Hasta La Gadget!

Just one catch: It’s BYO aircard. That can actually work out in your favor, though, especially if you pair the gizmo with a pay-as-you-go 3G service. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10470636-58.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Cheapskate/a/p

After a flurry of announcements in December and January, things have gone quiet in the Skiff camp as Hearst prepares to launch its publisher-focused Kindle Store competitor. Now in addition to its massive Skiff Reader and apps for Palm WebOS devices, MIDs, and yes the iPad, President Gil Fuchsberg announced at CTIA that Skiff and Samsung would partner to deliver electronic newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books across “a range of Samsung devices.” Specifically, Gil called out the Android-based Galaxy S with that impressive 4 inch, Super AMOLED display. But unless Samsung’s wrapped up some kind of exclusivity (which we doubt) then we should see a generic Skiff app for any Android device appear in the Android Market. Now how about a launch date Skiff for something, anything. Pretty please, with an Eclair on top? Read the full transcript of the partnership after the break.

Continue reading Skiff partners with Samsung to deliver e-stuff, someday

Skiff partners with Samsung to deliver e-stuff, someday originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 07:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

When you move from one house to another, the Post Office will forward your mail to you so that you don’t have to worry about not receiving an important piece of mail.  When you get a new phone number, the telephone company will forward your calls so that people know how to contact you.  With email becoming an extremely important form of communication for both personal and business use, should email providers be required to forward emails to a new address when someone gets a new account? It’s an interesting topic and one that Federal regulators are investigating.

Of course you’re probably thinking that it’s simple to notify your email contacts when you’re switching to a different address, and it is, especially in Gmail or Yahoo Mail with their forwarding option. But what about the instances when a person has an email address through their ISP and their service gets canceled. That’s what happened to one woman, Gail Mortenson, who filed a six-page petition with the FCC after her AOL account was abruptly terminated which “devastated her business”.  According to the AP, Mortenson said that she “lost potential clients because they couldn’t reach her, and she requested that Internet service providers, such as AOL, be required to forward email traffic from a close account to a new email address designated by customers for at least six months.”

Major email providers have yet to respond to the petition, but Richi Jennings who is an analyst with Ferris Research said that while the FCC could require companies to offer a free email forwarding service, it would be expensive to do this.  He says, “Service providers typically operate with low margins, relying on volume to make acceptable profit.”

At this point, I don’t think that forwarding should be required. What I do think though, is that providers should give their users the option to pay  a reasonable amount for a forwarding service. Email is an important communication method and if someone’s email is essential to keep a personal business going, they’ll be willing to pay to have it done.

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The iPad is no Kindle-killer (although buying the almost $500 DX now seems a little silly). The Kindle, and any other e-reader, will continue to be great for just reading books, with the sunlight-friendly e-ink display and the long, long battery life making for a great single-purpose device. The real Kindle-killer will be a cheap e-reader, and it just arrived: the $150 Kobo eReader.

The bare-bones reader looks very similar to the Kindle, but it is just over half the price. You get access to a store, as you do with the Kindle, in this case the Kobo International Store with around 2 million titles. And you can read these books on other devices: iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Android all have Kobo apps.

What the Kobo doesn’t have is a 3G connection. Instead you load up books via USB (EPUB or PDF) or over the reader’s Bluetooth connection with a compatible smartphone. The Kobo also has less storage than the Kindle — 1 GB instead of 2 GB — but you can add up to four more with an SD card (a handful of cards and you’d be set up for years).

What we really like about the eReader is the interface. The chapter lists are big and clear, the main “I’m Reading” page gives a newspaper front-page-like overview of the newspapers and books you’re currently reading, and you can even choose to display your books in an iPad-like bookshelf metaphor. When you power down, it shows the book’s cover instead of those awful Kindle screen-savers (although at least the Kindle doesn’t give away that you’re reading Dan Brown).

We do worry about those controls. The big blue D-pad on the front looks great, but all the buttons are tucked away on the left-hand side, on the edge, not the front panel. That could prove awkward. It could also be a smart decision to keep non-essential functions away from accidental presses.

You can also, somewhat oddly, add a book-cloth “skin” that will give the front of the device an old-fashioned look and feel (the back is quilted rubber). And to get you started, the eReader comes pre-loaded with 100 public-domain titles.

It looks like a huge threat to the Kindle, and Kobo seems to have trimmed just the right features to get to this low price. Only hands-on testing will tell if it’s as good as it seems, but right now we don’t see much reason to buy Amazon’s locked-down machine.

Kobo E-Reader [Kobo. Thanks, Meghan!]

See Also:

• Kobo International E-Book Store Launches: Why Amazon Should Be Afraid
• Kobo E-Reader First on iPad
• Hands-On: Shortcovers Brings Proper Book Browsing to iPhone

The Wall Street Journal has all but announced the price of its iPad edition: $18 per month. That compares to the official print-edition price of $29-per-month, or $10 if you buy a print subscription through a reseller. The WSJ article quotes people at the WSJ who are “familiar with the situation”, so you can take it as a reliable report.

Is this too much? For the WSJ, perhaps not, as it is one of the only papers people already pay to read online. But for papers (and magazines like Wired), which make their entire content available free, any amount above a few bucks a month might be too much. It’s not even like you are getting an ad-free version. The WSJ has signed up some big names, including Coca-Cola and FedEx, for $400,000 (over three months).

The publishers seem to be banking on multimedia to entice people, packaging movies and sound along with the pictures and text. I’m skeptical. This didn’t work for the CD-ROM, nor with the web. I certainly don’t want to have to watch a video-clip to get part of an otherwise text-only story. Also, shouldn’t these guys be cutting production costs? Shooting video is expensive. It also takes up a lot of space. There’s no way I would want top pull down a multi-gigabyte app to my 16GB iPad.

From a gadget point-of-view, this seems to be all wrong. The WSJ will probably get away with it as executives read their iPads and work from the beach, but trying to charge people for what they currently get free, and will still be able to get free, looks like a bad idea.

Magazines Use the iPad as Their New Barker [WSJ]