One of my favorite tech demos back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2010 was Mirasol, a new kind of display from Qualcomm that combined some of the virtues of LCDs (color, respectable refresh rates) with the single biggest virtue of E Ink (crazy long battery life).  I saw it in person, was suitably impressed, and waited for the e-reader which Qualcomm said to expect by the end of the year.

The e-reader didn’t show up, and I kind of forgot about Mirasol–until yesterday. Here at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, there was a press conference with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and  someone asked him about Mirasol. Which I wish I’d thought to do.

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Turns out, people will gladly stare at an occasional ad on their Kindles to save a little money.

Amazon’s Kindle with Special Offers, an e-reader that shows advertisements and discounts on its home screen, is now available with a 3G connection. Like the Wi-Fi model, the 3G Kindle with Special Offers is $25 cheaper than its ad-free counterpart, selling for $164. The Wi-Fi version sells for $114.

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Barnes & Noble’s first e-reader was the original E Ink version of the Nook, which had its virtues but lagged far behind Amazon.com’s Kindle in terms of overall polish. Then the company released the Nook Color, which went off in an un-Kindle-ish direction: color, richly-formatted magazines, and Android apps.

Today, B&N announced another new Nook–and this one, it appears, is meant to take the Kindle on more squarely than either of its predecessors.It’s $139 (matching the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle, but not the ad-supported one). It looks like a Kindle, with a gray case and 6″ E Ink screen (and no color touchscreen strip, the most striking feature of the original Nook). It stresses great battery life–in fact, Barnes & Noble is claiming two months on a charge, vs. one month for the Kindle.

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A little over a week ago, I wondered whether the world needed tablets that were significantly less costly and significantly less fancy than the iPad and its most prominent rivals. A couple of commenters said that such a beast already existed: Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color e-reader. They had a point. At $249, B&N’s Android-based tablet is half the price of the cheapest iPad. Its 7″ color screen and industrial design are quite nice, but it doesn’t have a 1-GHz dual-core processor or  cameras or gobs of storage (it has a merely adequate 8GB) or 3G or other features which are becoming de facto accouterments on higher-end models.

Of course, Barnes & Noble has never pitched the Nook Color as an iPad killer. It calls it a “reader’s tablet,” and it gave the device a modified version of Android that doesn’t have the standard Android interface or access to the Android Marketplace. It’s Amazon.com’s cheaper, E-Ink-sporting Kindle that’s been in B&N’s crosshairs.

But when the company released the Nook Color last year, it did say it was working on an app marketplace of its own–a move that would make the Nook Color a little less of a dedicated e-reader and a little more of a general-purpose device. (Already, some geeky buyers had rooted their Nooks to turn them into standard Android tablets.) Today, B&N is launching that marketplace–which is a new section in the shopping area where it already sells books and magazines–as part of the Nook Color’s version 1.2 upgrade. And while it’s sticking with the “reader’s tablet” idea and saying it’ll focus on reading materials and complementary items, it’s also saying that it’s listened to consumers who think that a $249 Nook Color has a place as an alternative to pricier, more powerful tablets.

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Amazon is said to be in the process of developing its own Android tablet, according to gdgt’s Peter Rojas. Calling it an “open secret,” Rojas believes that the device may not be yet another garden-variety Android tablet, but rather akin to what Barnes & Noble did with the new Nook. There, Android was used as the core of a customized experience.

Like B&N, Amazon has a vested interest in seeing you buy things from them: thus the device itself would probably not be as expensive as most Android tablets. However the retailer sells music and movies as well as e-books: this means the company potentially would have multiple revenue streams to lean on for its “tablet.” And that new Android App Store? And all those Android developer hires? Is it making sense now?

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It’s a sign of the times. Amazon on Wednesday said that it will allow Kindle users to borrow e-books from their local libraries. The service would be available at about 11,000 locations nationwide, and will also be open to those using Kindle applications.

The offering is part of a partnership with OverDrive, which already offers digital content solutions for libraries (and which has had a similar relationship with Sony for the latter’s Reader e-readers since 2009). Head to OverDrive’s website to see if your local library may be one of them — mine is!

Unlike regular library books, you’ll be able to annotate titles just like you can with purchased Kindle books. The notes will not appear to the next person checking out the book. But if you check it out again or even purchase the title from Amazon, your notes will still be there.

Amazon doesn’t have a solid release date for this, only saying in a press release that it would be available “later this year.” We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know when its available.

Back in August of last year, Slate’s Farhad Majoo predicted that the Kindle–$139 as of the time he wrote his story–would be $99 by the holidays. His prognostication that didn’t pan out: the Kindle’s price stayed put at $139. But Amazon just announced a new Kindle at a lower price. It’s called the Kindle with Special Offers, and it’s the $139 Kindle with the new twist of promotions for deals at the bottom of the home screen and on the screen saver (but not within books themselves). It sells for $114, or $25 less than its ad-free counterpart.

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More news in the never-ending saga of technology companies suing each other over patents: Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble and its manfuacturing partners Foxconn and Inventec, saying that the bookseller’s Android-based Nook and Nookcolor e-readers violate Microsoft software patents dating back to the 1990s. The move isn’t a shocker given that Microsoft had already sued Motorola over Android phones and struck licensing agreements with HTC (for Android phones) and Amazon.com (for the not-based-on-Android Kindle e-reader).

The license fee that Microsoft says it expects makers of Android devices to pay it would make it the only company to collect a royalty on every Android-based gadget sold. (Google gives away the software.)

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The New York Times’ Nick Bilton wonders why Amazon’s Kindle group is hiring so many Android developers.

Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor is a good e-reader that leads a secret double life as a reasonably-priced Android tablet. And now B&N is selling them on eBay for a startlingly low price: $199.

Amazon is working on an update to the software in its Kindle e-readers with some worthwhile-sounding features–including the ability to share your notes and (at long last) see page numbers that correspond to the ones in dead-tree books. In an interesting movie, it’s letting Kindle owners download a preview version before it finishes up the software and pushes it out to all devices.

Today, I wanted to buy a book. I did what I usually do these days before I plunk down my money for one: I checked to see if it was available as an Amazon Kindle e-book–one which I’d be able read not only on a Kindle but also on an iPad, an iPhone, an Android phone, a Mac, or a PC. It was. My finger instinctively lunged towards the 1-Click button.

And then it dawned on me: With the recent development that Apple is going to require creators of e-reader apps to sell books using its in-app purchasing feature, it’s not the least bit clear what the fate of Kindle books on Apple devices will be. (Apple says that as long as e-readers support in-app purchases, they’ll be able to retain access to digital books bought elsewhere–even though this violates the App Store approval guidelines.)

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Back in November, Sony said it would have an iPhone app that would provide access to e-books from its Reader store out by December. That month came and went. So has January. And now Sony is saying that Apple rejected its iPhone app (an Android version did make it onto the Market):

Unfortunately, with little notice, Apple changed the way it enforces its rules and this will prevent the current version of the Reader™ for iPhone® from being available in the app store. We opened a dialog with Apple to see if we can come up with an equitable resolution but reached an impasse at this time. We’re exploring other avenues to bring the Reader experience to Apple mobile devices. We know that many of you are eagerly awaiting the application and we appreciate your continued patience.

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Back in August, I wrote about Amazon.com’s odd habit of frequently bragging about sales of its Kindle e-reader without ever providing explicit numbers. It continues to do so–and it’s inspired its competitors to do some similarly evasive crowing of their own.

Barnes & Noble issued a press release today that it had sold “millions” of Nooks since the first version’s release in December of 2009. But it mostly bragged about Nook sales without disclosing them, by saying that Nooks are the company’s best-selling products ever, and that the Nookcolor is its best-selling gift this holiday season.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that with millions of NOOK eReading devices sold, the line has become the company’s biggest bestseller ever in its nearly 40-year history.  The new NOOKcolor Reader’s Tablet, introduced just eight weeks before Christmas, is the company’s number one selling gift of the holiday season. Barnes & Noble also announced that it now sells more digital books than its large and growing physical book business on BN.com, the world’s second largest online bookstore.

[snip]

Demand for the critically acclaimed NOOKcolor remained high following the product’s introduction in late October through the holidays. Sales have continued to exceed the company’s high expectations.

The only hard number in the release is the “millions” of Nooks sold; we can apparently assume that B&N has sold at least two million devices. (A few weeks ago, it was a minor news story when an Amazon staffer said that “millions” of third-generation Kindles had been sold in 73 days; I wonder if B&N would have been even this specific if Amazon hadn’t made the leap first?)

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How to turn a Nookcolor into…a Kindle.

Time for another Last Gadget Standing face-off! On the surface, Google and Samsung’s Nexus S and Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor don’t have all that much in common—after all, one is a smartphone and one is a “reader’s tablet.” But they’re both based on the same operating system, Google’s Android, and that makes them distant cousins, at least.

I’ve reviewed and (mostly) enjoyed both of them–they’re both worthy Last Gadget Standing semi-finalists. Now it’s time for you to weigh in.