Kindle users are leaning toward downloads priced at $0.00. Still, with Amazon playing close to the vest, it’s hard to tell what the sales patterns really look like. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10422538-93.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Digital Media/a/p
Egad. We had such high hopes for the Camangi WebStation, but as with a few other non-phone devices that have attempted to use Android, it seems as if this 7-inch slate falls a bit short in practice. The gang over at Laptop was able to corral a unit for a brief sit-down, and while they admired the exceptionally light and portable hardware, they kvetched about the lowly 800 x 480 screen resolution, sluggish performance when opening applications and the limited / confined feel of the Camangi Marketplace. They also barked about the resistive screen’s inability to accurately recognize finger presses, and while they’re still holding out some hope that this thing could be useful in at least a few scenarios, it’s fairly clear this piece isn’t for everyone. Peek the source link for the full skinny.
Update: GearDiary got their hands on one as well, and they’ve belted out similar impressions.
Camangi WebStation gets a few first impressions: ‘sluggish’ and ‘confined’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ryan Vanderbilt is the Creative Lead at Google Creative Lab. And like most Googlers, he doesn’t spend all his time working. Unlike most Googlers, Ryan built his own awesome desk.
The Table&Tennis is a beautiful, classic hardwood and chrome desk by day, and a beautiful, classic hardwood and chrome ping-pong table by, erm, also day (remember what we said about Googlers not working all the time?). The net slides from a slot within, and the paddles and balls are kept in the kind of slide-out drawer normally seen cosseting grandmother’s silverware. All you need to do is find your laptop somewhere safe to sit while you play.
With some irony, we think that Ryan’s project is a one-off, destined to remain forever in beta, which is a shame. We could certainly do with the exercise here at the Gadget Lab.
Table&Tennis blog [Ryan Vanderbilt via Core77]
There’s little sense in resisting the obvious: Google is slowly but surely taking over your life, but rather than get indignant and discombobulated, we’d suggest letting go and appreciating how much easier things are with the folks in Mountain View squarely in control. Take Google Goggles, for instance, which aims to convert cameraphone images into useful search results on its own Android platform. Up until now, we’ve been shown stock demos and videos of it running on conventional handsets, but seeing the Goggles hard at work on Sony Ericsson’s not-yet-released Xperia X10 is another thing entirely. Hop on past the break for the frames you’re craving, but don’t bank on this making the wait for said phone any simpler to stomach.
Continue reading Google Goggles gets video demo on Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
Google Goggles gets video demo on Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Christmas news used to be about the iTunes Music Store, and it went like this: Lots of kids got iPods as Christmas gifts, and then they went crazy downloading music.
Now, it’s not just music. According to mobile analytics company Flurry, iTunes Store downloads for the iPod Touch leapt almost 1000% on December 25th. That indicates that a lot of kids found iPod Touches under the tree this year.
There are now clearly added temptations in the iTunes Store, with a full line up of music, games, movies, TV shows and pretty much everything else teenagers used to head to the mall to spend their allowances on, and this alone would explain the spike. But what goes unsaid here is that the iPod Touch is stealthily killing off the regular iPod. Who, apart from joggers, would buy a $180 iPod Nano when they could spend an extra $20 and get a whole computer and games console thrown in?
While everybody is looking over there at the iPhone, or talking about Mac vs PC market-share, Apple is already pushing into obsolescence its entire product line, with things like notebooks and desktops headed for niche, professional uses. If and when a Apple tablet appears, it will do the same to the MacBook as the Touch is doing to the old iPod. Mobile devices like the iPod Touch are the future of computing, and while Microsoft is still waiting for people to get to the office to sell them its wares, Apple is doing what all respectable drug-dealers do: starting ‘em young.
Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas, 50% Growth from November to December [MobileCrunch]
We’re but three years removed from the US introduction of both Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PlayStation 3, and already the rumors are running rampant about the future iterations of both consoles. Two separate reports from Japan’s Impress touch on both units, with speculation and insider information on the former suggesting that Intel could be in talks with the Big N about powering the second Wii. Hard details are obviously tough to come by, but word has it that the two are mulling a GPU / CPU combo similar to the Larrabee; granted, we’d prefer something a touch more potent in the Wii 2, but we wouldn’t be shocked if Nintendo chooses the less powerful path yet again. In related news, it seems as if Sony could be looking for an alternative to its Cell CPU in the PlayStation 4, an alternative that involves some sort of “multi-core CPU.” Potentially more interesting is the notion that Sony’s next-gen handheld could be out before said console, which is loosely pegged for a 2013 release. We wouldn’t take any of this to heart just yet, but we’re pretty certain we can’t stop the dreamers from going too far.
Console scuttlebutt: multi-core CPU for next-gen PlayStation, Intel inside future Wii originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Updated 12/29 with additional details
Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor who is best known for his prediction that machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045, still has a few things to offer carbon-based life forms. Kurzweil has introduced new e-reader software, called Blio, that approaches e-reading from a completely different angle than the current E Ink-based devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader.
Blio is not a device. Rather, it is a “platform” that could run on any device, but would be most obviously at home on a tablet. The software is free and available currently for PCs, iPod Touch and iPhone.
“Everyone who has seen it acknowledges that it is head and shoulders above others,” says Kurzweil. “We have high-quality graphics and animated features. Other e-readers are very primitive.”
