Hasta La Gadget!

In a stealthy yet significant move, Amazon has dropped Sprint as its wireless partner for the latest versions of the Kindle 2 e-book reader. From now on, new Kindle 2s, in the U.S. and worldwide, will be powered exclusively by AT&T’s 3G network.

“Due to strong customer demand for the new Kindle with U.S. and international wireless, we are consolidating our family of 6-inch Kindles,” says Drew Herdener, spokesperson for Amazon.

The move was announced in a quiet update to Amazon’s product page for the Kindle rather than through a press announcement.

The move is a big blow to Sprint, which was the first U.S. telecom carrier to experiment with supporting mobile devices beyond cellphones and netbooks. It also means AT&T has all but cornered the wireless-connectivity market for e-readers. In addition to the Kindle 2, AT&T’s network forms the backbone of the new Sony touchscreen reader and Barnes & Noble’s recently introduced Nook e-reader. All that’s left for Sprint? Providing service for Amazon’s XL-sized Kindle DX, and supporting all the existing Sprint-connected Kindles.

When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, the company highlighted wireless downloads of books as the device’s unique feature. The move helped the Kindle gain an edge over Sony, which had introduced its e-reader earlier but without wireless connectivity.

Earlier this year, Amazon offered a second-generation Kindle called Kindle 2 and a big-screen reader called the Kindle DX. Kindle 2 has a basic browser and lets users check text-heavy sites such as Wikipedia. But the devices were restricted to the United States.

Finally, this month, Amazon debuted an international version of the Kindle 2. It was the first Kindle to use AT&T’s network instead of Sprint’s. Kindle DX is still not available outside the states.

“Now that they are selling a Kindle overseas, it makes sense for them to have just one product that they can sell in all markets,” says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “And, since, in most of the world GSM is what is used, having a single product helps drive down costs for Amazon.” Sprint’s network is based on the CDMA standard.

That doesn’t mean Kindle buyers who bought their device before October will be switching to AT&T.

“Existing Kindle users, owners of the first- and second-generation Kindles and Kindle DX, will not notice any change to their experience. They will continue to utilize the Sprint network in the U.S.,” says Herdener.

And at least until Amazon introduces an international version of Kindle DX, Sprint will continue to be in business with Amazon.

“Sprint still powers the Kindle DX,” a Sprint spokesperson told Wired.com. “So it is not accurate to say that our relationship with Amazon is over.”

Meanwhile, for Kindle users, the switch from Sprint to AT&T raises questions about reliability of service. Weighed down by heavy data use from the iPhone, AT&T’s U.S. network has become congested, leading to slow connectivity and dropped calls.

And with about 3 million e-readers expected to be sold next year, could AT&T’s network face additional strain? Not really, says Golvin. “The type of connection that the Kindle needs is different from that of a phone, since there is no voice component, only a data component,” he says. “The actual capacity consumed by all Kindles now and those coming on to the network is very, very small compared to the rest of the network.”

Kindle users are also less likely to notice small delays or disturbances in the network, says Forrester’s Golvin. Unlike a web page, downloading a book does not require near–real-time display of different components.

“On an e-book reader, the congestion is invisible,” says Golvin. “The downloaded book arrives when it arrives, and a few seconds’ wait does not change much.”

See Also:

• Hands-on with International Kindle
• Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen ‘Nook’ E-Reader
• Amazon Kills U.S. Kindle, Cuts International Price
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  
• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T
• Review: Amazon.com Kindle 2
  
• Review: Amazon.com Kindle DX

Top photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Homepage photo: Gubatron/Flickr

Like Harvey “Two-Face” Dent, a new dual-screen device has two faces to match its double identity: It promises to be an electronic book reader and a netbook at the same time.

The Wi-Fi enabled device, called eDGe, will fold like a book and can be used as an e-reader. It will also serve as a digital notepad you can use to write notes or highlight text, send e-mails and instant messages, browse the internet and run apps, say the device’s creators. Under the hood, eDGe will be powered by Google’s Android operating system.

