Sony Tablet P: At what price dual screens?

Sony's dual-screen Android tablet looks cool and can compact itself to fit into your pocket, but does its novel design preclude it from delivering a solid tablet experience?

"The Sony DS?". That was my first choice for the headline of this piece, but I felt it was a bit too cute and somewhat misleading.
So, do dual screens improve or hinder the tablet experience?

Design

The first thing you'll notice about the Sony Tablet P is the dual-screen, hinge-based design that allows the tablet to be compacted, like a clam shell.
The second thing is that, once folded, the tablet looks not unlike a large eyeglass case, that will likely fit into most large pockets.

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Amazon Leads Price War: Drops AWS Pricing Again, Leans Heavy on Reserved Instances

According to Amazon's blog today, the company is now on their 19th price cut since AWS debuted, but who's counting? Well, they are, apparently. The company is lowering pricing on EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are all dropping significantly. Significantly, Amazon is heavily emphasizing its price cuts on Reserved Instances.

The EC2 pricing is dropping by up to 10% for on-demand instances. If you're consuming Reserved Instances, Amazon is dropping prices up to 37%.

Amazon is also appealing to heavy users with its price cuts, offering volume discounts of 10% for customers that own more than $250,000 of Reserved Instances for additional Reserved Instances. After the $2 million mark, Amazon is offering a 20% discount, and Amazon is asking customers to call if they pass the $5 million threshold.

The prices for RDS are dropping by similar amounts. If you're using on-demand RDS, pricing drops by up to 10%. Amazon has shaved pricing as much as 42% for Reserved Instances of RDS. Likewise, ElastiCache is dropping by up to 10% if you use on-demand instances. (ElastiCache doesn't have reserved pricing on its pricing page.)

What's interesting, aside from the actual price drop, is the emphasis Amazon is putting on the Reserved Instances. By moving more customers to Reserved Instances, Amazon can better plan its capacity needs for the next few years and helps lock customers into using AWS. Companies could switch to RackSpace, Google or another provider – but they'd be losing some significant chunks of change in doing so.

This seems like a pretty smart move on Amazon's part, and I'm wondering how long it's going to take for other providers to introduce something similar. As far as I know, Amazon is the only major player offering this kind of pricing scheme and seems to be handily undercutting the other players.

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Price tags hung on Sony Xperia U and Xperia P

Sony announced two new smartphones at the MWC this year, part of the Xperia NXT lineup ? the affordable Xperia U and the high-end Xperia P. Today we got their prices for you.

The youthful Xperia U is going to cost ?259. As you should probably know already ? it will come with two exchangeable bottom plastic caps depending on the main color. The white Xperia U has white and yellow bottom covers, while the black version comes with black and pink accents.

The Xperia P is based on the same dual-core NovaThor U8500 chipset, but comes with a bigger 4-inch qHD Reality display with WhiteMagic technology, a better camera and more storage. There are no exchangeable parts on the panels though. This one is priced a lot higher than the U model ? ?449.

The Xperia P retail price is very close to the first NXT gadget ? the Xperia S. Sony might want to consider it, because the quad-core gang is coming soon and it will give the Xperia NXT series a tough time for sure.

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HTC's One X, One S, and One V get a contract free price

In case you were wondering how much of your hard earned money to set aside in order to get one of the hotly announced HTC One smartphones, we have some good news for you. The HTC One X, One S, and One V are already available for pre-order on the website of UK's retailer Clove.

The flagship One X will logically set you back the most with its ?492 (?580; $781) price tag (including VAT). The One S on the other hand, costs the easier to swallow ?450 (?531; $715). HTC One V is dirt cheap compared to the aforementioned two with a ?264 (?311; $420) price to go with its retro look.

The HTC One X and One S will start shipping on April 5, while the One V will become available on April 26.

Wondering which one from the three will suit you best? Check out our hands-on impressions of the devices from MWC here.

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