GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Newly-approved Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is a Kindle user, while longtime conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wields an iPad.

This nugget of information appeared in a recent video clip on C-SPAN. Both justices use the devices (plus hard copy printouts) to read the vast quantities of written material they must wade through — up to 40 or 50 briefs for each case, Kagan says in the video above.

The news, however, made us wonder about something of far more pressing national importance: Is this a deep ideological divide on the Supreme Court?

Would Scalia see things differently if he read opinions on the monochrome Kindle? Does Kagan need a dose of iPad color, and maybe a round or two of Flight Control HD between court sessions?

Are Kindle-wielding Justices writing angry “Mactard” and “fanboi” comments on the opinions of their opponents, while the Mac-loving faction refuses to talk or even think about anything that wasn’t designed in Cupertino?

Nah, that doesn’t seem realistic.

Thanks, Jeremy!

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Like books, e-readers and tablets need protection. Their delicate, computer-like screens can get cracked or smashed by the vagaries of life.

And like books, we spend hours staring at these delicate devices. So why not make them look more like books?

We don’t just want to protect tablets and e-readers, but honor and personalize them, and maybe bring back some of the quaint pleasures of reading an old leather-bound volume at the same time.

The most natural way to signal their special status as reading machines and engines of cultural consumption is to borrow what we know from the look and feel of book covers. And if making an e-reader look like an old hardcover book or a composition notebook adds a little trompe l’oeil fun, so much the better.

This slide show highlights some of the best faux-book covers for e-book readers and tablets.

Above: Covers made by Dodocase for the Kindle 3.

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Amazon has figured out a way to advertise its own products is everyone else’s stores, using a clever application that leverages the key features of smartphones — in particular, Apple’s latest iPhones.

Price Check for iPhone initially doesn’t seem very different from Amazon’s well-established, multiplatform “shopping cart” frontend, which has always allowed users to check prices and buy products on the go. The difference is the variety and speed of inputs you can use to find items in the store, which make the app particularly well-suited for in-store holiday comparison shopping.

• Say It brings up a picture of a microphone with an “I’m listening” message. Speak the product’s name into the smartphone mic, and Amazon will try to find it. The speech recognition is a little iffy, and obviously homophones give it some trouble (my search for “Kinect” brought up “Connect Four”), but it’s generally pretty good.
• Snap It opens up your iPhone’s camera, along with a textual reminder that the service “works best in good light with a book, DVD, CD, or video game” — in short, media objects with well-established cover art that Amazon can try to match in its database (and Amazon says it’s steadily increasing the size and variety of this database). “Snap It” worked extraordinarily well with every book I tried in the decidedly poor light of my office.
• Scan It is particularly powerful, since it can use a product’s barcode to find a unique copy: it won’t confuse hardbacks with paperbacks, or widescreen and fullscreen copies of a DVD. But it requires an autofocusing camera to get high-quality resolution on the barcode — which means iPhone 4 or 3GS. My iPhone 3G has the “Scan It” button grayed out; if I click it, I get a short, apologetic notice that my non-autofocusing camera can’t scan a barcode, at least up to the standards of Amazon’s new app.

Finally, you can also type in a product’s name in the “Type It” box at the top. Once you’ve found an item, you can browse specs and reviews, or share the price over email, Facebook or Twitter, or narrow the stores between Amazon and its partners (the “Prime” compatible button is quite nice.)

There’s also a handy list of “Recent Price Checks,” so you can keep track of products you’ve scanned, and a shopping cart, so you can buy products from Amazon directly. You can’t access your own wish list, which skews the app towards impulse buys or holiday shopping for other people.

When the app was first announced, I was confused; why was Amazon launching yet another shopping application for iOS? There’s the old standby Amazon.com, the Windowshop App for iPad and now PriceCheck? Did customers really need a whole page (or in iOS 4, a folder) devoted just to apps for Amazon?

Now I think I understand the strategy much better. Each Amazon application capitalizes on the unique hardware and anthropology of the device. Windowshop is a browsing catalog, suited to the full-sized screen and laid-back posture of the iPad. Even the name suggests voyeurism and fantasy. Price Check is mobile, pulling in camera, voice and autofocus to make something you can whip out of your pocket to make a snap decision while the Black Friday hordes crowd in around you.

Different devices, different scenarios, different shopping experiences — but all of them funneling you to just one store, up in the cloud. Smart. Now I wonder when and if other platforms (Android, Blackberry, etc.) will get their chance to play with similar new toys.




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This post was written by Journalist on November 23, 2010

Tags: 'Apple Store' Application: Buy an iPhone with Your iPhone, Amazon, Amazon iPhone App Adds Barcode Scanning, Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad, Amazon's iPhone App Remembers So You Don't Have to, Amazon's Price Check Might Be Perfect Smartphone Shopping App, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPhone App Digitizes Brick-and-Mortar Coupons, Price Check, Tablet Catalogs Rethink Casual Page-Flipping, Windowshop

Amazon’s Disc+ is simple and smart: buy a DVD or Blu-ray disc and get a free digital copy to stream right away and keep for later. It’s based on the premise that physical and streaming media go better together. Now, the program is expanding, going from just a few hundred titles at launch to over 10,000 today.

“Customers love instant gratification,” says Amazon’s Steve Oliver, “and this program allows customers to watch Disc+ On Demand titles instantly, without having to wait for their DVD or Blu-ray to arrive in the mail.”

