Sunday, April 15, 2012

Printing Industry News Digest No.96, April 14, 2012

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 96, providing a summary of major news items from the printing, publishing, packaging, digital, and communications technology sectors. PIND incorporates brief summaries and links to the week's key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail, digging deeper behind the headline.

If evidence was ever needed that print still has a role to play in all communications and advertising campaigns, Kelly Mallozzi offers it, having received a piece of direct mail through the post from, of all companies, Google! Creative and attractive print, personalised in this instance, and with a great offer. What could be better?! You might also like to take a look at some suggestions for integrating print and social media.

For a point of debate on the future of print, you might also like to take a look at this excellent documentary piece (22 minutes long) on print and its challenges. Higher resolution would be even nicer, but it does explain many of the issues well.

Ink developments continue to abound in all forms of print, and Labels & Labeling have been taking a look at a number, including low-migration UV inks, and opaque UV flexo whites.

With more technology comes more crazy people trying to infect it! Mac owners will have had a particularly tough week, and might like to check out this link to find out more about the recent Trojan that made the news.

In the world of publishing, Time Out, New York, has announced new iPad and iPhone apps, whilst the Guardian provides a good overview of the magazine app market as it has developed to date. Switching to e-books, Apple still appears to be in hot water.

Tablet pricing comes back on our radar this week with a number of soon to be products, including the latest from Samsung. With the Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1) and (7.0) to be released in the US on April 22, it is pricing of $400 and $250 that grabs the eye as much as the ICS Android spec. Translate those prices directly to UK costs and £150 and £250 (near as) come out of the calculator – both very attractive you have to say! A decent 7-inch product for £150 [ignore price in review!] could get the tills ringing big time in our opinion.

With Apple dropping the price of its iPad 2 to something in the order of £325/£330 in the UK, you certainly can’t afford to be over that in our opinion. Samsung’s aggressive pricing of the 7-inch model also might help to persuade Apple that there is a market for its product in this format (or maybe the price with send them running!).

If Samsung is setting the benchmark with those numbers, the rest cannot afford to be too far away. Acer has certainly taken heed of this recent downward shift with the tag on its Iconia Tab A200 10.1-inch model showing a competitive £280. That does now have to be seen as real world territory for Android machines, otherwise even more buyers will tick the Apple box.

Toshiba, however, still wants to hang on to big numbers. One interesting big number that it has come up with, however, is a 13-inch tablet. Is Android good enough to be seen that big? For £400 / $650 you can find out. Stretch that to £470 / $750 for the 32Gb version.

Along with the inevitable growth of the tablet market, cloud services have to shape up, grow up and follow. CNet offers its thoughts on the best services for email, storage, movies, music, and more.

Next week we will aim to get into the Drupa spirit big time, as we look at the important unveilings offered by the show, and start to point readers who intend to visit in the right directions . . .

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 97. For an RSS feed of PIND, copy this link into your feed reader; and click here for the GenesisNews #Print Daily – you can even take out a free subscription for this daily news update on print, publishing, packaging and associated technology!

PIND096

Missed Issue 95, including Ryobi/Miyakoshi B2 digital? Then simply click here!

Issue 94: DM Screening and Morgana
Issue 93: Latest digital for Drupa
Issue 92: HP’s B2 digital press



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