cross pond high tech

The iPad family accounted for 81% of tablet use in the U.S. and Canada during April, up slightly from a few months ago. Kindle Fires accounted for the second largest share, followed by Samsung Galaxy tablets. In other words, even though Android took its first lead in global tablet market share last quarter (see chart, right), that's not showing up in North American usage patterns. It's likely that Android tablets are filling out the low-end of the tablet market in the emerging world.

The walls around Barnes & Noble‘s Nook walled garden are tumbling down.

The company’s Nook HD and Nook HD+ are credible content-consumption tablets — remarkably credible, actually, considering that they come from a 127-year-old bookseller. But they sold so poorly over the holiday season that it raised questions about whether B&N would end up being forced to de-emphasize its hardware business in favor of selling content on other platforms.

The Nooks use Barnes & Noble’s own custom version of Android and provide its own stores for books, magazines, newspapers and apps. And therein lies an oft-raised argument against buying a Nook: the Barnes & Noble application store has had only 10,000 pieces of software — mostly for-pay ones — vs. the hundreds of thousands of choices in Google’s Google Play.

So with one fell swoop, in the form of a software update being rolled out today, B&N is eliminating that downside. It’s giving both Nooks the Google Play stores for apps, music, movies and books, plus key Google apps which the tablets have lacked until now: Chrome, Gmail and YouTube. (Google’s policies for its apps are an all-or-nothing proposition for device makers — if they want Google Play, they also have to pre-install Google’s apps.) New Nooks sold at Barnes & Noble’s bookstores and elsewhere will also carry the updated software.