Hasta La Gadget!

About three weeks ago I wrote a post for Gearlog called “The New Kindle: Not for Comics.” Essentially I lamented the lack of sequential art-friendly features on the device–it doesn’t have a color screen, and the zoom feature is, at best, lacking. This is unfortunate, really, because comics have a huge potential in the ebook market–after all, even today many folks are embarrassed by the idea of reading comics in public, on, say, a subway train. With a Kindle in hand, however, the person sitting across from you don’t know whether you’re reading War and Peace or Richie Rich.

In my humble opinion, the best device for reading comics at the moment (besides, you know, old-timey comics themselves) is the iPhone. The screen on the device is small, sure, but it’s brilliant, and the multi-touch capabilities make flipping through a book a fantastic experience.

Now that we actually have the new Kindle in the office however, it seemed like a good time to test out the hypothesis. There isn’t really much in the way of comic books available through the Amazon store, so I took matters into my own hands and used the PDF import function.

After the jump, check out a few of my favorite comics as seen on the Kindle, including Watchmen, Bone, New X-Men, and Jimmy Corrigan.

The week is flying by, but don’t forget to stop and smell the roses once in a while. And, while you’re taking a break from your busy life, check out Gearlog’s deals for Thursday, March 5:

1. Get the Samsung WEP210 Bluetooth Headset from Woot.com today for just $9.99. Normally $49.99, the headset has 5.5 hours of talk time and 70 hours of standby time. Only weighing nine grams, the headset is super light. The deal ends today or while supplies last, whichever comes first.

2. The Canon PowerShot SD770 IS Digital Camera is on sale at Buy.com today for $154.99, down from $229.99. The camera has a 10-megapixel resolution and a 3x optical zoom lens.

3. Save 60 percent off the complete Seinfeld series today at Amazon.com. Down from $250.95, the collection is only $99.99 as part of Amazon’s Deal of the Day.

Amazon wasn’t just teasing you whiners who blabbed on about how you’d rather just read ebooks on your iPhone: The iPhone and iPod Touch app has arrived.

The free program brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s much smaller, non-E-Ink screen, including the same electronic books, magazines and newspapers that Kindle owners can buy, and the ability to change text size, add bookmarks, note and highlight stuff. From what we can see at first glance of the app itself, there’s no dictionary or search.

If you already have both a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon’s program syncs the two so that you can keep your bookmarks on both devices. Immediately after loading up the app, this worked exactly as billed, and the page we’re on in the Kindle 2 showed on the iPhone.

While my first thought was “Jesus (not Diaz), Amazon’s bent on cannibalizing itself,” I guess the move kind of makes sense. People who want E-Ink will still buy the Kindle 2 (reviewed here), but perhaps this will steer people away from the other multitudinous, less complete iTunes ebook options. [iTunes Link to Amazon Kindle App]

Some people, like Madonna, say we’re living in a certain kind of world–a material world. Whether or not you’re a Madonna fan, check out Gearlog’s deals for Tuesday, March 3:

1. Amazon is selling the Canon PowerShot SD770IS 10-megapixel Digital Camera for only $144.95 today only. Regularly @229.99, the camera has many features, including 3x optical image-stabilized zoom, 2.5-inch PureColor LCD II screen,and face and motion detection technology to automatically reduce blur. Again, the sale only last for today as part of Amazon’s Deal-of-the-Day.

2. Save up to 20 percent off of select HBO series at Best Buy this week. Choose from titles like “Flight of the Conchords,” “Big Love,” and “John Adams.” Hurry, the sale ends on March 7.

3. The Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2 Portable Speakers for iPhone 3G and iPod is 30 percent off at Buy.com. Down from $129.99, the speakers are just $89.99 with free shipping. It has a 10-hour battery life, so you can take it anywhere, especially with the included traveling case. The speakers also charge your iPhone or iPod as it plays your tunes.

Roku was nice enough to upgrade our player for Amazon Video on Demand a little early, and we’re basically impressed — although we’re not in love with SD video and stereo audio, it’s hard to complain about a free service update. Actually, that might be the best thing about the newly-rebranded Roku Video Player: Roku’s opening the platform to third-party channels, so eventually the $99 box will be able to stream from all kinds of sources. Amazon is just the first additional channel built using the new tools, and for the most part, things work just like Netflix — the interface has been only slightly modified to enable selecting content from the box itself instead of from your online queue. We’re talking really slightly: there’s no search interface, so it’s sort of like having lots of categorized queues. One minor complaint: the rental clock starts when you purchase content, not when you start playback, which isn’t necessarily the most flexible setup, but it makes sense given the streaming-only nature of the service, we suppose. That said, purchasing is easy and fast, and we had no problems streaming in the highest-available quality on our 10Mbps cable connection — Max Payne didn’t look super-awesome in SD, but it was certainly watchable. Bottom line? It’s perfect for a bedroom, but we’re way more particular about the home theater — Roku tells us the Video Player can actually do 1080i and 5.1 if the content is there, so hopefully we’ll see someone leverage those capabilities and turn this thing into a $99 Apple TV / Vudu killer. Quick little demo vid after the break.

Continue reading Roku Amazon Video on Demand hands-on

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Roku Amazon Video on Demand hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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