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LAS VEGAS — Tired of playing endless sessions of Spider Solitaire on your laptop? Fear not, weary game enthusiasts. MIT Media Lab alums Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill have a solution that blends real-world objects with computer circuits and LCDs.

Sifteo is a very different kind of game cube. Using 1.5-inch blocks that communicate through a Wi-Fi connection, Sifteo brings puzzle games that might otherwise be played on a computer screen to the tactile, tabletop environment.

Instead of loading Text Twist on your PC desktop, you can play a game of Word Play on your literal desktop, physically rearranging the letters that appear on the blocks’ full-color 128-pixel display screens to form words.

Inside each cube is a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, powered by a lithium-ion polymer battery. And just like the iPhone and other smartphones, there’s an accelerometer that can determine the cube’s position, which enables some pretty cool ways to play games.

In Shaper, seen below, players must arrange the cubes into the configurations that appear on each block’s screen.

Sifteo co-founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill were talking about the idea of Sifteo a year ago at TED, back when the blocks were still called “Siftables.” The two met as undergrads at Stanford University, and both went to the east coast to earn MS degrees at the MIT Media Lab , where they built the Sifteo hardware.

“When we were still in the early stages of development, we took the blocks to an elementary school for testing,” Kalanithi told Wired.com in an interview. “It was amazing to see a bunch of 8-year-old girls moving the blocks around intuitively.”

Right now, Sifteo only has in-house developers working on games for the hardware, but the company wants to eventually open the API up to any and all 3rd-party developers that want to create games for it. “We’re looking for feedback,” Kalanithi said. “Opening this up to different people brings the best possibilities for interesting games.”

Sifteo is currently in an early access testing period, but the company plans to release the product in the Fall. Priced at $150, starter kits will come with three Sifteo blocks, a charging dock and AC adaptor, and a USB wireless link for your Mac or PC. If all goes as planned, by next Christmas you won’t have to play yet another round of Settlers of Catan with the ‘rents again.

See Also:

• TED: Siftable Computing Makes Digital Data Physical
• Scrabble Flash Is a B-L-A-S-T

Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com

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Pac-Man sucks on a touch-screen. Unless you have a proper joystick to yank your yellow-pizza avatar from the clutches of Clyde and co, then you’ll get bored (and frustrated) in minutes. Help is at hand (or at finger?) from ThinkGeek, in the form of the JOYSTICK-IT, a handsome stick which sticks straight onto a tablet screen.

Press it into place over the onscreen controls and the milled aluminum stick will transfer your jerks and tugs into virtual finger-presses by way of a conductive foam pad beneath. The biggest problem with on-screen gaming button is that your thumb can wander off the controls and leave you stranded just as you were about to perform a slick 180 and leave those dumb ghosts in a heap.

The stick will be available at the end of January, for $25. Stick it on you iPad, lay the tablet down on a too-low table and surround with glasses of warm beer. Congratulations: you now have a perfect replica of a tabletop arcade cabinet. Cigarette burns are optional.

Joystick IT product page [ThinkGeek]

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Consumer technology is advancing at such a rate that it is becoming increasingly common for such technology to find its way into various scientific applications. One of the more obvious examples is seen in the benefits high-performance computing has received from consumer graphics cards. We have also seen laptops used to measure earthquakes, and accelerometers such as those found in the Wiimote, iPhone, and other consumer electronics used to measure the flight patterns of the Malayan colugo.

In a recent paper in Water Resources Research, a team reports on the use of the Wiimote to measure evaporation. Natural evaporation rates are an important part of the water cycle; estimates of evaporation are required for weather forecasts, flood forecasts, and water resource planning, among other things.

One of the common means of measuring evaporation is simple enough: you set out a pan of water and measure the change in water level over time. Unfortunately, automated measurement typically requires a pressure transducer to accurately measure the water level, and those costs hundreds of dollars. The use of the Wiimote has the potential to substantially reduce the cost of measurement.

The methodology is simple enough. The Wiimote tracks the four brightest points in a near infrared image. Ordinarily, these four points will be the four Wii IR LEDs used to determine where the Wiimote is pointing. However, by affixing IR reflectors to a float in the water pan, the researchers were able to track the water level. This sounds simple enough, but these pans are often themselves floating in natural water bodies, and the combination of the two is likely to make waves.

To test the sensitivity of their technique to waves, the team used a small wave generator. A low-flow pump was used to change the water level. They found that even with substantial wave activity, they were able to measure changes in the average water level to within one millimeter.

However, they did find a slight bias in their absolute estimate of water level during wave activity. They hypothesize that this is due to a lag in the rates of rise and fall of their float that could be fixed with a modification. Using the Wiimote’s accelerometer to measure motion of the entire pan could also improve accuracy.

While I have to admit that I found this paper a bit mundane for what it was, the idea of using cheap sensors to measure environmental fields is one I find fascinating. For example, I wonder if the XBox 360’s depth-sensing Kinect camera could be used to measure particles such a large snowflakes in a wind field.

A first-order calculation suggests that its depth pixels are a few millimeters across for nearby objects, but it is not clear that the method it uses to calculate depth will work for small, fast-moving objects. Still, a $150 3D Particle Imaging Velocimeter would be a huge win. Environmental problems are prone to high time and space variability, and anything that can lower the cost of measurement has the potential to increase the number of measurements one can make.

The scientific community isn’t alone in getting excited about this tech. Its promise is also consistent with IBM’s recently-released Next 5 in 5 YouTube video: their prediction for the five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years. IBM predicts that simple sensor networks based in cell phones and laptops will be increasingly used to map environmental events. In addition, a large Department of Transportation project called IntelliDrive envisions using embedded sensors in cars to monitor environmental conditions.

Chime in below with your own ideas for scientific usage of consumer technology.

This story was written by Ethan Gutmann and originally published by Ars Technica on Dec. 28.

Photo: ginnerobot / Flickr

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James Whelton won a pink 8GB iPod Nano, and on the plane on his way back home he hacked it. And while he hasn’t done anything as spectacular as a jailbreak, he got the better of the little iPad and dug out some interesting details of what may be possible.

James got control of the Nano’s SpringBoard, the iPod equivalent of a desktop, where all app icons appear. Normally, the Nano’s OS checks to make sure that it isn’t trying to load a modified version. James bypassed this check and proved it my removing an app icon, leaving a blank space.

That’s cool and all, but the SpringBoard plist (a plist is a file that Apple’s devices use to store preferences) shows that it could be simple matter to switch on support for movies, TV shows, games, an address book, a calendar and even switch on a passcode lock. Here’s a picture of the extracted file:

Watching video on the tiny, square Nano screen seems kind of pointless, but so what? And unlike iOS devices which receive updates regularly, the normal iPods get one or two updates in their lifetimes, if ever, so there wouldn’t really be any reason not to hack one.

Hello Nano [NanoHack.me]

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Pocket projectors are fast heading towards impulse-buy status, and Chinavision’s Mini Projector with Wi-Fi and Wireless Remote $200 price-tag is as impulse as it gets right now. And as you may have guessed, it has some fancy extras.

The projector itself uses a 3-watt LED lamp, unlike the increasingly common focus-free laser models, which puts out 10-lumens of light. That isn’t bad, but you won’t be watching anything bigger than a sheet of legal paper unless you turn out the lights. Resolution is a non-HD 640 x 480 pixels. It also has a small speaker (and an audio-out jack), plus USB and SD slots for playing back media directly, an IR remote and it hooks up to a video-source via RCA cable.

Not bad, but the pizazz comes from the Wi-Fi, which lets you hook it directly to the internet and watch YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows and so on. It can do this because inside the projector is a tiny Linux computer, which is controlled by the little wireless keyboard.

I have no hopes for the quality of this kit, but you certainly get a lot for your money: There’s even a mini-tripod included in the bundle. Available now.

Mini Projector with Wi-Fi and Wireless Remote [Chinavision via Oh Gizmo!]

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Microsoft may be struggling to sell phones, but over in Xbox 360 land, things are going crazy. The Kinect controller-free controller has sold a whopping 2.5-million units in just 25 days.

The Kinect, which uses a combination of infra-red projectors and various cameras to track puny humans in their living rooms and therefrom control the on-screen action, has been a success since the pre-sale queues on launch-day, something usually seen in only the cultish world of Apple. And with the sales of Nintendo’s Wii declining after years of sold-out, hard-to-find success, it’s looking like the Kinect will be the new king of jumping-around-in-front-of-the-TV-and-looking-stupid this holiday season.

And don’t just take my word for it. Microsoft is optimistic in its press release, predicting five million units sold this Christmas, hopefully combating the festive flab with a bit of game-related exercise. Here’s a money-making tip for any speedy games developers out there: Write a Kinect-compatible game called “Guilty Gym Membership” and get it in stores for January 1st 2011, and you’ll be very rich indeed.

Xbox 360 Surpasses 2.5 Million Kinect Sensors Sold [Microsoft]

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

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Using a regular ol’ office keyboard to play games on a PC is like using an office-chair to race in the Tour de France: it’ll get the job done, but it’s not pretty. What the dedicated MMORPGer really needs is the Nostromo from Razer, and co-designed by Belkin.

Slide your hand into its cockpit and you’l find it cosseted by the ergonomic wrist-rest as your thumb falls perfectly over the eight-way directional pad and your fingers will hover poised over the 16 programmable (and backlit) keys.

As you’d expect, everything is configurable, from the keys themselves to the limitless macros, through the instantly-switchable key-maps to the 20 game-profiles that can be stored within. Just add a gaming mouse and you can leave that boring old QWERTY to the spreadsheet jockeys.

Nostromo product page [Razer]

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Wowwee’s Cinemin Slice is another iPhone, iPad dock, with one huge difference: It has a pico-projector built in.

The big wedge has a retractable dock section at the front, into which you can either drop an iPhone or pull out like a drawer and sit the iPad on top. There are also speakers (2 x 6-Watt), a headphone jack for hooking up to proper speakers, and an infra-red remote.

But we’re here for that projector. It will pipe video from the iDevice and throw it onto the wall at any size up to 60-inches (from 10-feet away). Contrast is a decent 1000:1, the image has a 854 x 480 resolution, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and the Texas Instruments-made DLP projector beams out 16 ANSI lumens.

It might sound to you like the size and shape of the projected image is unsuited to the rather more square shape of the iPad and iPhone displays. You’d be right, but not to worry: there are also mini-HDMI and AV ports for hooking up laptops and other video gear.

The Cinemin Slice will be in stores in January 2011, for an as yet unnamed price. As a guide, Wowwee sells an almost identical projector without the dock accouterments for $300.

Cinemin Slice [Wowwee via iLounge]

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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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Enterprising gamers are formatting vintage text-based adventure games — at the time of this writing, the legendary Zork I-III and 1988’s less-legendary Mini-Zork — for the Kindle and other dedicated e-readers.

“Many people cut their teeth on the imagination-fueled text adventure games released by Infocom back in the eighties,” PortableQuest’s edman writes at MetaFilter. “Whispernet combined with the handy keyboard and the limiting browser made the Kindle perfect for text-based adventures.”

Everyone agrees that E Ink screens render text beautifully. E-readers’ slightly older but tech-inclined demographic definitely includes lovers of vintage games. And the ability to save and reload games using Amazon’s Whispernet is a nice feature.

Are the Zork games at times frustrating? Yes — maybe even more so on the Kindle, where text entry isn’t as fluid as on a full keyboard. (You occasionally have to enter in numbers, and the alt+Q=1 shortcut is a lifesaver there.) Are they immersive and addicting? Yes. And I’m not even very old; these games and I are about the same age.

Could text adventure games on the Kindle benefit from including a few images here and there and introducing slightly more intuitive gameplay while staying within the text-based-adventure genre? I think they could. There’s no reason why mid-to-late-80s RPGs, like my beloved Ultima and Wizardry series, couldn’t be made to work on the Kindle. And that, my friends, is the future of Kindle gaming — just twenty-odd years too late.

Screenshot by Tim Carmody. H/T: Oliver Hulland

Source:wired.com

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We usually freak out at the idea that computer algorithms might tell us what to do. Yet we’re constantly asking them for instructions: how to contact person X, find document Y, or move from point A to point B. We just pretend that we’re in control. What if, instead, we made that submissive experience explicit, producing something unexpected — and fun?

You see, e-books may not yet have their avant-garde, but mapping apps just might. Self-described artist/architect/post-disciplinary researcher Mark Shepard built his alternative navigation iPhone app Serendipitor (currently in private beta) to inject Google Maps with the ethos of postmodern participatory art movements like Fluxus or Situationism. But when you mash-up movement with art, you get something very much like an alternate reality game.

Here’s Shepard’s description of how Serendipitor works:

Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took

As it happens, this dovetails with “Reality Has A Gaming Layer,” a terrific article published yesterday by game designer Kevin Slavin for O’Reilly Radar. Essentially, Slavin argues that mobile applications like Foursquare, virtual games like Second Life, simulated-reality objects like the Tamagotchi, and casual games like Farmville or Parking Wars are converging with the “big games” — essentially, games that require extensive play in the real world — that he and other designers have been working on for years.

What we’ve been creating, as we’ve taken these gadgets out of our office and living rooms and brought them with us into the world, are experiences that blend information, entertainment, and interaction. When you’re taking a photograph or looking up a map on your smartphone, you’re really waving around a video game controller. Serendipitor might be the perfect example of that.

(out of the) wayfinding with serendipitor [Serial Consign] via Nav Alang/@scrawledinwax

Source:wired.com

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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]

Source:wired.com

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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

Sony might be playing catchup to the Wii with its “Move” motion-controller for the Playstation, but the tech packed inside makes the Wiimote look like a kids’ toy. More surprisingly, according to iFixit head-honcho Kyle Wiens, it is very easy to open up and repair.

The Move is shaped like one of those personal massagers in the Sky Mall catalog, and has a ping-pong ball perched on the end. This ball lights up in a rainbow of colors thanks to three LEDs inside, and the included detector sees the glow from atop the television. This places you in two dimensions, and different colors for different players let the box know who is who. The detector also checks the size of the globe, uses that to calculate your distance and accurately places you in 3D-space. The Wii can’t do that.

Digging deep into the bowels after removing a few Phillips screws and you find a user-replaceable battery and then a slew of high-tech components that Kyle says are more common in today’s smartphones: “a processor, accelerometer, gyroscope, Bluetooth transmitter, vibrating motor, and even a MEMS compass” sit inside and provide information to the mothership. As Kyle points out, while “it’s steep to pay $50 for a controller, it’s quite the bang for the buck.”

The best part, though? Clearly the fact that any Star Wars games from now on will be able to make the ball glow the same color as your on-screen Light Saber. Awesome.

PlayStation Move Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you’re planning on showing off your awesome gaming skills with Apple’s new Game Center, you’d better have a nice new iOS device to play on. Apple has released compatibility details for the fancy high-score table, and you’ll need to have an iPhone 3G or 4, and second-gen iPod Touch or better.

Game Center was demoed by Steve Jobs at last week’s iPod event. It’s kind of a social network for gaming, allowing you to compete against your friends and compare results on the leader-board, and even invite people to play multiplayer games head-to-head. Right now the most common way to taunt your friends is to share your results via Twitter or Facebook, but that requires a log-in for each and every game.

Of course, that old iPod might not have the guts to actually play some of the more demanding games available, but at least you can excuse yourself when you limp in at the bottom of the league-table by blaming your old, weak iPod’s stuttering frame-rate.

Game Center [Apple]

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

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

Doctor Who’s Sonic Screwdriver is at once the most versatile and most preposterous tool the universe has known. There’s nothing it can’t do, from remote-controlling the TARDIS through scanning, burning and cutting, to fixing up cellphones for “universal roaming”. Now, it has one more function: it can control the Wii.

The BBC and Wii-accessory maker Blue Ocean have teamed up to make the Sonic Screwdriver Wii Remote. It’s not just a shell into which you slot a regular Wiimote, either: the Sonic Screwdriver is a self-contained controller, and will be used to play the upcoming Doctor Who: Return To Earth. Other than the fact that the game will feature the Cybermen, nothing is known about the game. I can take a guess, though, based on the increasingly absurd plots of the TV show:

The Doctor and Amy Pond will discover something awful. It will get worse and worse and threaten to destroy the entire universe. There will be no possible way out. Then, the Doctor will mutter some nonsense, point his magic stick at a machine and all will be fixed. Disappointment will ensue.

The Wii Sonic Screwdriver will be joined by a tiny version for the Nintendo DS, which will be used as a stylus to control another game, Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth. Both will be available by the end of the year.

Doctor Who gets Sonic Screwdriver Wii Remote [Official Nintendo Magazine via Oh Gizmo]

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Combined with a party-keg, Griffin’s recently-outed Party Dock for the iPad should make some great, well, parties. As long as you like quiz games, that is.

Thanks to an FCC filing, the iPad accessory was leaked last week and Griffin quickly took control of the situation. Now you can read preliminary details and sign up for future updates at the site. So just what is the Party Dock? It’s a dock for the iPad which has four wireless controllers (hence the FCC filing) letting up to four people play games at once. Because four heads squeezed around one ten-inch screen is a little crowded, the dock also hooks into a big-screen via composite and component video connections.

Games will have to be custom-designed for the dock, and developers can sign up with Griffin already. The controllers are simple, with four directional buttons, a central buttons and one more back button. In terms of layout, the controllers are identical to Apple’s IR remote. This design clearly lends itself more to trivia games than four-way shoot-em’ups.

The dock also supports regular video, so you can watch movies and YouTube on your big-screen TV, as well as photo slideshows and music. There is no launch date or price available yet, as the leak came a lot earlier than Griffin expected. That early-outing will have one advantage at least: now the developers know about it, there may even be a good game lineup at launch.

Griffin Party Dock [Griffin]

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Who doesn’t love them some simulated pinball action? Me, that’s who, but I still like this tiny little box that turns your iPhone into a miniature pinball table: It’s so cute.

The dock can be bought at BestBuy for $40, and works with a free pinball game available in the App Store. The box hooks into the 30-pin connector and provides buttons for the flippers, a proper, spring-loaded ball-plunger and even another screen at the back to show your scores. There’s also a tilt-function in there should you get too feisty with the game.

Sadly the table only works with the provided pinball game and no others, making the fun somewhat limited, especially for $40. The app’s page on the iTunes Store currently looks a little odd, too: The single screenshot on display shows the three wheels from a one-armed-bandit, presumably from the developer’s other hardware/software game combo, Jackpot Slots. Now, make me one of these for the iPad and even I might be tempted to play.

Pinball Magic Game [iTunes]

Pinball Magic dock [BestBuy via Touch Arcade]

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If it works as advertised, a USB dongle could soon break the PlayStation 3’s seemingly hackproof seal.

An obscure group called PS Jailbreak is selling a USB dongle that will supposedly modify the PS3 so users can dump backed up (aka pirated) games onto the system’s hard drive to play them just like legitimate copies.

We write this with such cautious language because hackers have hailed the PlayStation 3 as a console Everest. Sony baked extremely strong security into the system, and though the PS3 has been hacked by a few tinkerers (including George Hotz, the first person to unlock the iPhone), no tried-and-true mod has emerged.

Until we can get our hands on a one of these USB dongles, color us skeptical. (The fact that the “PS Jailbreak” website doesn’t seem to be working right now doesn’t give us much confidence.) Meanwhile, check out the video above claiming to demonstrate the mod running a backup copy of a game and let us know what you think.

PS Jailbreak via Engadget

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Imagine if your Android cellphone could play Playstation-like games. Now further imagine that in place of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it had a slight-out game controller, complete with D-pad, buttons and an analog control-strip. What you are imagining exists inside Sony Ericsson’s labs, and may be coming to you as soon as October of this year.

Engadget cites a “trusted source” inside Sony Ericsson and has some surprisingly detailed specs for the machine (which is seen in Engadget’s own mockup above). The phone, which will look something like a cross between a Samsung Captivate and a PSP Go, will probably be powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, sport a Wide VGA-resolution screen of around four-inches and possibly include a 5MP camera.

Sounds great, right? There will also, the rumor goes, be a dedicated section of the already fragmented Android market for the games, which will be comparable in graphics quality to PSP games. The whole lot will be running on a specially-skinned version of the upcoming Android 3 (Gingerbread).

This is pretty much a PlayStation phone, and we don’t have to say how hot that would be. If this is true, it could be the first real phone-gaming rival to the iPhone, and will likely offer a very different style of game. The iPhone’s touch-screen is great for puzzlers and strategy games, but when you want to blast through a platformer or just go out and shoot some dams zombies, hardware controls are where its at.

I’m uncommonly excited about this rumor, not least because it means that I could likely hack it to run emulators for old consoles and get into some retro-games on my phone.

Exclusive: Sony Ericsson to introduce Android 3.0 gaming platform and PSP Go-like smartphone [Engadget]

Mock-Up image: Engadget

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Somebody needs to make an iPhone game-pad already. The iPhone is great for games and all, but for old-school platformers and beat-’em-ups like Streetfighter IV, nothing beats having some real buttons to mash. Enter the gPod, a be-buttoned case into which you slide the iPhone. It has a d-pad, four control buttons along with select, start and a pair of shoulder-buttons. It is the perfect thing for playing old Super Nintendo games.

But we doubt you’ll ever be able to buy one. It could be easily made, we’re sure, even though the current prototype is compatible with the first-gen iPhone only, but games would have to be written to use buttons. As only a small percentage of iPhone and iPod Touch owners would have this add-on, that would be a tiny market.

I’d buy one, though, even if it only worked with jailbroken iPhones: what would be better than spending an afternoon with this and a SNES emulator full of old game ROMs? Nothing, I tell you. Nothing at all. It even makes a pretty cool-looking case.

iPhone Game Pad [CP Design via Dr. Crypt]

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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews