CoolNote 1.5 has been released with lots of sparkling goodies just in time for Christmas. It was always capable of downloading extra content in the form of backgrounds and fonts, so appropriately enough this new version sees a whole bunch of new Christmas-themed backgrounds with everything from snowmen, santas and presents right through to the Christmas bunny. There are lots of other improvements too, most of which revolve around polishing the look and feel whilst retaining the smooth interface CoolNote has become known for. There's also a nice price drop to 0.99p/~$1.50 for the rest of the year. But back to those Christmas notes - they in fact serve a dual purpose, since they can not only be used as cool Christmas to-dos (e.g. present lists) on your home screen, but the rich notes are now sent as an image with the text when the note is shared via email to any non-CoolNote using buddies - yes it really is a poor mans Christmas card solution :-)

Arriving in good time for the Christmas festivities is an update to DrinkMinder for Android - and this time things get social. Yes, you can now set up a Twitter account and automatically tweet each drink so that even those without DrinkMinder can now keep an eye on things ;-) The full DrinkMinder write up is here, but there are some other minor improvements relating to usability, performance and compatibility. DrinkMinder is a FREE Android app which will keep you informed with its instant unit/calorie reckoner or its drink session recorder, where with a carefully designed 1-tap drink logger you can track your sessions over time. Get it from the Android Market now!

The Android reader wars are here in earnest now - Barnes & Noble just released their Amazon Fire rival with what's claimed a better spec in the battery and screen resolution department. Offering free WiFi at all its stores, the tablet will be widely available at the end of November 2011at a cost of $249. The spec compares well to the Kindle Fire with a 7-inch tablet, a 1024x600 pixel touch screen, 1G RAM an a Dual core 1Ghz OMAP4 CPU. This move is the next logical one for B&N who announced in the summer that the were selleing 3 times as many digital books through its websites as physical ones, and so pretty much had to do this to stand a chance of competing with Amazon, Apple etc.

A TV Remote with a TV screen which runs Android Apps? Where do I sign up! Motorola turn up their boundary-pushing machine to the max as the distinction between a tablet, a TV remote and a media player gets totally blurred with the announcement of the Corvair. Said to be a dedicated TV remote running Android Gingerbread (2.3), it has a 6-inch touchscreen, WiFi, Infra-red and even a ZigBee variant known as RF4CE for all those home automation goodies. You can only wonder how well this works with Google TV from, err, Motorola since Google's buyout seems all over bar the shouting. Now all it needs is a dedicated app to stop any particular family member hogging it...