The left half of the eDGe will have a 9.7-inch E Ink e-paper display. Users will be able to read e-books in PDF and EPUB format and take notes or draw diagrams using a stylus. The right side of the device is a 10.1-inch LCD touchscreen that can be used to check e-mail and surf the web.

The $490 eDGe won’t be available until February, 2010, says its creator, Entourage Systems, a startup based in McLean, Virginia. But the company is taking pre-orders for the device.

Currently, e-book readers and netbooks are among the fastest-growing categories in consumer electronics. Not surprisingly, companies are trying to find ways to meld the two. Netbooks pioneer Asus, for instance, is also working on a dual-screen e-reader. Asus showed a prototype of the device at the CeBIT trade show in March and plans to unveil it at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Asus’ e-reader will likely have two color touchscreens, a speaker, a webcam and a microphone, along with the capability to make inexpensive Skype calls.

The eDGe will have an ARM processor, 4 GB storage, an SD card slot and 2 USB ports. Weighing about 2.5 pounds, eDGe’s dual screens will work together, the company says. That means a user will be able to highlight a word from the e-paper screen and drag it to a browser on the LCD screen in order to do a Google search on it. (See a list of eDGe’s specs.)

As with many hybrid devices, eDGe runs the risk of not being good enough as either an e-book reader or as a netbook. Also, eDGe doesn’t have the kind of integrated access to an e-bookstore that companies such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble can offer with their e-readers. However, because eDGe uses the EPUB format, its customers can access the 1 million free, public-domain books digitized by Google. To get the latest Dan Brown bestseller, Entourage says it is building its own e-book store and inking deals with publishers.

Still, the eDGe packs in some appealing extras. The device will come with a text-to-speech function and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. It will offer about 16 hours of battery life in e-reader mode and up to 6 hours when running the LCD screen, says Entourage Systems.

See Also:

• Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen ‘Nook’ E-Reader …
• New Asus Color E-Reader Folds Like a Book
• 5 Things That Make Us Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook E-Reader
• Sony’s E-Book Reader Adds Touchscreen, Wireless Downloads

Photo: eDGe/ Entourage Systems

Two days after launch, Amazon’s international Kindle has started to show up on doorsteps around the world, including mine. For those outside the United States, the Kindle has until now been a curiosity. Now it’s a way for English speakers everywhere to get quick and cheap access to otherwise hard-to-find books. On Monday, we summed up the problems with the rather contemptuous attitude Amazon has shown with the “international” Kindle. Today we take a look at how the actual hardware shapes up.

When I first opened the package (with its cute “Once upon a time” tagline), I tried to peel the sticker off the screen, giving instructions on charging and switching on. This was, of course, the e-ink screen, a novelty in these parts. But of course, y’all across the pond have known that for a couple years already. On to the differences.

The first moan we had was about the power adapter. The Kindle ships internationally with a U.S. plug. This is in fact a USB wall-wart, and could easily be swapped out. The included USB cable, of course, works fine anywhere. Result: Not as bad as we thought, especially for me, as I have a U.S./E.U. adapter always in the wall for testing products from the States.

Next up, wireless. The new machine’s full name is “Kindle with U.S. and International Wireless”, and it uses a GSM cellular radio which works pretty much everywhere in the world. Service is provided by AT&T with a roaming agreement, something that means U.S. travelers have to pay extra for content to be delivered when they are away from home. It also means that, as we previously complained, many users don’t get the web browsing features. This turns out to be only half true, as we shall discover in a moment

The connection is supposed to be 3G, but it was dead slow. I bought David Byrne’s new book, The Bicycle Diaries, and it took a couple of minutes to arrive, despite being just 4.4 MB. Still, these are e-books, so there’s no real hurry.

The big surprise is that web browsing does work. Or at least, you can visit one and only one site. This is not Amazon.com (although you can of course browse the Kindle Store from the device). It is Wikipedia. If you were to choose just one web site to visit, it would probably be Wikipedia, and even without pictures it is very useful. There’s just one problem: You can only visit http://en.m.wikipedia.org/. Want to access the Spanish version, in Spain? Tough.

