GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

One thing the otherwise excellent Kindle is not is a great web-browser. Even with a hardware keyboard to type urls, the process of visiting even one site is painful. If you’re like most people, you’ll try once or twice and then give up, forever.

Which is a shame, as the little e-reader has a free, life-long 3G connection, perfect for quickly checking your mail or the news. Which is where Kinstant comes in. Kinstant is a customizable home-page (remember those?) which has just been updated with some fancy new features.

Save Kinstant as your home-page and you have one-click access to Kindle-friendly versions of many sites (Gmail, the New York Times, CNN) plus links to category pages. Click one of these and you’ll see a further list of sites, plus headlines and summaries for that subject.

With the new version, you can also add in your own links, either direct from the Kindle or from a proper web-browser somewhere else. You just add the regular URL and then, when you click the link, you are taken to a vastly simplified version formatted for the e-reader.

And there’s more. A menu gives access to a calculator and Google Maps. Yes, maps. Add your location and destination and you get directions and an embedded map with the route marked.

Users of older Kindle’s with even crappier browsers (Kindle 2 and DX) can access a trimmed down version. It’s not pretty, but it works.

Kinstant is free, and available now. To get it, just follow the link, and be amazed that you have just turned your Kindle into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Kindle-less can view the page in their computer or cellphone’s browser too, if you want to see how it looks.

Kinstant [Kinstant. Thanks, Sherwood!]

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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

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

One of the best things about the Gadget Lab is our awesome readership, and this tip comes from Gadget Lab fan Ron Winters. Ron has actually managed to make the Kindle’s “experimental” web-browser functional. Better still, it is an always-connected client for reading your own personal news.

Up until the latest version, the Kindle’s browser fully deserved its “experimental” tag. In fact, “excremental” would have been more apt. It was clunky, slow and almost impossible to use. Anecdotal reports say that the Kindle 3 has a much better browser, and now Ron has proven it with a great hack for using Google Reader. The trick lies in keyboard shortcuts and the oft-forgotten full-screen mode. It works like this:

First, log into your Google Reader account and use the awkward cursor control to navigate your feed list. Then hit the “right” cursor to enter the news articles themselves. Then comes the trick: just press “f” to enter full-screen mode, instantly turning your Kindle into a custom newspaper. You can scroll through the article with the Kindle’s page-turn buttons, and using Google Reader’s keyboard commands – press “j” and “k” to page through articles.

Ron says that “this works best with images turned off in the kindle browser” and with a bigger font size for easier reading: “I happen to like 200%,” he says. One of the first things I tried to do with my second-gen Kindle was browse to Google Reader – it’s a natural fit – but it was too slow and awkward to actually use. Ironically, given that the Google Reader site is not yet optimized for the iPad, the humble Kindle could turn out to be the best mobile newsreader yet.

Photo: Ron Winters. Thanks, Ron!

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews