Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon has added audio and video to its iPhone and iPad Kindle applications. Several titles are already in the store and give you popover additions to the words and pictures already in the e-books.

The new multimedia books get their own section: Kindle Editions with Audio-Video, which is rather sparsely populated right now. The international store contains just seven books, most of which are Rick Steves’ travel guides (plus a cookbook and Knitting for Dummies), while Technologizer reports that the US store currently lists 13 titles. Presumably more are on the way.

This marks a big leap over Apple’s own e-reader software, iBooks, which currently has just words and pictures. IBooks may have a nicer UI, but Kindle has the catalog, and often the lower prices: these new books come in at $13.79 in the international store, and at the regular $10 price-point in the US.

Of course, these versions won’t work on the Kindle hardware: even if they did they’d max out the 2GB storage pretty fast. As it is, these big files are only downloadable over Wi-Fi on the iOS devices.

Cookbooks, travel guides and how-to titles all clearly benefit from added video and audio. Let’s just hope that Amazon doesn’t decide to bulk up simple novels with these extra Megabytes, too, unless it is to add a fully synced audiobook version so you can switch back and forth between words and speech. That would be pretty sweet.

Kindle Editions with Audio-Video [Amazon via Technologizer]

Press release [Amazon]

Not a fan of being tied down to a single network? Neither are we, so let’s all hold hands and rejoice at the news that Dell’s 5-inch Streak has today become available to purchase unlocked over in the UK. Freedom lovers will have to pay a hefty £50 extra for being unshackled from O2’s chains, but the £449 ($676) price point remains significantly lower than the 16GB iPhone 4 and should prove mighty tempting. Then again, if you wait until next month, you might be able to import one from the good old US of A, where Dell will be selling the unlocked Streak at a thrifty $500. It all depends on what you have more of, money or patience.

[Thanks, Manuel B.]

Dell Streak now available unlocked for £449 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bus. Ice cream truck. Personal space invader. Vessel of illicit speaker transport. It’s all semantics, anyway.

Darren: “Man, this smoke is great, but damn if I’m not suddenly craving an orange Push Up.”
Joe: “Unlike the Street View car, the Bing truck is equally at home on the street or at a rave.”
Chris: “In the event the authorities get too close for comfort, Bing is prepared to take its entire operation mobile for weeks at a time, stopping only to refuel.”
Don: “At last, the real decision engine is revealed.”
Richard Lawler: “Ok, so the plot is, we pick up “models” off the street… and find low cost plane tickets, product reviews or a nice restaurant for them. That’s it.”
Ross: “Creative Picture Framing” indeed, Microsoft. Creative picture framing, indeed.
Joanna: “Didn’t we just do a sketchy tech van caption contest!?”
Richard Lai: “For the last time: we don’t sell froyo here.”
Tim: “Creative Picture Framing was a front for GHOST: Google Hating Operatives with better Search Technology. Jeeves had already arrived in his blacked out Benz, but the Altavista boys were nowhere to be found.”
Myriam: “Oh, I see! It’s an art car for Burning Man… Right.”

[Thanks, Hosain]

Caption contest: Bing bus goes searching for search results originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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No, Amazon didn’t just release a new Kindle capable of doing full motion video with embedded audio. Instead, Amazon just updated the content for the Kindle app running on Apple gear that gives a few books an inject of multimedia. For example, Rick Steves’ London Kindle Edition with audio/video features walking tours with Rick doing the narration while Rose’s Heavenly Cakes features video tips for… you guessed it, making delicious cake. Unfortunately, we’re only seeing about a dozen titles classified as “Kindle Edition with Audio/Video” so it’s hard to tell if the move is a first step in a wholesale Kindle change or just a toe in the water to gauge interest. We suspect the former, given enough time and publisher interest.

Continue reading Amazon Kindle Editions with video and audio added to iPhone / iPad app

Amazon Kindle Editions with video and audio added to iPhone / iPad app originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 01:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scoring the top four US carriers plus a top-tier regional with a single family of smartphones in one fell swoop is a major achievement for any manufacturer — a feat memorably pulled off by the HTC Touch Pro2 — so you can officially color us impressed now that Samsung has unveiled the Fascinate for Verizon plus an unnamed device for US Cellular, both variants of the Galaxy S (generic version pictured). As a refresher, this is the same phone family coming to Sprint as the Epic 4G, T-Mobile as the Vibrant, and AT&T as the Captivate, so these guys have a bit of an Android coup on their hands. Like the others (Epic 4G notably excepted), the Fascinate is a non-keyboard Android slate and features the usual 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 1GHz Hummingbird silicon, and 5 megapixel camera with 720p video recording; US Cellular’s phone looks to be roughly the same thing, though it seems they’ve yet to choose a retail name for it. Both will be available on an unannounced date for an unannounced price — but if the market is any indication, $199.99 on contract seems like a good bet. More on these models as we have it.

Verizon ropes in Samsung Fascinate, US Cellular gets a Galaxy S too originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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