Disc+’s expansion means more than it would have just a few months ago, as more televisions and set-top boxes offer direct support for Amazon’s VOD, including the new Roku Player, TiVo Premiere and Google TV. This makes the downloads much more valuable than just streaming the device to your laptop. And it’s a natural way for new customers who might be reluctant to pony up for download-only or streaming video to get familiar with the service.

Amazon started offering digital downloads with physical media purchases to customers years ago with music, leveraging their unique position as a top retailer of both physical and virtual media. The model is slowly growing in movies and television. Now we just need a Book+ program for books offering a Kindle edition bundled with hardcovers. Then we’re really talking about something.

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Amazon keeps rolling out software applications for nearly every device it doesn’t make itself. Next up is the new player in the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7. The forthcoming WP7 Kindle app has virtually the same function as other mobile Kindle apps, but will have Microsoft’s look and feel.

I may have been the only e-reading-focused reporter at the Windows Phone 7 debut event. I asked everyone I could find about e-reading applications for the device. “Just stay tuned,” I was told.

I still couldn’t believe there wasn’t one or more e-reading apps announced at the launch. It’s become an assumed part of app-capable smartphones and tablets in what has to be record time. Having an app for Kindle is like having an app for Facebook or the New York Times.

Think about it: just a year ago, there were only a few e-book apps, some by companies that are dwindling if not long gone. Now nearly every e-bookstore has a reading app on every screen you can carry.

Kindle joins just one other e-reading application that will be in the application Marketplace: Wattpad. Sometimes called “the YouTube of eBooks,” Wattpad is a service where users share their own original writing; half e-book commons, half social network.

Wattpad looks great — but it’s neither an e-bookstore nor an e-book reading application as we’ve come to recognize it from the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Stanza or MobiPocket smartphone apps (this list goes on and on).

The Kindle app for WP7 may not be ready when the phones are officially ready for sale. If history is any guide, this won’t be the last e-reader app announcement you’ll hear between now and then.

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Amazon has good news for Kindle owners that it wanted to share with them first. A post from the Kindle team on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum says that 14-day lending will come to the Kindle sometime this year.

There is a catch: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.” If you’re familiar with Barnes & Noble’s lending feature on the Nook, this isn’t a surprise. “Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” Again, to borrow some jargon, this is a known issue.

Books will be lendable both to Kindle owners and users of Kindle apps, which is nice: even if you don’t have your own Kindle, you can borrow an e-book from someone who does.

The Kindle team also revealed that Kindle app users will soon also be able to read Kindle magazines and newspapers through the app. Periodicals had been a Kindle-only feature. Support for newspapers and magazines is coming to iOS “in the coming weeks” and Android and other app platforms “down the road.”

Since there’s so much news about Kindle’s e-reading competition lately, I guess Amazon just wanted to let Kindle users know that the company still loved them — and more importantly, that it’s going to keep giving them reasons to love the Kindle.

Coming Soon for Kindle [Amazon/Kindle Community Forums, via Kindle Review]

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Amazon’s newly overhauled Kindle application for Mac offers notes, search, two-column reading and a much-improved UI. It might even make me read e-books on my computer again.

It’s funny: I used to read a lot of e-books in client apps on my MacBook and iPhone. Since I got my Kindle 3, I hadn’t read any.

Amazon was frankly slow to bring its e-book software to Macs. The PC desktop client came first, and a pared-down Mac application only eventually followed in March. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble had already released a Nook desktop app for Mac simultaneously with PC.

B&N’s Mac client offered every feature you could ask for: copy-and-paste, two-column reading, notes and highlighting, text search, built-in dictionary, multiple viewing themes, use of every font on your computer. I still think it might be the most powerful e-reading application available on the desktop.

Even generic readers beat Kindle’s UI. Amazon just didn’t seem serious about Mac support, or desktop readers at all.

A few days ago, I noticed that even though I’d been buying Kindle books again, I didn’t even have the Kindle app on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered to transfer it over from my old machine.

So I go to Amazon’s site and download the application, open it up — and I’m astonished. The Kindle desktop app is so much better than I remember — not quite the equal of Barnes & Noble’s app, but infinitely closer.

I thought I was hallucinating, or my memory was faulty. Actually, I’d just downloaded the brand new app a day before it had been officially announced.

Improved WhisperSync support means that I can read a book on my Kindle, open it on my Mac, and it will open to the last page read on the Kindle. When I open the same book on the Kindle again, I have the option to pick up where I left off either on the Kindle or the Mac. I actually like that it’s a prompt on the Kindle, rather than an automatic sync; on the desktop too, I can toggle between last page read on Kindle or last page read on Mac, but it’s a menu option rather than a prompt.

Just because Amazon’s finally getting serious about the Mac doesn’t mean it’s neglecting software updates for the Kindle; only a week after the 3.02 firmware update graduated from beta, Amazon’s offering the 3.03 version for download as a preview release.

As you might guess from its version number, it’s a minor release, offering some performance improvements (moderately faster page syncing and page turns, mostly) and reportedly plugging some security gaps. 3.02 seemed to improve the Kindle’s performance in direct sunlight. 3.03 is download-only for now, but will be available as an over-the-air update soon, probably in a few weeks.

Kindle for Mac — Read Kindle eBooks on your Mac [Amazon.com]

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There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.

“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”

There are a handful of devotes who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.

Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.

The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)

Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.

When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.

Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]

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If bricks and mortar retail stores were vampires, then Amazon is a vengeful, ruthless Peter Cushing intent on destroying them. With the latest update to its iPhone app, Peter, er, Amazon has added a sharp wooden stake to the already dangerous tools contained therein: Amazon Mobile now does barcode-scanning.

Simply point the camera of you iPhone 4 or 3GS (running iOS4) at the barcode of a product in-store and you will be swept off to the appropriate product page of the online retail giant’s store. Thus, you can take a long, leisurely demo of that fancy new camera you want down at the local photographic emporium, thanks the salesman for his time and save a few bucks by ordering it from Amazon right there in the store. Hell, if you live in a city with same-day shipping it may even arrive at home before you do.

Amazon’s isn’t the first iApp to scan barcodes, and you have have been able photograph an item and have Amazon’s team of worker-monkeys ID a similar item for you in moments. But by integrating the reader into its own app, Amazon is clearly positioning itself as the default store for pretty much anything. Really, why bother carrying something home unless you have to have it right now? Let Amazon deliver it and save some money, too.

Amazon Mobile is available now, as is Dracula, starring Peter Cushing.

Amazon Mobile [iTunes via TUAW]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Amazon is announcing that a new kind of content will soon join books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in the Kindle store. Called Kindle Singles, the 30-to-90 page e-chapbooks aim to split the difference between feature-length magazine articles and shorter books.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti. The costs of print production, marketing and distribution have historically driven the page-counts of book monographs up and the word-counts of magazine and newspaper articles down.

Amazon said that Kindle Singles will have its own section in the Kindle store and will be priced “much less than a typical book.” Amazon will also grant authors and publishers the same royalty split for singles as on the Kindle Digital Text platform: 70% on books costing between $2.99 and $9.99.

There are print precedents for 10,000-to-30,000-word works — novellas, chapbooks, long pamphlets, extended journal articles, among others — but they’ve usually been either tied to specific genres or downright exceptions to the form. They’ve never been a central part of the publishing model in either fiction or nonfiction.

Translation Jackets for On Bullshit; Image by Princeton University Press

Kindle Singles is also unusual in calling on publishers to produce stand-alone “born-digital” works that may not ever be traditionally printed. Some publishers may use the form to sell individual sample or advance chapters of longer print books. Individual writers may benefit the most from the program, as it makes it easier for them to self-publish works that precisely for reasons of length can’t find support from traditional publishers.

Two further possibilities, particularly if other e-book retailers follow suit with similar chapbook-length offerings: digital-only publishers (or offshoot imprints) could emerge to produce works specifically for this format, or the additional revenue and marketing stream of electronic publishing could lead print publishers to produce more short-form books in print.

I wouldn’t discount this last possibility. In 2005, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit became a surprise hardcover bestseller. Frankfurt’s “book” was a reprint of a journal article that had already been collected and published in a longer anthology. It sold over half a million copies and spawned a sequel, despite being just 67 pages long and printed in an unusually small 4″ by 6″ format.

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Amazon seems ready to get into the app store business with plans to launch a new Android app store.

The company has reportedly sent welcome kits to some developers to entice them to start signing on to the store, according to report in The Wall Street Journal and Engadget.

With its plans to offer an Android app store, Amazon may be hoping to take on the Google Market, currently the app store of choice on most Android devices. Exploding sales of Android smartphones and the introduction of new Android-based tablets hungry for apps may have caught Amazon’s attention and had it clamoring for a piece of the action.

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Smartphones running Android OS were more popular than iPhones among new buyers in the U.S. during August, according to a report from The Nielsen Company.

Currently, Google’s Android market has about 90,000 apps, compared to Apple’s App Store has 250,000 apps.

Already upstart, independent challengers such as AndSpot and SlideMe are trying to create their own Android app stores. It’s all kosher because, unlike Apple, Google allows for multiple app stores to exist on the Android operating system. These independent app stores hope to lure users with the the promise of better search and user interface, greater availability internationally and increased revenue.

Amazon may be betting on something similar and it certainly has the clout and the brand to be more popular than these upstarts. But winning over developers may not be easy.

“From the developer perspective, its trial and error to see how effective they really are. A lot of these app stores, whether from Verizon now or Amazon in the future–are yet to prove themselves,” says Paul Chen, director of business development at Papaya Mobile, an Android games developer.

Still Chen says his company is open and willing to embrace any distribution channel that could increase the visibility of its apps.

Though Amazon has been extremely tight-lipped, based on the leaks, here’s everything we know so far about Amazon’s plans:

What will the app store be like?

Amazon’s app store is likely to be a lot like Apple’s–carefully curated and targeted at consumers who are tired of the chaos in the Google Android Market. Spam, poor quality of apps and the inability to easily find apps are major problems in the Android Market. But what Amazon’s app store will be called, look like or the kind of features it will have is still under wraps.

For consumers, it will be exciting if Amazon can bring features such as recommendations, wish lists and deals to its app store.

Cost, control and availability

Developers will reportedly have to pay $100 to sign up–just as they do with the Apple app store.

Unlike the current Google Android Market where any developers can publish apps as long as it follows the company’s guidelines, Amazon will decide what will get into its store, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Apps can either be free or paid. Paid apps will have to be competitively priced–that means developers can’t charge more for the same app on the Amazon app store compared to other markets.

Amazon’s app store will likely be available only in the U.S. though it won’t be long before Amazon extends it to other countries. After all, Amazon has all the necessary payment systems in place to make this happen, even as Google Checkout remains limited.

Support and distribution

This is where things get confusing. It is not clear which Android devices Amazon’s app store will support or how it will be distributed. Google’s Android Market comes pre-loaded on all Android smartphones. But Amazon will have to ink deals with device makers to get its app store in there. We will also have to see if Amazon’s Android app store and Google Market will co-exist on a device. If they do so, it could cause consumer confusion and give rise to app store fragmentation.

Also, with the availability of tablets and hardware boxes running Google TV, which is based on the Android platform, it will be interesting to watch if Amazon limits its app store to just smartphones or if it is willing to go where Google fears to tread.

Photo: (astanush/Flickr)

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Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

There’s a lot of gadget news about Amazon today, so we’re going to take these items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

   KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: ‘kindleReaderDiv’, asin: ‘B003X28734′, width: ’640′, height: ’346′});

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?
   
   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

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Amazon is set to open the doors on an Android App Store, adding to the list of places where you may or may not be able to buy software for your device. According to Tech Crunch’s excellent MG Siegler, the store’s structure will be very similar to that of Apple’s App Store.

Developers will have to pay $99 to sign up, just like with Apple, and will get the same 70:30 revenue split. Amazon will decide what gets into the store, pull any apps it doesn’t like, and wrap everything up in its DRM. Further, you can’t sell your apps cheaper elsewhere. If it costs a dollar in the Android Market, it has to cost a dollar over at Amazon.

And it will be dollars. The Amazon app store will be U.S-only at launch, although as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, “Amazon takes payments in more countries than Google Checkout does.” Apps can also be free.

One problem that won’t be solved is customer confusion. Unless Amazon makes its own tablet which has exclusive use of the store, then it will have to pick a range of Android devices to support. Unlike its music store, whose goods (MP3 files) can be played anywhere, an app store could only support a subset of devices.

Amazon will join Verizon and Google as outlets for Android apps, adding to the confusion. Remember the arguments about Android being “open” and iOS being “closed”? They’re starting to look a little silly now.

Yep, Amazon Launching Their Own App Store For Android Too [MG Siegler via ]

Illustration: Charlie Sorrel

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Screenshot of My Kindle, Getting Beat By the Computer – Image: Tim Carmody

This might be the happiest chapter in Scrabble’s short digital history: Electronic Arts has released an official version of Scrabble for Kindle. This is the first paid game — or application of any kind — available for the e-reader.

Scrabble fits in well with Amazon’s existing game offerings, as it’s a word-based game that requires simple, five-directional navigation. It shows up in a Kindle user’s home screen, right next to existing games and books. (It’s easy to make a “Games” collection/folder if you like to keep your entertainment media organized/segregated.)

The game is, if I may say so, well put together; you use the controller to navigate to particular spaces, and once you’ve chosen a direction, you can just type out words. There are also smartly-chosen menu options, including a very useful list of two-letter words.

It’s fast and responsive, and I predict it will be a big hit. Scrabble has a huge built-in fan base that overlaps well with book- and word-loving Kindle owners, and Scrabulous (later rechristened Lexulous) has been a tremendous casual gaming hit on Facebook. In fact, Scrabble-makers Hasbro and Mattel had to fight with Facebook and Scrabulous when the game broke out faster than they were ready with an official version. Words With Friends is the similar unbranded iOS application.

Major drawback: unlike Facebook’s or other online iterations of the Scrabble game, there is no social dimension. You can’t play with another Kindle user online; the best you can do is set up a two-player game where you pass the Kindle back and forth.

Electronic Arts’ Scrabble costs $4.99 and is available for purchase and download today.

The First Kindle Paid App Is Out – It’s Scrabble [iReader Review]

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Photo credit/permission courtesy Marco Arment at Marco.org

The Kindle 3 is a deceptively capable device, but Amazon doesn’t, by default, give you access to a lot of what’s going on under the hood. (The “Settings” menu only has three choices.) This is why some users pop that hood using jailbreaking tools — tools that work on the Kindle 3.

I haven’t taken this step with my new Kindle, but I have read in detail the MobileRead forum posts announcing that the Kindle 3 has been jailbroken and describing how (and why) to do it. Here is a short list of why Kindle users jailbreak their device:

• Installing custom fonts, including support for Asian-language scripts;
• Installing custom screensavers;
• USB networking, or tethering.

All of these hacks risk bricking your Kindle and violating Amazon’s terms of service, but only the last might really cause you problems. Amazon’s free 3G networking (assuming you’ve got a 3G-capable device) is intended to be used for Amazon’s services only, i.e., the Kindle store and the built-in web browser.

Again, read the forums carefully, and do some deep soul-searching and gut-checking before you try any of this out. For now, I’m still pretty happy that I’ve got an easier way to enter in numbers using the built-in keyboard: Press “Alt,” then a key on the top row (Q=1, W=2, etc.). See also this great list of Kindle tips and keyboard shortcuts, again courtesy A Kindle World’s Andrys Basten.

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Photo of third-generation Kindle. Courtesy Amazon.com

Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can.

I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle.

Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do. For organizational purposes, I’m going to do it as a Q&A. Most of these questions I’ve actually been asked (some of them frequently); others are rhetorical. (There are many features you wouldn’t even think to ask about.)

Q. Can the Kindle read PDFs?

A. Yes — and it actually handles them very well. You don’t need to email yourself copies; you can hook up your Kindle to your computer through a USB cable, mount the Kindle’s drive, and drag-and-drop.

One big suggestion. Just because of its screen size, viewing PDFs on the Kindle is much better if they’re oriented in portrait rather than landscape, and if they’re single-page documents rather than spreads (i.e., where a book is scanned/photocopied two pages at a time). Printed office documents, downloaded journal articles, maps, etc., all look great. They’re monochrome, obviously, but they read as well as an e-book. You can even highlight and annotate them just like you can Kindle books — that is, assuming they’re real text PDFs, not just bundled images.

Q. Can I read free/public-domain books on the Kindle?

A. Yes, and you should. Amazon “sells” a number of public-domain books for $0 through the Kindle store. You can also download public-domain books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books. In fact, that’s where a lot of Amazon’s free books come from.

At TeleRead, Kindle World blogger Andrys Basten points out that Project Gutenberg actually has a mobile version of its website where you can download Kindle-compatible e-books directly. Just fire up your Kindle’s web browser and go to m.gutenberg.org.

Virtually all mobile-optimized web sites look terrific on the Kindle’s web browser, and Project Gutenberg’s is no different. You can search or browse by author, title, subject, release date, or popularity, and download Kindle books with or without images included.

Select a book, scroll downwards (using the “next page” button allows you to scroll quickly), and select the “Kindle” version. (There are also HTML, EPUB, and TXT available, usually.) Your Kindle will show you a scary message, saying “Do you really want to download pg###.mobi? It will be available on your Home screen.” Don’t worry. “pg###” is just the Project Gutenberg internal title of the book. It will still show up on your Kindle by its proper book title. And it’s GOOD that the book will be available on your home screen; that’s where all of your other books are kept.

Q. Wait a minute, you just said something about Google Books. Can I read ePub files on the Kindle too?

A. It’s true: Google Books allows you to download public-domain books not in Kindle’s AZW or MOBI formats, but in the competing EPUB standard. But there are a couple of good ways to convert ePub files without DRM into Kindle-compatible formats.

If you are For Real about digging into e-books, I advise you to download the multi-platform e-book management app Calibre immediately. Among its other virtues (e-reader client, e-library manager) Calibre is an e-book-converting monster:

Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT

Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT

If you are like 90% of Kindle users, the important input formats in that list are EPUB — and the two comic-book formats CBZ and CBR. The important output formats are MOBI and PDF — either of which your Kindle can read without a problem.

What’s more, Calibre will sync these files to your Kindle. Mounting, dragging, and dropping are pretty easy already, but since the books are already in Calibre, this can make it even easier.

If you don’t want to bother with Calibre — for some people, the sheer scope of the application is overwhelming and even I haven’t tried everything it can do — there’s also RetroRead, a free site/service that converts EPUBs from Google Books to Kindle- and iOS-friendly formats.

Q. I don’t like using a USB cable, and some of these sites say they can send books to my Kindle wirelessly. Don’t I have to pay to have documents sent wirelessly to my Kindle?

A. You do have to pay Amazon to have non-Amazon docs converted and sent to your device if it’s over 3G. The key thing to avoid charges is to always sign up for services using your username@free.kindle.com email address. If you do this, then your device will only add documents when it’s using Wi-Fi — and that’s free.

Q. What’s my username?

A. It’s often identical to the username of the email address that you use to sign in to Amazon. If you’re not sure, go to Amazon’s “Managing Your Kindle” page, which is a great resource for all of this.

Q. Can other people send things to my email address to spam me/make me pay for document delivery?

A. You have to authorize every user who can send a document to your Kindle. I’ve actually never used this to authorize a group of trusted friends to share and convert e-books, but that’s a great idea.

Q. How can I read blogs and websites on my Kindle?

A. The new web browser — based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari and mobile Safari — is so much better than previous instances that usually you can use this to read blogs without any special conversion.

For some reason the web browser is still listed under the “Experimental” menu, but this thing is ready to go. Among friends, we suspect that Amazon doesn’t actually want to advertise how good the web experience is, because it’s on the hook for all the 3G data its users consume.

Again, I prefer the mobile versions of most websites to the standard ones; you don’t have to pan/zoom, but it’s not hard to bookmark your favorites. (Liberal use of bookmarks also saves you from repeat typing, which is improved but still not fantastic.) Mobile versions of text-heavy websites (like mobile Twitter, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc.) look and function the very best.

The other amazing improvement in the new Kindle browser is something called “Article Mode.” This is identical to the new “Reader” button in Safari, or the Readability bookmarklet. Basically, if you go to an ordinary web page, and it’s cluttered with images, ads, or laid out in a way that’s hard to read on your Kindle, click the “Menu” button and then “Article Mode.” Instantly the web page will be laid out in an easy-to-read text column, just like if you’d sent it to Instapaper.

Q. Instapaper? I love Instapaper!

A. Me too!

Q. How can I send web articles I save in Instapaper to my Kindle?

A. Ah. Well, you can navigate through the web interface, which is pretty good. Or, you can have Instapaper send articles to your Kindle device. Again, make sure you use your @free.kindle.com address to avoid getting dinged for 3G transmission charges. Now, instead of being in your browser, your Instapaper articles will be grouped with and formatted like Newspapers and Magazines. Instapaper’s Marco Arment has said that using the Kindle is his “favorite way to read content from Instapaper.” And that was on the janky old Kindle 2. Might a Kindle Instapaper app be in the works? Methinks quite possibly yes.

Q. I’d hate having to scroll through a long home screen. Can I sort my books, articles, PDFs, or whatever into folders?

A. Yes. They’re called “Collections.” From your “Home” screen, click the “Menu” button — there are a lot of keys on the keyboard, but “Menu,” “Home,” the directional keys, Return, Select, and the page turn buttons are your friends — and choose “Create New Collection.” Once you’ve created it, you can add/remove items, change how you sort through them — the works. Great way to group by kind, genre, category, or even levels of attention.

Q. How can I share books I read with my friends and family?

A. Ah. This is a sore spot, as Barnes and Noble’s Nook has promised some limited ability to lend out e-books. Kindle doesn’t really have that. However, there are some clever ways to get the same functionality.

First, you can share an Amazon account with another person and authorize both of your devices to download e-books purchased from that account. This is probably most obvious for families, who often buy from a single Amazon account anyways. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same with a group of friends. The trouble is that each Kindle is tied to one account. So if you’re reading e-books in a group account, you’re only reading e-books in that group account.

With free books, it’s not a problem to share either. As I mentioned above, every user can authorize a number of e-mail addresses to send documents to their Kindle. This is a great way to share PDFs or free books you’ve converted in Calibre.

Q. I read a little bit in English, but my first language is German. Can I change the default menu/user-interface language?

A. Aha. As far as I can tell, definitely not on the Kindle itself. The only way you can change the “country” setting is by entering in an address on the web site. I think this is a huge disadvantage to the device, and shows some of the limitations in how Amazon thinks of its user base. Even in the United States, there are plenty of readers who would prefer to have their menu language displayed in Spanish, French, or other languages.

Q. Can I use Twitter on the Kindle?

A. Yes. Kindle’s 2.5 update added a feature where you could share passages or tweet about books. As for working with Twitter itself, again, I recommend the mobile site, mobile.twitter.com. New Twitter is translucent and beautiful in an ordinary web browser, but that beauty if totally lost on the Kindle.

Reading mobile Twitter on the Kindle is a blast. You can even use your page turn keys to quickly scroll up and down. You can easily favorite or use the built-in retweet. Typing tweets on mobile Twitter… Hmm…

Well, I’ll say this. I don’t like writing tweets using Twitter’s web page anyways. And the keyboard on the Kindle 3 is much-improved, but still no champ. If you’re used to either a full keyboard OR a smartphone’s software typo corrections and autofills, the Kindle is bound to disappoint.

The Kindle excels as a reader, not a writer. Really, the keyboard is there to enter in search terms, not to compose. It doesn’t have number keys, for example — although you use those to enter in URLs or email addresses all the time. (You have to press the “Sym” button to get access to numbers, @-signs, etc.)

Okay! For now, that’s all I’ve got. I hope I’ve answered at least some of your questions. If you have more, let them rip in the comments and I’ll do my best!

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Amazon’s new commercial puts the Kindle in the best possible light: poolside, in the hands of a beautiful, bikini-clad woman. It even works in a dig at the iPad and other LCD tablets; the dweeby guy next to the Kindle reader can only see his own ugly reflection.

This video has been percolating around the tech blogosphere for a couple of days, but I don’t think anyone has gotten it quite right. (I was off yesterday. Sorry.) I honestly don’t think it’s about competing with the iPad, or touting the benefits of non-reflective screens, as much as it’s about re-positioning the Kindle in the popular imagination.

Think back three years to when the Kindle was first announced. Yes, there was a splashy cover story about the future of reading. But everyone agreed: the device itself was ugly, it was expensive, and its market was limited to rich bookwormy dorks who needed something to read on airplanes where the physical world could vanish behind the virtual mindspace of a not-quite-real book.

Now, the Kindle is stylish; it’s relatively inexpensive; and the world in which you read it doesn’t look like a place you’d want to escape from at all. That is, apart from your nosy neighbors and their self-involved not-quite-pickup lines.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

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Sony 350 with Cover from Sony Style

Remember Sony? The company that owned innovative high-end electronics for a few decades? Well, they make e-book readers. While we don’t write about them as often as the Kindle or iPad, some of Sony’s readers are really good. Their newest and prettiest model will be available stateside this week; it’s definitely worth a closer look.

The most attention-grabbing feature of the new Sony is the fact that its e-Ink screen responds to touch input. The touch sensors aren’t actually in the screen, but are triggered by infrared sensors all around the screen’s edges. Invisible beams respond when your finger breaks the plane of the screen — just like security devices in a spy movie. You don’t even have to actually physically touch the screen for the sensors to respond, just get within the sensor’s threshold.

The Sony PRS-350 has the same Pearl high-contrast e-Ink screen as the Kindle, but in a slightly smaller form factor (5″ instead of 6″). According to iReader Review (and as you can see from the gallery above), this knocks the image and text quality of the old Sony Readers out of the park. And because the new Pocket Reader doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, the whole device is only 5 3/4″ x 4 1/8,” and just a shade over 1/3″ thick.

Like all Sony Readers, it supports both ePub and PDF with or without DRM. The body design is gorgeous, and the build quality is reportedly top-notch.

So we have a tiny, touchscreen e-Ink reading machine that might even display images and tiny fonts better than the new Kindle. Did Sony just make the long-awaited “paperback e-reader” to move the whole show?

No; unfortunately, they didn’t. Here’s why.

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The Sony Pocket reader has no internet capability at all. No Wi-Fi, no 3G. Nothing.

This means that while it’s terrific for reading books, you can’t use it to read anything else. No checking email, no using Instapaper, no Google Reader.

Speaking of Instapaper and RSS readers — there’s also the specter of the Amazon App Store, which promises to add a lot more functionality to the Kindle. Functionality that’s likely to be dependent in no small part on web access. Even if Sony starts thinking seriously about casual gaming on their e-Readers — and frankly, I think moving in the other direction and putting e-Books on PSPs is a lot more likely — they’re still moving uphill.

In a follow-up review, iReader Review notes that actually loading books onto the Pocket Reader is a giant pain. “Its not just that you cant get books to Sony 350 wirelessly in 60 seconds. You cant get books to it in 60 seconds period… Sony proves that its a hardware company and not a software company.” He notes lots of other user-experience problems with the device, too, including an imagined vignette where Sony asks its software design team to take this magical device and completely screw up the UI.

Finally, it costs $179; $10 less than the 3G Kindle (which gets you free 3G forever), and $40 more than the Wi-Fi only Kindle ($30 more than the Wi-Fi Nook), both of which still get you wi-fi. A 20-25% markup is a lot to pay for a touchscreen.

Face it — two months ago, the Sony Pocket Reader would have been a cannonball in the world of e-readers. It would have been cheaper and more capable than nearly anything on the market. But the Kindle 3, with its improved screen and WebKit browser, is actually turning into something more than a repository for e-books.

Sony’s made a gorgeous one, and I think it will appeal to many, many people. Seriously — it’s appealing to me. But it doesn’t look like the future.

According to Sony Style USA, the silver Pocket Reader is available for order now and will ship tomorrow (the 14th); the pink version can be preordered and should ship Thursday (the 16th).

P.S.: Whatever you do, don’t try to find this e-reader by searching for “Sony 350.” Sony makes a kajillion products from cameras to DVD players that all have “350″ somewhere in their official handle. It’s a nightmare. Why they don’t just call the thing “Pocket Reader” is completely beyond me.

All images courtesy of iReader Review.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photograph of Stphane Mallarm’s Un Coup de Ds, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural, and comfortable as possible. The ideal is for the device and text to fade away and immerse you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal. It’s also a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy… [w]e dont have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme, or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarm, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

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16mo/Paperback/E-Reader

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All images via Got Medieval.

Story continues …

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

"Happy Christmas Everybody!" by allerleirau/flickr. Used gratefully via a Creative Commons license

New e-readers, new tablets, and new game console accessories are all wonderful, but even in a down economy, just keeping up with demand will be a serious challenge for many gadget retailers — especially as we get closer to the holidays.

Over at Teleread, Chris Meadows looks at order-to-ship times for two hot gadgets, the Kindle 3 and the iPad. The new Kindle is being staggered out to customers according to when they were ordered (dates from Amazon’s Kindle Community Forum via KindleWorld):

• Orders placed before 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 1st will still ship by the August 27th release date.
• Orders placed before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on August 5th will ship on or before September 4th.
• Orders placed before 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 8th.
• Orders placed after 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 12th.

Apparently it’s the new “Pearl” E Ink screens that are the problem; PVI can’t make enough of them for Amazon to ship its Kindles out the door, especially since other companies are clamoring for the screens too.

The iPad, however, which had crazy wait times for months after launch, is finally meeting demand. “Apple basically ran out of product the first weekend and didn’t catch up for months,” Fortune reports: “The iPad 3G launch had to be pushed back, the international roll-out postponed by a month, and shipping delays at Apple’s online store reached as much as three weeks (15 business days).”

But now Apple can ship iPads within 24 hours. iPhone 4? Not so much. Will they be able to keep it up through December? Can Amazon catch up? If demand remains high, it’s not a bad problem to have.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.

The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.

That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.

Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.

But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.

Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.

According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.

If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.

Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr

Related posts:

• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess
• Wi-Fi Only Nook For $150 in Best Buy
• 5 Things That Make Us Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook E-Reader

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

At this point, you probably know a lot about the new Kindle. But it’s this little hardware addition on the underside of the device that’s caught our attention:

What’s that in the middle? Why, yes — it’s a microphone!

According to the new Kindle User’s Guide, the microphone is not currently enabled but is provided for future use. Some folks think it’s for voice navigation, which could give Kindle a major accessibility advantage over its competitors. (E-readers and tablets still remain way behind PCs on this front.) David Rothman thinks Amazon/Sprint might stick a phone in there, which seems pretty unlikely given how intent Bezos and Amazon seem on refining the reading experience rather than competing with Apple and general-purpose tablets on all things multimedia.

But voice annotations and memos don’t seem too far-fetched; and if the apps developed using the Kindle Development Kit get off the ground sometime soon, I suppose the more hardware goodies third-parties have to play with, the better.

Andres Bastyn identified the microphone in a short roundup at TeleRead, “Unheralded new features in the Kindle 3,” focusing on subtle but sharp software tweaks. For instance, the web browser now has an “article view” mode, similar to the new Reader function in Safari or the popular iOS app Instapaper.

