Hasta La Gadget!

The DVR patent fight just got a little crazier, with Microsoft greasing itself up and jumping into the arena — seemingly to preserve the honor of AT&T. You’ll remember (maybe) that TiVo and AT&T have been having something of a fight over a few different patents primarily related to time shifting. Now Microsoft is suing TiVo, saying that it has stepped on two patents used in AT&T’s U-Verse, which you’ll recall relies on Microsoft’s Mediaroom. Want to hear some of the legal verbiage in question? “A system that displays programmable information and a secure method for buying and delivering video programs.” It’s vague and all-encompassing, and that’s just how we like our patent kerfuffles.

Microsoft has AT&T’s back, sues TiVo for patent infringement originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s face it — there’s at least an 89.4 percent chance that you’d be utterly embarrassed to let your mother, SO or inner neat-freak inspect your keyboard. Years of wear and tear have cleared the way for minuscule portions of delicacies, follicles and all manners of foreign objects to make their home just beneath the vowels you smash on a daily basis, and considering that cleaning said keyboard or buying a new one is far too difficult, the Quirky community has a better solution. The Space Bar ($42 in a 3-pack) is an aluminum keyboard cover that can slip right over ‘boards that measure 18-inches wide and 1.5-inches deep; aside from covering things up, it also provides six easily accessible USB 2.0 ports. Too bad there’s no germ-nixing UV light on the underside, but there’s always hope for v2.0.

Update: The pricing has since been updated — it’s $42 for each.

The Space Bar sleekly covers up your grimy keyboard, adds a few USB ports to boot originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, you know how much you pay for a book on your Kindle, but do you know how much an author gets from that sale? For most it’s probably some meager single-digit percentage, with the publisher taking the rest of the roughly 35% of revenue Amazon doles out. The remaining 65% goes straight into the site’s coffers, but that’s about to change. On June 30, Amazon is launching a new option in its Digital Text Platform (DTP) publishing scheme that would give authors and publishers 70% of the revenue, with Amazon taking just 30% — effectively flipping the ratio on its head. The catch? There are plenty:

• Distribution costs are now paid by the publisher, but that should be on average a few cents per book.
• These books must sell for between $2.99 and $9.99 and must be priced at least 20% lower than a comparable physical copy of the book. (This is good news for readers, putting a greater incentive for lower-priced digital volumes.)
• The book must support the “broad set” of Kindle features, including text-to-speech.
• This will only be available for books that are in-copyright and only for those sold in the US.

This is an obvious reaction to the competition from places like Scribd, which pays publishers 80%, and publisher-friendly upstarts like Skiff, but it’s also an interesting push to force more books to enable Kindle’s text-to-speech. That is currently something of a sore spot amongst those who provide the content, so while we’re sure authors will love the extra money coming here, we’re wondering whether their publishers will take it given the possible loss of lucrative audiobook revenue. Will this help Amazon in the upcoming war of the e-readers, or will it hurt? We can’t wait to find out.

Amazon to start paying 70 percent royalties on Kindle books that play by its rules originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you have $200 you were thinking of tossing in the trash, you could instead send it to me. I promise to waste it on booze and Cuban cigars. Or you could waste it yourself, and buy the Aputure Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder, a tiny, low-resolution screen on a short cable that duplicates the functionality of your camera’s current screen, only with lower quality.

The Gigtube is a 2.5 inch, 230,000 pixel LCD with three hours of battery life. It hooks into your camera (just how depends on the camera you have) and displays the live-view feed from a “distance”. Some cameras will not output a live-view, so you’re limited to reviewing the shot after it has been taken, a rather useless feature on its own. The Gigtube has one neat trick: it can be used to trigger the camera’s shutter remotely (and here “remotely” means up to 2 meters, or just over six feet).

For what might you use the Gigtube? The pictures on the site appear to suggest narcissistic self-portraits and up-skirt-shots. In fact, anything that “bring photography in a new visual angle”. The unit will work with most Canon, Nikon and Olympus DSLRs, along with the Olympus Pen v1 and v2. Sure, you could buy one, but you should really do the sensible thing and let me send your cash up in wonderful, tasty smoke.

Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder [Aputure via Oh Gizmo!]

If consistently pulling down a fistful of megabits per second isn’t causing the hair on the back of your neck to stand on end… well, first, we strongly recommend you get that looked at by a professional. Secondly, though, you might have a bit of a wait before you get another hair-raising boost in throughput, because Clearwire — you know, the company that runs the WiMAX network shared by Clear and Sprint — is looking to take a laid-back approach on the migration to WiMAX Release 2. The underlying standard, 802.16m, looks destined for IEEE approval some time this year with the promise of 120Mbps down and 60Mbps up in an effort to wage 4G war with LTE Advanced, but Clearwire’s CTO is saying that he’s not looking to trial the tech this year — even though Russian carrier Yota is on track to make it happen using Samsung hardware. Instead, 2011 is a “much more likely” target for these guys, apparently, with commercial deployment plausible by ’12. With the updated standard capable of speeds that put even high-end cable and fiber broadband connections to shame, you’ve got to wonder if backhaul isn’t the real concern here — or, even juicier, if they’re not just trying to keep all the options on the table for a little while longer.

Clearwire in no rush to move to next-gen WiMAX Release 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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