Starting at the end of March, readers are supposed to pay a $15 fee every four weeks in order to get access to the full content of the NYT website together with access granted through a smartphone application. This means a total fee of $195 for a whole year. Customers owning an iPad will be charged a $20 fee every four weeks for getting web and iPad access, as the NYT iPad application is said to incorporate supplementary features versus the smartphone version. This makes a total of $260 per year. Customers who want to access the NYT on all their devices will be charged $455 per year.

Costs for the subscribers of the paper edition, with “all devices” access included for the digital edition, are considerably more expensive. A seven-day home delivery is priced at $680 for the first year and $770 starting with the second one. What is peculiar is the difference between the lowest-cost paper subscription, which includes the “weekday only” version, but also the all-devices digital subscription, and the digital-only subscription. While the former is priced at $340 a year, the latter is by far more expensive.

The year-long digital subscription, offered to regular NYT website readers free of charge, is sponsored by car manufacturer Lincoln. It excludes access to the NYT on e-reader devices and also leaves out applications like the NYT Crossword or Premium Crossword. The NYT iPad and iPhone applications are free, but they currently offer only limited content and will also require subscriptions starting on March 28th.

He also said that other periodicals than WSJ surprisingly seemed to get good traction.

The 200,000 paid subscriptions represent a combination based on all sizes of tablet devices, which includes Android tablets, the iPad, the Nook and the Kindle. By contrast, the printed edition has currently a circulation of about 1.6 million.

In spite of these large sales numbers coming from tablets, News Corp has yet to reveal performance figures generated by paid subscriptions that were accessed from smartphone platforms.

Since the opening of the App Store, a long-debated question was that of where Apple should draw the line. As an example, Apple forbids any form of nudity in its App Store, even when there is no clear intention of sexuality. Attitudes on the human form are generally very relaxed in Europe compared to those of the United States. This results in the necessity of editing out nudity in advertising and other items when they are offered on the App Store. However, applications with “educational” sexual content are allowed and are frequently present at the top of the best-selling polls and are therefore unknowingly promoted by the App Store. About 5,000 sexually suggestive applications have been purged from the App Store this year in February, but there are others that still remain. Such applications arrive with an age rating, but apart from using Parental Control there is no other way on the App Store to block them from purchasing and being used.

Dixen said that iPhone Magasinet, another of his publications, had absolutely no problem to get approved. He also said that another of his magazines, Gear, which deals with gadgets in general, was featuring on its cover models partially-clothed. Ekstra Bladet, a Danish tabloid, had similar rejections because of the use of an image presenting a “page nine girl”, which is a popular feature in European publications that frequently feature a topless or nude woman inside a magazine in order to keep readers’ attention. German publisher Bild dealt with this restriction in March this year.

The company was also criticized for capricious censorship of language. For example, it has barred classics of literature like James Joyce with Ulysses and Oscar Wilde with The Importance of Being Earnest, but has allowed movies and podcasts full of profanity, with the MPAA rating only to guide buyers. Applications featuring Dalai Llama on the Chinese version of the store and violent comic books where also blocked, while violent movies and TV shows were allowed.

Dixen says that this form of censorship affects the value of the publications. He complains that it is necessary to obtain the approval of every application and every copy of the magazines. Dixen rhetorically asks what would happen if the next issue of the magazine about mobile phones in general presented a theme issue related to Android. According to him, approvals usually take up to two weeks and this could make information to be already out-of-date when it appears.

It is known that Apple itself has had problems with how far and where to control controversial application content and often attracted the anger of the developers. The vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple, Phil Schiller, said that the company had attempted to answer complaints coming from parents and women. When asked about the Sports Illustrated “Swimsuit Issue” application, which probably expresses the true meaning of the term “salacious”, he explained the difference between it and other similar applications, saying that it was a well-known company and its previously published content was broadly available in a “well-accepted format”.

Dixen added that the incident had been funny because not many magazines on Android would sell through Apple’s App Store. He also pointed out that where this policy would go was the important aspect of the whole topic.

Some hints were given by the reaction to tablets of the young Murdoch. He said the tablet would foster a new type of journalism. Compared to e-paper readers, tablets are full color and do resemble more to color print. As for the touchscreen, it allows users to directly interact with the content.

Daily Planet is expected to have its own staff, but also to rely on resources of News Corp media empire to get the news. The company has just hired an executive from Viacom as its head.

Rupert Murdoch’s interest in the tablet zone comes mainly from the intention of re-familiarizing customers with paid news, following more than a decade of free, ad-based material found on the web. For instance, The Wall Street Journal has a price of only $4 per week for applications residing on the iPad or Android tablets, which is enough to successfully compete with the printed edition. Many sites owned by News Corp, such as the Times of London or The Wall Street Journal, either did or have begun to require full access subscriptions.

Panasonic is currently making phones in Japan, but it ceased to export them back in 2006. It hopes to boost sales of smartphones three times in Japan by 2015, more than forecasts say.

Osamu Waki, head of mobile communications business at Panasonic, said that the company had misjudged the Japanese smartphone market. The company is now committed to catch up fast, viewing the rapid shift to Android.

Earlier last month, Panasonic unveiled a Lumix-branded smartphone with a proprietary operating system and took everyone by surprise.

Eric Schmidt did not exclude explicitly the possibility that some tablet makers run Chrome OS on their devices, since the open-source software is a flexible platform that can adapt to a wide range of hardware. Current Android builds do not have specific optimizations for tablets, but Android 3.0 will perhaps represent a convenient platform, functional with larger touchscreens.

Chrome OS is expected to launch in the next few months and will be present on notebooks equipped with ARM and Intel processors. The search giant, according to unconfirmed reports, would release a Google-branded smartbook that would be made by Inventec. Other devices are also expected to come from Hewlett Packard and Acer.

Huang said that it was great to compete against the iPhone and iPad, because those devices were really amazing. NVIDIA’s chief also estimated that both his team and the company’s partners were committed to compete with Apple and do a very good job.

The remarks NVIDIA’s CEO made have come after some of the tablet plans common to Google and NVIDIA had been delayed. Some companies, such as ICD and Compal, had been presenting Android tablets based on Tegra 2 hardware early in January. However, the first mainstream Android tablet did not come until September, when the Galaxy Tab of Samsung began to reach Europe. The first significant tablet based on NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 hardware was the Toshiba Folio 100, which began shipping only last week.

The year-long interval allowed Apple to announce, ship and mark high sales for its iPad tablet. The device had 95.5 percent of the total tablet market as of last summer. The position Apple detains now is expected to decline as soon as the Galaxy Tab will expand and companies like Motorola, LG, HTC and others will launch new Android tablets in the CES and around the event. Their prospects are still unknown until Google will unveil Honeycomb, its first tablet-ready version of the Android operating system.

The new device is expected to represent overall sweeping upgrades. Thus, it would move up to 14.4Mbps HSPA on networks that could support such a speed, as well as an eight-megapixel camera. It would be using the Gingerbread version of Android (2.3) and is supposed to be extremely thin. Its thickness may be compared to that of a classic iPod nano, thinner than most smartphones. An internal storage of 16GB, Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi are expected to port over from Samsung’s Galaxy S.

The launch of the device is scheduled for February next year, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress that will take place in Barcelona. It is not usual for Samsung to ship phones presented at the show very soon after the event, but the company reserves the show for what it estimates to be flagships like the Wave. Since the company would launch its device sooner, it is believed that Samsung hopes to pre-empt the iPhone’s usual mid-year update and also any possible rivals coming from Motorola and HTC.

Initial expectations were to sell more than three million of the Xbox 360 accessories by the end of the year, but the forecast was revised in order to reflect a much stronger demand than expected. Don Matrick, Interactive Entertainment Business president at Microsoft, suggests that the sensor is able to reach five million units sold before closing the holiday shopping season.

According to Chris Homeister, Best Buy senior vice president, on the night of the Kinect launch, there were lines of shoppers at their stores. To have surpassed one million Kinect sensors sold was therefore no surprise in his opinion, as the device seems to be a must-have gift at Best Buy for the holidays.

The standalone sensor, as well as several bundles, is already available in European and North American markets. Many countries from Asia will also be added very soon.

Google’s CEO also rejected a complaint about some features missing in older Android versions by explaining that their absence was not the same thing as fragmentation.

These statements contradicted directly criticism from the industry and evidence from the company itself as well. The company’s usage trackers have mentioned Voice Actions or many of the newer applications or application features.

Netflix also brought fragmentation into discussion when blaming DRM fragmentation for an Android application missing, while iPhones and the just-launched Windows Phone 7 devices have Netflix viewing already available. With no copy protection consistent across different operating system versions and even from a device to another, Android has let Netflix to negotiate with phone designers and add code for each individual device, while Microsoft and Apple used a different approach, namely write-once and use-everywhere.

Cross-device application support was also weakly represented, many applications needing special accommodations for less usual resolutions, such as Motorola’s 480×854, and also physical keyboards, as well as specific software and hardware combinations.

Although Google has denied fragmentation, it has seen support weaker. These repeated denials were used by Apple to attack Android’s weakness. CEO Steve Jobs accused Google of not being honest on the topic of openness and has put the debate in terms of integrated devices, such as the iPhone, versus fragmentation of Android.