Barnes & Noble has come out of nowhere and taken the eBook Reader market and pulled an “Apple iPhone” on it. Sure there are plenty of great eBook readers on the market, with Amazon selling it’s Kindle and Kindle DX to great fame, Borders touting the Sony eReaders, and then iRex and Plastic Logic, who are sort of there. But with the “nook” Barnes and Noble has something really solid. As leaked earlier to Gizmodo, the reader is comprised of two screens, one eInk screen to read, and a smaller 3″ multitouch screen across the bottom for everything else. You can easily control your reader, type on the virtual keyboard, user a CoverFlow-esque book browser, and control your music through a great capacitive display. What’s more, all of this retails at a price point lower than Amazon at just $259. Gizmodo has got a great hands-on with the reader, while CrunchGear has a nice little comparison of the four major eBook Readers on the market. But what’s really interesting is how well thought out the nook really is. For example, you can lend books you own to friends and family for a 2 week period (just like real books!). Not only that, but they (and you) can read those books wherever you want: the nook, iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac, PC, Blackberry, and (soon) Windows Mobile! The nook even remembers your place, notes, and highlights across all the different environments. The next “reading” feature is that you get to read one book free on the device each time you go to a Barnes & Noble store. You can even sample books on the reader to see if you like them before buying the whole book. Finally, it’s still got a great battery life at 10 days, 3G and WiFi, and the bottom screen runs Android so there are plans for apps to be developed for it in the future, possibly better utilizing the built-in 2GB memory and SD card reader? Videos anyone? Overall, this looks great, solves a lot of issues people had with browsing the Kindle store through a eInk display, and I plain love it.

Similar to the Mac OS X’s Expose functionality, this addition to the Home button functionality displays up to nine iPhone screens allowing you to quickly go from one screen to another. I don’t know about you, but I currently have about 5-6 pages on my iPod Touch, and now that I am switching to an iPhone, I am sure to add another 1-2 pages of applications (some default stuff like Phone, Messages, Camera, Compass, and some unofficial stuff that now be useful now that I have a camera and GPS ). For people like me, functionality like this is awesome and would save me a bit of time when I am switching from one screen to another. Sure I could just go and search for the application, but that involves so many more button clicks! What do you think? (Found on MobileCrunch)

As predicted earlier, Apple has announced a new multi-touch Magic Mouse, which looks very sleek and very cool. It’s multi-touch abilities allow you to use a visually clean mouse to scroll, left and right click, switch tabs/pages, and even zoom in and out. They also announced a new Macbook, which retains some of the styling of the old one, but is now unibody, has a glass multi-touch trackpad, LED backlit, and a non-removable 7 hour battery. Finally, they announced new iMacs, which now come bundled with a wireless keyboard and the recently announced Magic Mouse. They are 16:9 ratio screens, and lose the square-shape of the old, and become more rectangular and take on the styling of Apple’s 23″ LED display. All in all, some nice interesting stuff, which I am glad to see Apple is announcing here instead of at an event. Leaves hope for more interesting stuff for then.

18 feet by 4 feet. Three 1920 pixel projectors. Six users with full multi-touch capabilities and localized audio. And multiple GPUs powering the whole thing so that 4K and 6K images can be zoomed in until they occupy the entire screen. The system is also smart enough to detect when a new person steps up the screen, and then dynamically provides the user a workspace through which he can browse the entire inventory of Hard Rock photo and video memorabilia in real time, and at full resolution. (Found on Gizmodo)

Hey Apple! Way to go raining on Barnes & Nobles’ parade by stirring up rumors of a product announcement tomorrow. Engadget is reporting that Apple is preparing to announce a bunch of new products (without sending any invitations to the press?.. weird), including “new iMacs and plastic MacBooks, revved Mac Minis (including one that runs OS X Server), a new multitouch “Magic Mouse” and some sort of multitouch desktop trackpad accessory.” We can only wait and see.

Remember the Droid ads that Verizon was reported to be running yesterday? Well Boy Genius Report has managed to get his hands on Verizon’s Motorola Droid. Initial thoughts he has is that the phone is nearly as thin as the iPhone 3GS, but still has a full-ish QWERTY keyboard, which is “pretty usable and has a soft-touch rubberized finish”. It’s got a huge, capacitive display that is “the best screen we’ve ever seen on an Android handset”. And it’s running Android 2.0 on “the fastest Android device we’ve ever used. (It’s running a TI OMAP3430 processor)”. Not bad at all, but will be looking forward to the full review which should be up soon (hopefully). (Found on Boy Genius Report)

A couple more details have leaked out about the Dell Adamo. Business Week is reporting that the laptop will be priced at about $2000 (YIKES!), but it will be the thinnest laptop in the world at just 0.39″, and if that isn’t cool enough, the front lip has a “heat-sensing strip on the lip that, when swiped with a finger, glows white and automatically opens the aluminum lid.” Inteeeeerrrrrrrreeeeessssttting… so there’s a motor that opens the lid? The other thing being reported is that the laptop will be unveiled on October 22nd (how many of you think that it’s a coincidence that Windows 7 launches on the same day?). (Found on Engadget)

This looks fantastic. Gizmodo has received leaks of what Barnes & Noble may be announcing on October 20th, and their new/next eReader model looks truly amazing. They’ve taken an eInk display and then merged it with an iPhone-like multi-touch color display. There are a couple screenshots that have the multi-touch display showing a coverflow-like display of books on the device. I look forward to reading more about it in two days. Looks like someone is going to put a fight up against Amazon and their Kindle. (Found on Gizmodo)