Hasta La Gadget!

For those who feel there’s not enough choice in e-readers or smartphones, here are some new options. Acer is showing a new e-reader and smartphone that more than anything else add clutter to the category.  The two devices will be shown at Computex, one of the largest trade shows for PC makers held every year in Tapei, Taiwan.

Acer’s new e -reader called LumiRead will have a 6-inch E Ink display, 2 GB flash memory (good for about 1500 books) with the option to add a MicroSD card, and a QWERTY keyboard.

There’s also an ISBN scanner built into the device so users can scan ISBN codes on the books to create their own wish list or search online libraries and book stores.

Like the Alex e-reader or Amazon’s Kindle, Acer’s LumiRead will have a internet browser and connect wirelessly using 3G or Wi-Fi.

Acer has signed agreements with Barnes & Noble and Libri.de, a German internet book retailer to offer e-books. The device will launch in the U.S. in the third quarter and be available in China and Germany towards the end of the year.

Acer isn’t talking price, which will be key to the device’s success. The e-reader market is flooded with Kindle clones and the arrival of yet another device is hardly likely to get consumers’ attention.  The ISBN code-scanning feature aside, the LumiRead feels rather pedestrian and unless Acer can beat Sony’s $170 Pocket Edition e-reader, it is difficult to see how LumiRead can get ahead.

Separately, Acer also announced a new smartphone called Stream. The Android-powered phone will have a3.7-inch touchscreen OLED display, 3G,  Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, 512 MB RA and 2 GB of internal memory.

“Acer Stream is a high-end multimedia smartphone, optimized for watching movies, listening to music and enjoying web browsing like at home,” says Acer in a statement. “Perfect for most demanding users who look for the best in entertainment.”

That means HD video recording up to 720p, 5-megapixel camera, a GPS system that allows photos and videos to be geotagged and a HDMI port. The phone will run Android version 2.1 aka ‘Éclair.’

Based on the specs, the Stream sounds a lot like the Nexus One.  It’s likely that Acer will launch the device in Asia and Europe only. After all, the Nexus One and the HTC EVO 4G blow the Stream out of the competition in the U.S.

Acer hasn’t announced telecom carriers or pricing for the Stream.

See Also:

• $150 Kobo eReader: The Real Kindle Killer?
• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• Entourage eDGe E-Book Reader
• Acer Plans a Million Chrome OS Netbooks, New E-Reader

Photo: Acer LumiRead/Acer

Barnes & Noble has released its e-reader software for the iPad, adding yet another way to buy and read e-books. It’s as slick as we’ve come to expect, but suffers from several minor flaws and one fatal problem: Unlike iBooks, where you can buy easily and seamlessly from with the application, the B&N reader boots you out to a website, just like Amazon’s Kindle App.

The app is available only in the US App Store, but as it is free you can create a US iTunes account and grab it anyway. That way you can try out sample books and also download free e-books (credit required, although not for samples), of which there are surprisingly many (mostly romance and Star Wars novels). Once you have completed the transaction in your browser, you step back to the app and hit refresh. The books are quickly downloaded to the iPad.

I briefly tried out the reading interface, and it is adequate. There is a good range of fonts, you can highlight and make notes on text, although you can’t search your notes, and you can define words in the built-in dictionary as well as Google and Wikipedia (you’ll be asked if you want to launch the search in Safari first). The page turns are slick, and thankfully they leave out the page-turn animations that are so distracting in iBooks.

The problem is when you flip to landscape format to read. Instead of splitting the text across two pages to take advantage of the big screen, the app just goes wide. There appears to be no way to fix this, so upright reading is recommended. BN eReader for iPad (it’s full, ugly name) is a competent reader, and it’s free. If you already own a Nook, I’d recommend it. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem much point.

BN eReader for iPad [Barnes and Noble. Thanks, Brittany!]

See Also:

• Barnes & Noble Nook
• Bookstores Aim at Amazon With E-Readers of Their Own

Pandigital’s best known for its hard, hard work in the game-changing digital photo frame world, but the company’s feeling a bit froggy of late. It’s latest leap is into the burgeoning e-reader market, and unlike those from Barnes & Noble and Amazon, this one’s sporting a 7-inch LCD — you know, now that Apple has suddenly made that “okay” again. At any rate, the forthcoming Novel boasts a full-color 800 x 600 resolution touchscreen, inbuilt WiFi and dimensions of 5.5- x 7.5- x 0.5-inches. The highlight here is the partnership with B&N, which gives this guy access to the bookseller’s eBookstore, not to mention the ability to share content via LendMe. Pandigital also throws in 1GB of internal memory, an SD / MMC card slot, orientation sensor, and the rechargeable battery is said to be good for a mediocre six hours on a full charge. The $199.99 Novel should be out and about next month supporting PDF, ePUB and HTML formats (yeah, there’s a web browser), and in case you were wondering, it’s based around Android and gets powered by an ARM 11 processor. Did Pandigital — of all companies — just out a remotely interesting e-reader? Yes, yes it did.

Continue reading Pandigital intros 7-inch Novel e-reader, nabs access to B&N eBookstore

Pandigital intros 7-inch Novel e-reader, nabs access to B&N eBookstore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 May 2010 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS sells tons of laptops through Amazon.com. Amazon happens to offer a Kindle for PC application. Heck, why not team up and pre-install the app on the ASUS netbooks and laptops that are sold through the online e-tailer? Sure makes a lot of sense to us, and apparently it did to both Amazon and ASUS. Starting today, select laptops — including the Eee PC 1005PE and UL30 — will be sold with the e-book app loaded up. Frankly, we’re not the biggest fans of pre-installed software cluttering up fresh screens, but this sort of partnership surely makes sense with certain devices — in particular, convertible tablets that you’d use to read. You know what would also make sense? ASUS preloading some sort of Amazon application on its Eee Pad. That’s just us playing make believe, but it seems like the two companies are certainly talking. We’re set on getting our fill of ASUS tablet news at Computex next week, but in the meantime hit the break for the full Amazon / ASUS PR.

Continue reading ASUS and Amazon team up to pre-install Kindle for PC on netbooks and laptops

ASUS and Amazon team up to pre-install Kindle for PC on netbooks and laptops originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 May 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reader application, has not yet been updated for the iPad. Maybe it’s coming soon and will be awesome, or maybe the current owner, Amazon, has killed it to reduce competition for its money-making Kindle app.

Either way, unless you want to read your e-book collection on a blocky, pixel-doubled screen, you’ll have to switch readers.

But what about all the books you already have in your Stanza library? Here we show you how to extract you books from Stanza, pretty them up and put them into iBooks on your iPad.

Getting books into Stanza is easy. You can beam them across your Wi-Fi network using the companion desktop application or with the clunky but powerful e-book manager Calibre. You can buy them from within the application itself, or you can add online repositories of varying legitimacy.

Once the books are on there, though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within.

Download the app, called “Stanza Book Restore Tool”, from Lexcycle, the developers of Stanza. Point it at your backup folder (on the Mac you’ll find it in Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup), choose a destination and hit “Recover Books”. All the books will be copied to your computer.

But what then? Now you have a bunch of EPUB files littering your desktop. You could drag them straight into iTunes, where they’ll be imported into your book collection, but the lovely cover artwork you enjoyed in Stanza will be gone, replaced by text on a generic, plain book cover. What you need is the aforementioned Calibre, previously seen on Gadget Lab in the service of adding Instapaper and other newspapers to your Kindle.

Download the free Calibre app for Mac or Windows, drag in the EPUB files and then go to work. Your books’ title and author data should be cleanly filled out already, but if you right-click on a book (or hit the e key) you can edit the metadata. The easiest way is to let Calibre pull the info down from the internet.

Once this is done, click the “Download cover” button to do just that. Calibre gets it right 99 percent of the time. If you don’t like the cover, you can add your own from an image file.

The next step is essential if you want to import all the new keywords and cover art along with the books into iTunes. You need to convert the books to EPUB.

But wait. They’re already EPUB files, right? Yes, but right now the newly added metadata isn’t baked into the files. Running an export won’t create new files, but it will replace the old one with the newly enriched versions.

Do this as a bulk action and go make a coffee. If you’re using a Mac, don’t get too scared when its fans start to spin like a leaf-blower.

Next, you need to separate out all the EPUB files and just drag them into iTunes. The problem is that they’re stuck inside subfolders. On a Mac, the best way is to run a spotlight search on the Calibre catalog folder, choosing “file extension=epub” as your search term. Drag those files onto the iTunes icon and wait.

Once the import is done, you’ll see a beautiful library of e=books ready to sync to iBooks on the iPad.

Restoring Stanza books from iTunes backup [Lexcycle]

Calibre [Calibre-ebook]

Stanza [Lexcycle]

See Also:

• Stanza v2.0: The iPhone's Best E-Reader Just Got Better
• IPhone Stanza Downloads May Top Kindle Sales
• Gadget Lab Guide: How to Un-Cripple Your International Kindle
• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation