news companies and analysts are sending positive reports about parts of the industry while other reports don't look so cheery first the bad news due to the flooding in Thailand Intel is forecasting that it will take a hit to its business by a billion dollars because of the hard drive shortage in the meantime Samsung reports that it believes it will sell 300 million handsets and Apple's MacBook Airs expected to be the top ultrabook of the season both sets of devices do not use hard drives those are headlines for today I'm Wilson Tang for cnet.com and you've just been loaded