A study was done that used MRI scans of the brains of 27 adults to determine that humans learn new words better by hearing them than they do by learning them visually. One of the authors of the study then told the Daily Mail that it means children who use iPads will learn fewer words than previous generations. Nope. It does not.

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North Korea has come out with what's basically its own version of an iPad: The Samjiyon. Unlike the iPad, which is used to access the Internet to get movies, books, and music in addition to communications and basic web-browsing, the Samjiyon does not get Wi-Fi, and is instead basically a touchscreen tablet devoted to delivering government propaganda and also slingshot games, because North Korea.

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TV taxes, or license fees per television set, are pretty common throughout Europe, providing funding for many large public broadcasters across the continent, such as the much-loved BBC. This week, though, Sweden updated their structure for collecting the television tax to reflect how more and more people actually watch TV, which is not on their TV. With that in mind, the television tax will now apply to any citizen with a computer or tablet as well.

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If you're Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, using your homepage to call out a competitor is one of the most prominent ways to do so. Following the iPad Mini announcement by Apple, there have been many comparisons made to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets. The majority of these have wondered how Apple intends to compete effectively when there are other options available that have higher specifications while still managing to be cheaper. Amazon's asking the same question by directly comparing the capabilities of Apple's offering to their own.

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When it comes to Apple, things tend to move very quickly. Apple announces the iPad Mini, and it's available the next week. Apple releases one version of the iPad, and then they release a new one just seven months later. Apple releases a new product, and Apple's critics make funny videos at Apple's expense.

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As sad as it is that Google had to cancel their media event for tomorrow on account of Franken-Sandy, it may not be that big a loss, since most of things they planned to unveil seem to have already popped up online. First, the Nexus 4 smartphone was revealed after somebody left one at a bar. Now a video of another of Google's flagship Nexus devices, the rumored Samsung-built Nexus 10 tablet, is giving Android fans an extremely short sneak peek.

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Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite, the newest version of their dedicated E-reader, doesn't seem like it would be incredibly popular with the reverse-engineering, hardware-hacker set: It's black and white, and really one designed with purpose in mind... reading. Then again, maybe that's exactly why someone decided to jailbreak it, opening up to world for adventurous Kindle-users to new and exciting features like... weather widgets, and other stuff you could've done if you had gotten a fully-functional tablet instead.

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Not wanting to be outdone by Amazon's fleet of new Kindles, it sounds like Barnes & Noble will strike out in a new direction with their next generation of Nook tablets. According to Digital Trends, B&N plans to announce a new Windows 8-powered Nook at the end of September, which will likely launch alongside the new operating system in late October.

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One of my biggest problem with tablets is the issue of typing on them. There's limited tactile feedback; sure you can get haptic, but you still can't feel your way around the keys. Considering the limited tactile feedback, there are too many "keys" too close together. And since you need both hands to be at all efficient on a standard QWERTY, you have to go find someplace to set the sucker down so you can treat it like a keyboard. Adam Kumpf must have felt the same way, because he's developed a one-handed tablet keyboard that solves almost all of these problems.

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When the iPad first released, many analysts speculated that the device had no place amongst consumers, except amongst the diehard techies that needed to own every new device. Some speculated that the tablet PC wouldn't find a home amongst casual computer users due to the smaller screen and lack of keyboard. However, as the industry quickly found out, the opposite took place, and the casual users were the ones that adopted the tablet PC much more than the hardcore computer users. It seems obvious now -- why would a power user give up a mouse, keyboard, and horsepower? Why wouldn't a casual user adopt an easy-to-use touchscreen interface?

An easy-to-use, portable device is generally what the casual market likes, and that type of device makes it easy to consume anything the device can actually run. In the case of the tablet PC, the Pew Research Center in collaboration with The Economist Group found that 77 percent of tablet owners use their tablet every day, and spend an average of 90 minutes on them -- an amount of time that one would speculate accounts for an average person's personal computer time per day. One of the most popular activities spent on the tablet is consuming news, and 3-in-10 tablet users actually spend more time consuming news now that they have a tablet. News seems to be going the way of the portable device, with the tablet leading the charge, and here's all that information. Infographically.