Likewise, PDF reading has been improved: the viewer now lets you highlight and copy-and-paste text, and adjust the contrast for better readability (a major problem in the past for scanned/photocopied docs). There are even workarounds for avoiding document delivery charges over 3G, by either syncing with your computer or sending your documents to an email address that waits until you’re in wi-fi to send them along. Saving bandwidth is saving money, especially if you’re not using it to buy something from Amazon.

All this points to Amazon trying to strengthen and reposition the Kindle as a general text document reader, not just a portal for e-books. And it makes it pretty unlikely that Amazon/Sprint would just drop a whole new data stream in there, even if they could try to introduce a new monthly fee — something that could make Kindle users, having been promised free 3G for the life of their devices, to totally lose it.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Jeff Bezos has survived the iPad.

Predictions that Apple’s bright tablet computer would be a Kindle-killer haven’t quite come to pass: Amazon CEO Bezos says that the growth rate in sales of his e-reading device has tripled since June, when he dropped the Kindle price to $189. (Clearly increased competition from other e-readers, like Sony Reader and the Barnes and Noble Nook, hasn’t dampened the Kindle fire, either.) And he’s still kvelling over last week’s announcement that e-book sales on Amazon exceed the number of hardback books sold by the e-commerce site. “And that’s with a device at the end of its product life cycle,” he says.

The cycle of life resets on August 27, when Amazon will ship the third-generation Kindle. Judging from a brief hands-on demo, the new Kindle — which still costs $189 — isn’t a drastic makeover but a canny evolution that enhances the device’s raison d’etre: reading.

But by also releasing a lower-cost ($139) version of the Kindle without 3G wireless connectivity, Bezos anticipates millions of new customers who can live with waiting for a Wi-Fi hot spot to replenish their content. He says that the introduction of the Wi-Fi version is purely a price play, a way to sell Kindles to families and couples who already have one in the house.

“At $139, you’re going to have multiple Kindles, not just one,” Bezos says.

Consistent with Amazon’s past practice, Bezos revealed no specifics about Kindle sales to date, other than to say that “millions” have already been sold.

This year’s Kindle comes in either the classic ivory or an earthier graphite hue. The most significant improvement–perhaps as a ’sez you’ to the crisp iPad screen–is a sharper e-ink display than previous Kindles. Bezos claims that the contrast is 50 percent better, due in part to a proprietary technology involving “font hinting” which more skillfully manipulates the electronic ink that forms the letters.

Also, as Apple’s CEO has been known to say, “It’s really thin!” The new Kindle is a svelte 1/3 of an inch thick and weighs 8.7 ounces, making it 21 percent smaller than the 2G Kindle. This makes Kindle lighter than a paperback, while the iPad is heavier than Infinite Jest. (Eventually, Bezos says, he’d like to make the Kindle so light “you’d need a paperweight to hold it down.”)

“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks sometime in the next nine to twelve months” — Jeff Bezos

The pages turn 20 percent faster than on the previous Kindle, and Amazon has even tamped down the clicking sound of the buttons, so readers are less likely to disturb a slumbering companion. Those page-turning buttons, by the way, are longer and slimmeralmost like bumpers on the edge of the device. This may be the first Kindle that finally prevents you from turning a page by mistake.

The long-anticipated Kindle touch screen is still not there. “From an engineering point of view, it would have been very easy to put a touch screen on it,” says Bezos. “But it would hurt the reading experience.” He says that e-ink touch screens degrade display quality and add glare. Instead, the Kindle revamps its interface by replacing its stubby joystick with a “five way” arrangement where a thumbnail-sized selection button is surrounded by a thin band of compass-point directional buttons. The home and the menu button are now placed on the keyboard array. Maybe third time’s the charm for the Kindle, which has changed navigational controls on each version.

Other improvements include expanded battery life: a full month if the radio’s off, and ten days if you leave the 3G turned on. There’s twice as much storage, enough for 3,500 books. And though Bezos didn’t show it to me, Amazon is offering a cover with a built-in LED reading light that works off the device’s battery. It’s sixty dollars, which seems pricey for a book light, but Amazon explains that it uses gold-plated conducive hinges. Maybe when you’re done reading you can use it as jewelry.

Citing competitive reasons, Bezos does not reveal Kindle sales figures, only saying the numbers are in the millions. “We’re starting to see evidence that at the $189 price point that this may be a mass product,” he says. “Even though we’re designing it for readers, it seems to be breaking out.” With a Kindle now selling at $139, he expects the tipping point to tip even more.

What’s more, the revelation that Amazon sells more Kindle books than hardcovers is only the beginning of what now looks like an inevitable mass migration to e-books.

“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks at Amazon sometime in the next nine to twelve months,” Bezos says. “And then at some point after that they’ll overtake the combination.”

As for the iPad? Bezos is a fan. “My first thought when I saw the iPad is that it will be great for our mobile commerce business — the more Internet-connected devices the better, from Amazon’s point of view.” But if people thought the iPad would be a challenger to Kindle’s e-reading throne, “it hasn’t happened that way,” says Bezos with his trademark laugh. He tried reading a bit on an iPad but didn’t get far because “if I have to read a long document on an LCD display, the first thing I do is print it out.”

He thinks that people will be fine with carrying multiple devicestablet, laptop and, of course, “purpose-built reading devices that are extremely light, let you read outside in bright daylight, a whole bunch of things.” Like the one he’s now selling for $139.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews