Hasta La Gadget!

Kindlefish turns the Kindle into a universal translator

The 3G Kindle is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Sure, you can read books on it, but with its web browser, you can also access Wikipedia from anywhere in the world. Until now, though, there was one thing it didn’t do so well — translation. That has been fixed by Kindlefish, made by Gadget Lab reader Nicholas.

Nicholas found that Google Translate is badly suited to the e-reader’s admittedly limited web browser. “Standard Google Translate doesn’t work for the Kindle,” he writes on his blog, “and the mobile Google Translate page returns text that is too small to be easily read, and a little clunky for use on the Kindle.”

To get around this, he wrote a new front-end called Kindlefish, a homage to the universally translating Babelfish from Douglas Adams’ five-part Hitchhiker’s trilogy. The interface is simple, letting you set three preferred languages for quick access, and one input language (English by default). You just type your phrase on the Kindle’s little keyboard and hit the “Translate” button.

Non-Latin text looks particularly good

Kindlefish outputs the translation in very large type, so you can show it to a waiter or storekeeper without having to pronounce anything. Asian alphabets look particularly good on the e-ink screen.

We tested it out, and it works well enough. With the Kindle’s less-than-ergonomic keyboard and the slowness of its browser, though, you’ll need patience to make the most of this. In other words, it’s not going to help you pick up that French cutie sitting across from you in the cafe, but it might help you get a glass of mineral water from the waiter.

If you want to try it out, head over to the Kindlefish site on your Kindle. The site is on free hosting, but if it is swamped by traffic then Nicholas plans to move it to a more permanent home.

Kindlefish – No Muss Translations for the Amazon Kindle [Seattle Flyer Guy. Thanks, Nicholas!]

Photos courtesy Nicholas/Kindlefish.com

See Also:

• Word Lens: Augmented Reality App Translates Street Signs Instantly …
• Google Translate Adds Live Speech Translation to Android
• Welsh Road Sign Features Email Auto-Reply Instead of Correct …
• Kinstant Makes Kindle Browser Useful, at Last

Sony Ericsson says its Xperia X10 smartphone will be getting an upgrade to Android 2.3, even though the company had said it would stop at Android 2.1.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

CNET Car Tech reviews the 2011 Acura RL.

Originally posted at The Car Tech blog

When it comes to mobile RAM, capacity is often what pops to mind first while we overlook speed and power consumption, but Samsung’s latest delivery is worth the extra attention. Earlier this month, said Korean giant started producing 30nm 4Gb 1066Mbps LPDDR2 (or simply Mobile DDR2) chips, in order to phase out its 40nm ones that topped 2Gb at a 800Mbps transmission rate. To put it in perspective, a 40nm 1GB package consists of four 2Gb chips, whereas the new 30nm one will only need two 4Gb chips, thus reducing the package thickness by 20 percent (down to 0.8mm) and power consumption by 25 percent. It’s hard to tell when we’ll start seeing these bits of silicon entering the consumer market, but Samsung’s already stamping out 1GB modules this month, with a 2GB version to follow next month. Oh yes, we’re definitely liking the sound of 2GB RAM for mobile phones.

Samsung starts baking 30nm 4Gb LPDDR2 chips, packaging 2GB mobile RAM in April originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Tech-On!, Samsung Hub  | Email this | Comments

Let this be an object lesson about attempting to profit off of catastrophe. A man in China bought 7 tons of salt, in hopes of making a quick buck off of worries surrounding Japan’s battered nuclear reactors. The man spent $4,000 on the stuff, after being tipped off that fears would result in a shortage.