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In an attempt to replace the stereotypical map-table with figurines and one of those little, miniature push-broom thingies, the company AAI has developed a giant touchscreen tablet that could allow commanders to give orders to troops on the ground the same way you pick the angle you want to launch your bomb bird.

The tablet is two feet by three feet and uses collected surveillance information to show a map of the war-zone that is as accurate and up to date as possible, including simple stuff like terrain and structures, but also the location of friendly and enemy troops. The enemy troops part won't always be perfect, of course; the tablet does not allow you to disable the fog of war function.

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Windows 8, the simply-named successor to Windows 7, has been making the rounds lately and seems to be a step in an appropriate direction for the once-king-but-now-threatened operating system. The increasing prevalence of Apple computers in the past few years has put the fire under Microsoft and now the tablet revolution brought on by the iPad is changing the game even more. Microsoft, it seems, is adapting well to the pressure. That is, Microsoft is not releasing another Vista disaster.

Perhaps the most unique, standout feature of Windows 8 is that it's a tablet OS. But it's also a desktop OS. But it's also a tablet OS. That is to say, if you have Windows 8 on your tablet, it will be the same as Windows 8 on your desktop. It supports traditional touchscreen gestures like swiping to change windows and multi-touch, but also standard mouse and keyboard equivalents like alt+tab.

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Even though Sony is currently experience a public relationship nightmare, that hasn't stopped them from announcing their entrance into the tablet arena. The two tablets, dubbed the S1 and S2, will be running Android 3.0 Honeycomb, be DLNA-enabled, and will be capable of WiFi, 3G and 4G, as well as be PlayStation Suite enabled, which means they'll be able to play select PSOne games, like Sony's Xperia Play.

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Dude: Dell's global head of marketing Andy Lark has Apple fans in a furor over his recent dismissive remarks about Apple's future in the tablet market that it more or less created. Lark, speaking to CIO.com: "Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex." Per Lark, Dell is the company that is poised to win the enterprise market in the long run because "the majority of [Dell's] business isn’t in the consumer space." Apple fans might laugh this away, but it's plausible enough:

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If you aren't sure whether or not you want to run out and sell your iPad to collect some money for the slightly thinner iPad 2, the above handy tablet comparison chart over at TiPb will hopefully make the decision process a little easier. Of course, once you weigh your options, you still have to come to terms with iPad 2, man. iPad 2. Head on past the break to see a larger version of the chart.

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It's been observed in the past that the Nook Color, with its color LCD display and its Android operating system, blurs the line between e-reader and tablet computer; consider that line erased. The Nook-hacking community has rooted Barnes & Noble's $250 reader, and as the triumphal Angry Birds photo above indicates, this means that the Nook Color is now open to sideloaded Android apps. With an 800 MHz ARM Cortex A8-based processor, 512 MB RAM, and storage capacity of 2 GB, expandable to 16 GB with microSD (compare to the iPad's 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 256 MB RAM, and storage from 16 to 64 GB), that's not too shabby for the price. Full Nook Color rooting instructions available here, but be warned:

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The buzzier likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have their every move obsessively scrutinized, but it's worth highlighting when a less trendy old Internet vet pulls off something forward-thinking and gets it really right. Yahoo has quietly launched a new homepage for tablet computer users, which you can check out at http://www.yahoo.com/tablet. If you're on a non-tablet computer, it loses something in translation, but viewed from the 9.7-inch screen of an iPad, it not only looks pretty, but provides a touchscreen-savvy functionality that's still lacking on most of the web. Also cool and new from Yahoo: Its recently launched Yahoo Clues application, which lets users track trending search terms, with an additional layer highlighting the demographics among whom different searches are most popular.

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