Newspipe: Acer Iconia Tab A500; Pandora evils; No iPad 2 for you?

By Richi Jennings. April 8, 2011.

Welcome to Newspipe: a wrap-up of interesting stories in a handy, easily-digestible size. This time: Acer accepts pre-orders for its $449 "Iconia Tab A500" 10 inch Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet; Pandora caught with its hand in the privacy jar; and did Apple slap Best Buy, stopping it from selling the iPad 2? Oh, and stand by for a huge Patch Tuesday.

 
Acer is off to the races with its first Android tablet. The $449 Iconia Tab A500, a 10.1 inch slate running Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") should give Motorola (MMI) something to think about. Agam Shah implies it might have been sooner, but for ex-CEO Gianfranco Lanci. Kit Eaton sees it as the next iPad challenger for people to chatter about. Expect it in U.S. stores April 24.

Also, expect Apple fanbois to point and laugh in unison. Is anyone else bored with the crazy, tribal nature of the mobile platform war?

 
Pandora, you've been a naughty girl, so get back in your box. Veracode analyzed the chatter from the Pandora smartphone app and were shocked (shocked!) to find it leaking personal information to advertisers, including GPS position, birthday, gender, and the phone's unique ID. The finger seems to point to the in-app advertising libraries, rather than the app authors themselves. Kara Tsuboi finds it "frightening and upsetting," but admits its a complicated issue.

Not so complicated for federal prosecutors to understand. Legal precedent could be set here that may haunt us for a long time to come.

 
Top iPad 2 tipsters tipped off Devin Coldewey and Chris Rawson that Apple has pulled Best Buy's remaining stock of iPad 2s, due to the store's allegedly-irregular sales tactics. It's said that Best Buy was holding back inventory artificially and lied to customers about it being out of stock. Best Buy appeared to deny the rumor, but ignored the lying allegation.

If true, no wonder Apple is upset -- its carefully planned launch strategy is predicated on huge early sales (not to mention lines of nerds in lawn chairs).

 
Oh, and next week is Patch Tuesday week. Buckle up: it's gonna be a doozy. As Gregg Keizer reports, it fixes 64 security bugs -- no second-Tuesday has had more. Microsoft's advance notice promises 17 patches, nine of them classified critical. Asavin Wattanajantra joins the usual suspects fingering Microsoft's "slipshod design and coding practices."

Cheap shot is cheap. You try repairing a truck engine as it thunders down the highway at 65.

 
That's all for this edition of Newspipe. Feel free to drop a comment below...
 

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: TLV@richij.com.

You can also read Richi's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.