Over at eWeek, Don Reisinger presents "A $199 iPad: 10 Reasons Apple Should Discount its Tablet". My retitle: "10 lame-ass reasons why Apple should slash iPad's price to $199".

I don't often go for another reporter's jugular, but Reisinger is the king of top-10 lists and this is among his worst. We post top-10s sparingly at BetaNews, because of their limited news value. But they do generate traffic. Top-10s are the purview of pagevew whores. Well, hell, Google search might filter this post for the "W" word; so much for my pageviews. Frack it. I'm not a traffic slut; I just have a bad reputation.

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Say you are building a mobile operating system. What are the major applications you build into that OS? Email, calendar, and contacts apps right? Not Research in Motion. The company that built its business on business productivity failed to include that in the original PlayBook OS.

Fast forward to today. RIM attempts to right the sinking ship and fix the disastrous initial release of Playbook OS 1.0 with the second version of that mobile operating system. You guessed it: the signature additions to the operating system are those native email, calendar, and contacts apps missing from RIM's first try.

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Most Apple products aren't exactly comparably low-priced, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that customers have higher incomes -- considerably more. Still, by how much is about as startling as the sticker shock a Dell Inspiron buyer gets when shopping MacBook Pros. I'm surprised Apple doesn't post a trauma team with security guards (unless perhaps Apple Store employees are registered EMTs) inside its retail shops; surely someone suffers cardiac arrest from the prices.

For some reason NPD and Nielsen issued data within days of one another looking at device buyer demographics -- hence why I'm posting about price at all. Beyond the press release data, which you can read in a few paragraphs, I wondered about Macs and iPads, seeing as analyst firms Canalys and DisplaySearch insist that tablets are PCs. So I asked Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about US demographics.

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Wall Street Journal claims that Apple is testing a smaller tablet, around 8 inches. The question: Would you buy one, if available?

Who knows, maybe your answer will help Apple, given how super-secretive is the company's product development. You can be the customer research Apple should seek before launching new products, particularly now that Steve Jobs -- master of good taste and guiding voice of one -- is gone. Please answer in comments and take our poll. But first read this perspective on what 8 inches could mean.

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Move over, iMovie, some serious competition moved on to iPad, today. Avid Studio for iPad is now available -- $4.99 for a limited time. Avid was the big name in filmmaking, long before Apple stormed the market with its pro and amateur products. Apple reigns king on iPad and the Mac. Can Avid provide some needed tablet competition?

By the specs and feature list, Avid Studio for iPad appeals. The app can directly capture video, use multiple content sources on the tablet (e.g., audio, photos and video), generate motion titles and graphics, precisely trim content, create picture-in-picture effects and much more. That's all while taking advantage of iPad's touchscreen. For people using Avid's PC software, there's an app exporter available, too.

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After a couple of private trial runs, nivio (the name is intentionally all-lowercase) has opened in limited beta to United States users. The service lets users have remote access to their own cloud-based Windows desktop, complete with app store-style access to premium applications for a monthly fee.

Nivio is made up of three parts: nDrive, nDesktop, and nApps. As the names may already suggest, they are a cloud storage platform, a cloud-based Windows desktop, and a platform for renting applications for your Windows desktop.

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Do I have your attention yet? Apple fans needn't worry, iPad has considerable lead over Android tablets. iPad global market share, as measured by mobile operating system, fell to 57.6 percent in fourth quarter from 68.2 percent a year earlier, according to Strategy Analytics. Meanwhile, Android tablets rose to 39.1 percent from 29 percent. Something else: Windows climbed from zero to 1.5 percent, and that's without tablet-optimized Windows 8.

Despite popular convention that people only want iPad, clearly somebody is buying Android. Strategy Analytics doesn't break down the numbers by vendor, but there's reason to ask about one. Amazon. For months there has been oft-asked question: Would $199 Kindle Fire cut into iPad sales? Last month, Amazon said that it sold over 4 million Kindles in December, but wouldn't specify how many were tablets. "Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter", Peter King, Strategy Analytics director, says. Perhaps that's answer enough.

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For a company which business depends on collecting data, Google sure was slow tabulating its report on smartphone usage. The study is available today, but the data is already outdated given strong holiday e-book reader and tablet sales and global impact of 37 million iPhones sold during fourth quarter -- the startling number Apple released yesterday. Still there are some fascinating trends here that likely will prove true had Google collected data in December or January rather than September-October.

What I find perplexing: 17 percent of US smartphone owners also have tablets -- 11 percent in Japan, 10 percent in United Kingdom and 8 percent each in France and Germany. Note: This data, as the rest, is for smartphones privately used. The percentages likely would be higher when including business use, and the trend is accelerating, says Google. My question, and this is really for you to answer: Why buy a tablet if you have a smartphone? Remember, Google isn't tracking PC owners who buy a tablet, but smartphones users who do.

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That's a dramatic change from just a few months ago and, perhaps not coincidentally, before new Nooks and Kindles lowered price of entry for both categories. Between December and January, the number of Americans owning one of the devices rose to 29 percent from 18 percent. During the same time period, the number owning a tablet rose to 19 percent from 10 percent, which is the same rise for e-book readers.

Pew Internet released the data earlier today, based on surveys conducted in mid December and early January. "These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers", according to the report. "However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted". As recently as August 9 percent of Americans owned e-book readers and 10 percent tablets.

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Last week I chimed: "Only Windows 8 can save the PC market now". Weak consumer computer sales forebode market shifts ahead, but so do those in the enterprise. An IDG Connect study reveals just how much: IT and business decision makers are augmenting or replacing PCs with iPads at an alarming rate.

"Fully 51 percent of IT and business decision-makers say they always use their iPad at work", according to the report -- and, of course, that's the number who actually own the tablet. Sixteen percent have replaced their laptop with an iPad and 54 percent supplement it. Remember, these numbers are for people responsible for corporate computing. As the wind shifts in their sails -- or should that be sales -- so does it eventually across the computing infrastructure. The data suggests that iPads are significantly starting to cannibalize PC sales -- and not just among consumers -- and it's consistent with recent global PC buying trends.

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National bookstore chain Barnes and Noble announced on Thursday that is considering a spin-off of its digital content business surrounding the Nook e-book software platform and its related hardware. The company says the Nook digital business is expanding so strongly that it could be separated from Barnes and Noble's other business units and operate on its own.

"We see substantial value in what we’ve built with our NOOK business in only two years, and we believe it’s the right time to investigate our options to unlock that value,” William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble said in a statement on Thursday. “In Nook, we’ve established one of the world’s best retail platforms for the sale of digital copyright content. We have a large and growing installed base of millions of satisfied customers buying digital content from us, and we have a NOOK business that’s growing rapidly year-over-year and should be approximately $1.5 billion in comparable sales this fiscal year. Between continued projected growth in the U.S., and the opportunity for NOOK internationally in the next 12 months, we expect the business to continue to scale rapidly for the foreseeable future.”

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Sony Electronics rang in 2012 with a surprising discount that may foreshadow much about the tablet market this year. Overnight I received email from a Sony spokeswoman saying the company "has permanently dropped the price of the Sony Tablet S by $100 starting today". This follows what seemed like a temporary $50 discount right before Christmas. If you paid $499.99 or $599.99 before Santa's sleigh ride, 16GB Sony S is now $399.99 and 32GB 499.99.

SonyStyle Store doesn't yet list the new pricing as permanent, merely "save $100 instantly". "On top of these savings, Sony is also currently offering (for a limited time) a store credit and five free Video Unlimited movie rentals, five free PlayStation Store game downloads and 180 days of free Music Unlimited service with the purchase of a Tablet", the spokeswoman says.

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The most successful brands define their category/function, like Xerox for "print". According to research NPD released today, for many business decision makers "tablet" means "iPad".

"The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for 'tablet' in the business market, leaving Apple poised to take advantage of the increased spending intentions of these SMBs", says Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis. Those spending intentions are on the rise, with 73 percent of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees planning to buy tablets -- eh, iPads -- during the next 12 months. That's up from 68 percent in second quarter.

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In both the home and work environment, there are numerous uses for remote access tools. For home users, the ability to not only access the files stored on a computer housed in another room but also take full control of it as if you sit in front of it can save a great deal of legwork reviewing a document you need to read or checking the status of a download, all without having to run up and down stairs. Used for work, the possibilities are almost limitless. Network administrators can control their entire network from almost anywhere -- homeworking becomes a possibility for a far larger number of people; the list just goes on and on. There are a number of remote access tools available for iOS, LogMeIn is not only one of the best known, it is also one of the best. And the great news is that it is now completely free of charge.

The app was previously available for $30, and while many people could see the benefits of using such a powerful and useful tool, the price was a little off-putting. With the launch of a free version of the app, which is mercifully light in the restrictions department, the world of VPN has opened up to a whole new audience who are now able to take advantage of remote access from a well-known name without having to part with any cash.

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Apple's iPad leads the tablet market. It's a fact supported by extensive market research, and you'd have to split hairs to try to refute it.

However, the tablet market has matured and segmented over the last two years, and data continues to roll in showing that Amazon has effectively capitalized on that segmentation with the Kindle Fire.

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