Hasta La Gadget!

Screenshot of My Kindle, Getting Beat By the Computer – Image: Tim Carmody

This might be the happiest chapter in Scrabble’s short digital history: Electronic Arts has released an official version of Scrabble for Kindle. This is the first paid game — or application of any kind — available for the e-reader.

Scrabble fits in well with Amazon’s existing game offerings, as it’s a word-based game that requires simple, five-directional navigation. It shows up in a Kindle user’s home screen, right next to existing games and books. (It’s easy to make a “Games” collection/folder if you like to keep your entertainment media organized/segregated.)

The game is, if I may say so, well put together; you use the controller to navigate to particular spaces, and once you’ve chosen a direction, you can just type out words. There are also smartly-chosen menu options, including a very useful list of two-letter words.

It’s fast and responsive, and I predict it will be a big hit. Scrabble has a huge built-in fan base that overlaps well with book- and word-loving Kindle owners, and Scrabulous (later rechristened Lexulous) has been a tremendous casual gaming hit on Facebook. In fact, Scrabble-makers Hasbro and Mattel had to fight with Facebook and Scrabulous when the game broke out faster than they were ready with an official version. Words With Friends is the similar unbranded iOS application.

Major drawback: Unlike Facebook’s or other online iterations of the Scrabble game, there is no social dimension. You can’t play with another Kindle user online; the best you can do is set up a two-player game where you pass the Kindle back and forth.

Electronic Arts’ Scrabble costs $4.99 and is available for purchase and download today.

The First Kindle Paid App Is Out – It’s Scrabble [iReader Review]

See Also:

• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• How to Do Everything on Your Kindle, Pt. 2: Jailbreak Edition …
• Games, Chat, ePub: Imagining the Future of Apps for Kindle …
• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle
• Confessions of an Online Scrabble Cheat
• Scrabble Flash Is a B-L-A-S-T

Disneyland. It’s a magical place where memories are made, shared, and otherwise exploited. Now you can make, share, and otherwise exploit said memories with the world, thanks to Disney’s Memories, a new site that lets users upload and share photos, videos, and other content with the Internet at large.

“We’re inviting our guests to share their family memories online and in the parks,” Tom Staggs, the chairman of Disney parks said during a recent event. “We’re making them the center of this campaign.”

Sounds simple enough, right? And really, what could Disney have to gain from your memories? A lot, actually.

You know a device is due for a refresh when the only thing left to write about it is rumormongering of a possible upgrade. Today it’s the turn of Apple Insider, citing sources in Taiwan, to declare that an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display will be headlining a long overdue update to Apple’s MacBook Air. We’ve heard this scuttlebutt before, and the idea that the Air would be shrunken in order to better differentiate it from the MacBook Pro line carries a lot of believability, but we’re still a little jaded from previous misleading rumors on the same subject. At least this one comes with all the gravitas of DigiTimes, whose scribes suggest Quanta has an order to build up to half a million 11.6-inch “MacBooks” for Apple in 2010. All that said, we still wouldn’t be surprised if Apple let another holiday period go by without updating its unhealthily thin 13.3-inch laptop.

MacBook Air suffers another bout of 11.6-inch display rumors originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Apple Insider, DigiTimes  | Email this | Comments

I’ve had it. I can’t take all this Nokia operating system speculation anymore. The final straw came with a VentureBeat piece citing a “trusted source” that claims “Nokia is now likely to use Windows Phone 7 as an additional platform for its phones.” Enough already. Nokia has a strategy and hiring Stephen Elop away from Microsoft’s Office team isn’t going to change that no matter how much the US media (where Nokia has near zero presence) wishes it were true — if anything, it’s going to accelerate it.

Continue reading Editorial: Nokia’s not going to switch to Android or Windows Phone 7, so stop it already

Editorial: Nokia’s not going to switch to Android or Windows Phone 7, so stop it already originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

In the beginning, it was hard not to see Microsoft’s refusal to embrace Blu-ray on the Xbox 360 as a result of the fact that the company had originally sided with Toshiba’s HD DVD format–a battle that, of course, the company ultimately lost.

Even as Blu-ray became the clear victor of the battle and former HD DVD supportser (including Toshiba itself) embraced the format, Microsoft wasn’t exactly falling all over itself to adopt the media.

And now, as other companies are beginning to abandon physical media in favor of the streaming variety, it looks as though Microsoft may have ultimately done itself a favor by waiting it out. Now seems like a pretty good time for the company to pat itself on the back for such foresight.

Stephen McGill, the head of Xbox operations in the UK, did the honors. “Blu-ray is going to be passed by as a format,” the executive told a UK site. “People now recognize what a smart decision it was to keep the [Xbox 360] pricing low,” Gill said, in reference to the lack of a Blu-ray drive on the device.

It’s hard to argue with the suggestion that Blu-ray will ultimately be eclipsed by non-physical formats–we’re seeing the same phenomenon occur over in the music world. Though, thanks the the war on technology waged by record labels, the process has been relatively slow and painful.

As broadband becomes the norm, it’s clear that movie streaming services are the next logical step in the evolution of movie delivery. The question then, is how long such a transition will take. It’s certainly a gamble on Microsoft’s part–but then, the last time the company invested itself in a next generation movie format, that didn’t work out all that well.