Blio is set to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.
E-readers have become a hot consumer electronics product. About 5 million e-reader devices are expected to be sold by the end of the year. Meanwhile, electronic books for the Kindle outsold physical books on Amazon for the first time this Christmas, said Amazon, one of the largest online book retailers.
Kurzweil — who is better known for his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near — has worked extensively in areas such as optical character recognition, speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. His company Kurzweil Technologies has a joint venture with the National Federation of the Blind called knfb Reading Technology to create reading products for people with disabilities. knfb Reading is the company that has created Blio.
One of Blio’s major advantages over current e-book readers is that the software offers a full color experience. E Ink, which is the black-and-white display used currently in almost all e-readers, works best for text, and even then most e-books still look ugly, thanks to design limitations in the readers.
Blio actually lays out the “pages” as they would be seen on paper, with typography and illustrations copied across. It also supports video and animation. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of the interactive magazine applications (also meant for upcoming tablet devices) shown off by the likes of Time Warner, Popular Science publisher Bonnier and Wired’s parent company Conde Nast.
Add to that some nifty features such as text-to-speech and the ability to synchronize things (like bookmarks, highlights and the page you last read) across multiple devices, and it makes for an interesting e-reader.
“We can take a PDF and an audio book and merge the two to get a combination such that you can hear the audio book and see the words highlighted on the PDF at the same time,” says Peter Chapman, an executive at Kurzweil Technologies.
For publishers, says Kurzweil the advantage is that Blio preserves the original book’s format, including typsetting, layout, fonts and pagination.
Though it sounds nifty, Blio is up against some stiff competition. Kurzweil and his team are betting against the trend of dedicated e-reader devices such as Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader.
“People don’t want an extra piece of hardware,” says Kurzweil. “They want to take one device and do everything with it and they want color screens.”
Instead, Kurzweil is betting that tablets that are scheduled to be launched next year — including the much speculated Apple tablet — will be used by consumers instead for reading digital books. Blio could fit well on those tablets.
Blio will also go up against existing e-reader software such as Stanza for the desktop. Amazon acquired Stanza earlier this year, and its Kindle for PC and Kindle for iPhone apps also sync with the Kindle device. Barnes and Noble also plans to offer desktop and smartphone-based e-reader software that will work with its Nook. But Kurzweil says they can’t support multimedia and text-to-speech like Blio does.
Blio creators are also working with major book publishers to port their e-books from the Adobe PDF format to Blio for free. They are trying to partner with Google to make its massive library of free book titles available in Blio.
On its own, Blio looks solid, but it signifies something much bigger: the end of the paper book. Right now, e-books are poor copies of paper books, with a single advantage: convenience. A book is just a container for text, not its natural home.
The upcoming rash of tablets could provide a better place for reading words than these old wads of paper, usurping print the way Gutenberg usurped hand-copied manuscripts.
A chart from Blio shows how the software compares to its rivals:
See Also:
Photos: Blio/knfb Reading Technology
As if we didn’t have enough pretenders in the ebook space, here’s Ray Kurzweil with a new format of his own and a bagful of ambition to go with it. Set for a proper unveiling at CES in a week’s time, the Blio format and accompanying application are together intended to deliver true-to-life color reproductions of the way real books appear. Interestingly, the software has been developed in partnership with Nokia, in an effort to turn Espoo’s phones into “the smallest text-to-speech reading devices available thus far,” though apps are also being developed for the iPhone, PC and Mac. The biggest advantage of this format might actually be behind the scenes, where the costs to publishers are drastically reduced by them having to only submit a PDF scan of their books, whose formatting remains unchanged in Blio. We’ll be all over this at CES, but for now you’ll find more pictures and early impressions over at Gizmodo.
Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You know what’s awesome about being the head of a South Korean chaebol? You’re untouchable. After being convicted of tax evasion netting a $110 million fine and a deferred 3-year prison sentence, Lee Kun-hee, the former chairman of Samsung Group, has been pardoned by the South Korean government — his second presidential pardon after first being convicted in 1996 of bribing former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo. Why the reprieve? Easy, so the 67 year old can help the country pursue a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. A Korean activist group responded to the move saying, “Granting a chaebol chairman a pardon just to host an Olympics will make South Korea a laughingstock in the international community.” How true.Samsung’s former Chairman pardoned, again originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Look, let’s not beat around the bushes — Verizon Wireless will one day stock Palm’s Pre. It’s a rather well documented fact, and at this point the only real question is “when?” Judging by a mysterious Wi-Fi Certificate that just popped up, we’re beginning to think that the waiting period is nearly up, and with CES 2010 happening in a week, there’s hardly a better time for us to really start believing. If you’ll recall, Sprint’s Pre snagged a Wi-Fi Certificate number of P100EWW, and just this summer we spotted a few leaked Palm devices within VZW documents with “P101” and “P121” monikers; lo and behold, the certificate for this elusive dual-mode (WiFi and cellular) smartphone boasts a P101EWW label. We aren’t trying to read too deeply between the lines or anything, but if this isn’t a Pre destined for Big Red, we’re eager to know what kind of new mobile Palm has lined up for its presser at CES.
[Thanks, Rehman]
Continue reading Palm smartphone pops up in WiFi certification database: is this Verizon’s Pre?
Palm smartphone pops up in WiFi certification database: is this Verizon’s Pre? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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