Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve heard in the past that the Palm Pre would be available at other carriers “next year” sometime after Sprint’s exclusivity period is up, and now we have a vague verbal confirmation from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson that he “sees” AT&T grabbing hold of the Pre once it’s available. The remarks were made today at the D7 conference. If this pans out, it fits with rumblings we’ve heard of the Eos being AT&T’s low-end, Centro-style webOS device, with the Pre snapping up the higher end.

[Via Phone Scoop; image courtesy of PreCentral.net]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

AT&T expects to sell Palm Pre when Sprint’s exclusivity ends originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Gadget: The Cool-er, a lower (compared to the Kindle) priced eBook reader that lacks built-in wireless functionality and a hardware keyboard, but adds music, an SD card slot and PDF/MP3 support. But of course, the lower price is the big draw.

The Price: $250

The Verdict: Cheap in every sense of the word, but usable. The Cool-er has the same 6-inch screen as the Kindle 2, but renders text with a proprietary computer-screen-esque font face instead of the more “print”-like Kindle 2 typeface. It is, of course, size-adjustable. You can also flip it 90 degrees to read in landscape mode.

As if it wasn’t obvious enough from its appearance, the Cool-er is designed to be the iPod of eBook readers. It succeeds in looking like an iPod and being available in a lot of colors, but fails in usability and design. The only thing going for it is that it works as an eBook reader if reading is the most important part of the package (which it is, to many people). Also, it’s quite a bit lighter than the Kindle 2, so you can easily hold it with one hand while you’re brushing your teeth, lying in bed, or using the bathroom.

The problem comes from the interface—it feels very much like a Chinese knockoff. The giant iPod design, with the D-Pad scrollwheel acting as both a menu selector and a page turner, isn’t the best way to read a book. Meaning, you can only turn pages with either your right or left hand (if it’s in landscape mode), making reading slightly more awkward. The onscreen UI is also indicative of it being made by a smaller company; it works, but you have to conform to the interface rather than the other way around.

Being able to play audiobooks in MP3 format off the SD card is better than straining to understand text-to-speech with the Kindle 2’s robotic voice. And listening to music while reading is good, but you have no playback controls unless you get out of your book and into the file. It’s really mostly intended for audiobooks, I believe. And it’s more half-baked than anything.

You load eBooks onto the player via mini USB or onto the SD card, but it’s not quite compatible with Macs. Transferring files via OS X will get you four blank folders (the metadata files that Macs deposit on external drives) that you can’t seem to ever get rid of. Also, the battery meter is somewhat finicky and fluctuates up or down depending on its mood. There’s also no great auto-sleep mode like the Kindle has.

Where They Get You: The books. The Host, by tween vampire novelist Stephenie Meyer, costs $20.79 on coolerbooks.com, but only $9.99 for Amazon’s Kindle. Other, older and less popular novels, are more on par between the two stores. You do get 25% off of the list price if you own a Cool-er reader.

The coolerbooks selection is also smaller than Amazon’s, housing none of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, one of which I’ve found used in the photos anyway. (Amazon has them all for $9.99 each.)

Good For Piracy: But the upside is that the Cool-er supports native PDF format documents, like the Kindle DX, so you can load on downloaded and torrented eBooks with ease. But if you really wanted to pirate books onto the Kindle 2, it’s just a matter of using calibre to transcode the books into a compatible format beforehand, so it’s not that huge of a benefit.

Versus Other Players: It’s not as capable as say, a Kindle 2 or the touch-capable Sony PRS-700 reader, and it’s not as cheap as this lousy Ectaco jetBook reader at $170, so it’s kinda just right there in the middle.

If it were $199, we’d recommend this to people who just want to read, and don’t care about all that extra stuff like touchscreen or downloading books directly to the device before your plane takes off. But it’s $250, which is only $50 cheaper than the Sony. If that $50 is very important to you, go with the Cool-er, otherwise we’d recommend either the Sony or the Kindle 2.

I really, really wish this reader were $199, because it’s not a bad reader, it’s just not as good as what’s out there now. [Cooler]

$50 to $100 cheaper than more popular eBook readers

UI is only so-so, and page controls are slightly awkward

Feels plasticky, lighter build means easier reading

Not as polished as Kindle 2 or Sony’s PRS-700, which may be worth the extra $50 to $100

The Muzetto laptop bag from Waterfield is quite possibly the most attractive notebook accessory I’ve used–ever. Far from the black, horizontal stereotype that saturates the notebook transport market, the Muzetto is pure beauty, with some function thrown in for good measure.

Until recently, I was perfectly content walking around town with my ordinary black messenger. There was never any question of its purpose–I trekked around town for months with that plain-looking black beast on my shoulder. But after watching two seasons pass by in NYC, I decided that change was overdue.

Easily dubbed a “man purse,” the Muzetto is part function, part fashion accessory. Large enough to accommodate a 13-inch notebook, the 14- by 11- by 2.5-inches (LWD) Laptop Muzetto isn’t cheap ($239 direct), but the vertical leather messenger bag is just as well made as its price would imply. Waterfield bags aren’t manufactured in bulk in a factory in rural China–they’re made right here in the USA, near the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. You’re paying for quality, and you definitely get your money’s worth.

We’re still trying to get used to the overwhelming joy of having Cupcake installed on our G1s, but it’s full steam ahead over at Google where engineers are already slaving away on the Donut branch that’ll eventually come to be known as Android 2.0. Demoed today at the first I/O keynote were Donut’s universal search (known simply as “Android Search”), which will let you search both online and locally on the phone through contacts, calendars, music, and any app with the proper code, and a text-to-speech API, which should allow developers to integrate Google Voice Search-style awesomeness into the apps of their choice. We also got a brief glimpse of handwriting gestures used for searching through list — the live example was drawing the letter ‘e’ and going to that specific point in a list of songs. Nothing wildly different interface-wise — yet — but we know from the initial 1.0 release that the UI’s very much subject to change, not to mention the fact that HTC and others look poised to do some serious customization of their own. Check out the gallery for shots live from the I/O keynote!

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Android 2.0 “Donut” features demoed at Google I/O originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LED-backlit LCDs are where TV’s future and present meet—they’re the best LCDs you’ve ever seen, but they’re not as stunning as OLED displays, which will one day dominate all. They’re not cheap, but they’re not ludicrous either. Most importantly, they’re actually here.

I’ll CC You in the FL
With LCDs, it’s all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there’s light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you’re basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.

The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people’s lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren’t the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they’re trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theater mag to see what I mean:

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they’re electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.

OLED—”organic light emitting diode”—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That’s why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there’s no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don’t: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required.

LED Is As LED Does
So, Samsung’s term “LED TV” is more accurately—and more commonly—described as an LED-backlit LCD. But not all LED displays are created equal.

There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the center of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they’re still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can’t pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can.

LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It’s called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you’d see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung’s local-dimming 46-incher started at $3,500, versus $2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too.

What Color Is Your LED?
The color of the LEDs matters too, separating the best LED-backlit LCDs from the the merely great. Most LED sets just use white bulbs. The reason Sony’s XBR8 started out at $5,000—as much as Pioneer’s king-of-TVs Kuro—is because it uses tri-color LEDs in an RGB array. In each cluster, there are two green bulbs next to one red and one blue (greens aren’t as bright). The result is high contrast plus super clean, incredibly accurate color.

LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell’s Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we’ll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you’re buying.