Rick Broida

Barnes & Noble will stop making color tablets, meaning its existing inventory will be sold on the cheap. Is now the time to buy a Nook HD? …

Reuters News

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. said it will open 500 special stores in existing Best Buy stores in the United States (150 in Canada) to sell exclusively Windows-based tablets and computers and other Microsoft products. It’s an effort to revitalize sales of its flagship operating system.

Microsoft, which has a chain of 70 or so of its own Microsoft Stores and kiosks in shopping malls, said last week that the initiative will add more than 1,200 Best Buy Microsoft-trained sales associates to help customers.

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Cnet News

Airline passengers may be able to use their favorite electronic gadgets from takeoff to landing if new FAA guidelines come to pass.

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to ease the restrictions on the use of certain devices at lower altitudes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Citing “industry officials and draft recommendations prepared by a high-level advisory panel to FAA,” the Journal reported on Friday that passengers would be spared from having to turn off all electronic devices, though cell phones may or may not remain on the banned list. …

CNet News

Microsoft backtracked Wednesday on its much-derided policy that would have required Xbox One gamers to connect their consoles to the Internet once a day to prevent game piracy.

Microsoft faced a huge backlash when it announced the policy, just before the E3 video game conference earlier this month. Then, the company said it would allow gamers to play offline for up to 24 hours on a primary console, or 1 hour if they were logged onto a separate console accessing their library of titles. At that point, offline gaming would have been disabled until players re-establish a Web connection. …

CNet News

Instagram has video — 15-second, filtered, camera-stabilized miniature movies, to be exact. But more importantly, with the release, video will finally get its moment in the spotlight.

Thursday, Facebook-owned Instagram added video sharing, giving members a way to capture up to 15 seconds of video and frame their footage, using a filter or automatic camera stabilization, in the best light possible.

Though the product bears resemblance to Twitter’s Vine, which allows for 6-second clips, Instagram video comes with the qualities that its built-in audience of more than 130 million people have grown to love: it dramatically improves upon the act of capturing video. It’s as if Instagram is repeating history, doing for video what it’s already done for the photo by making the medium approachable to the masses. …