Am I pleased to have it? Hell yes. I do almost all my reading on my iPod Touch these days, so the Kindle’s bigger, sharper screen and longer battery life are welcome. I’d love to have a real web browser in there, along with PDF support, but the ability to have instant access to thousands of books in my own language is worth the price on its own. Oh, and the leather case (bought separately), is nice, too.

See Also:

• Crippleware Alert! International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside …
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the …
• Large-Screen Kindle Won't Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives …
• Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen 'Nook' E-Reader …
• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T

Photo credit: Charlie Sorrel

It used to be that “convergence” meant putting two different (but hopefully complementary) devices into the same case. Scratch that. This still happens today, as proved by the Alex, a long box with an e-book reader in one end and an Android-powered cellular device in the other. The dual-screen device, from a company called Spring Design, is like a Pop-Tart with jelly in one end and baloney in the other.

The Alex (we have no idea about that name) aims to strike a balance between the full-color, fully responsive LCD screen at the bottom, used for web surfing, and the e-ink panel above, used for reading books. The idea is that once you have found what you like, you can send it upstairs and kill the battery-guzzling color part, reading the content on the eye and battery friendly e-ink screen. It also goes the other way, with links in the e-ink display opening pictures and video in the color one. This is called “dynamic hyperlinked multimedia information” and was sent through time to the Spring research labs from 1995.

Aside from the ugly design (and that damned name) it’s a fine idea, let down by one thing. Most of us have a cellphone already, or at least some kind of portable device that can both browse the web and save longer articles to the Instapaper service, which lets you hit a bookmark to convert articles into text and read them later, on a web browser, the iphone, or even have them emailed to your Kindle.

The other problem with two screens (despite the inevitable hit to battery life) is that the Alex is big, as in long and tall. We’d much rather have a bigger, single e-paper screen. As it is you get 6-inch e-ink display and a 3-inch color display. To rephrase, you get a Kindle and an iPhone screen in one, only without all the extra functions.

Spring says it “has been working with major book stores, newspapers and publishers over the past two years.” Remember the hot rumor that a Barnes and Noble device would be showing up soon and feature two screens, one color and one of electronic ink? This could well be it. One thing that is certain is that this won’t be the last goofy e-book design. We have a long way to go before natural selection gives us a design as perfect as the paper book itself. Price and launch date to be announced.

Product page [Spring Design. Thanks, Eric!]

Apple on Thursday made a subtle-yet-major revision to its App Store policy, enabling extra content to be sold through free iPhone apps. It’s a move that immediately impacts the publishing industry, and it could pay even bigger dividends if the Cupertino, California, company indeed delivers its highly anticipated touchscreen tablet.

While the most obvious beneficiaries would be app developers, a market segment that can also benefit from the new in-app commerce model are people and companies that create content and need to set up shop in a way that doesn’t, in effect, charge someone for just walking in — like media publishers.

Newspapers and magazines are reportedly in talks with Apple about repurposing their content onto a “new device,” presumably the rumored touchscreen tablet Apple will deliver in early 2010. Numerous reports suggest an Apple tablet would have a strong focus on redefining print media. Enabling in-app commerce through free apps was a crucial move to help make this goal a reality.

Apple’s earlier in-app sales model wasn’t ideal for publishers. Previously, in-app commerce was a feature exclusive to paid apps; free apps were not permitted to sell content. Newspapers and magazines already struggle to sway readers to pay for content to begin with, and charging for apps cuts off potential customers. By allowing commerce within free apps, Apple creates the opportunity for a free media app to serve as a gateway for readers to get hooked on a newspaper’s or magazine’s content, which could help lure them into paying for exclusive premium content.

CNN is an exception: Its recently-released iPhone app costs $2. The Wall Street Journal will later this month begin charging for most of the content it delivers through its free app, and the Financial Times has an app that only offers up to 10 free stories a month without a subscription to the newspaper. But for the most part, publishers have loathed charging for an app, even if it then enabled them to try to charge for content within that point of sale. Reducing the cost barrier of that business model to zero changes things considerably. At least one small publisher, Scarab Magazine, has already taken advantage of the change.

Picture a free magazine app that offers one sample issue and the ability to purchase future issues afterward. Or a newspaper app that only displays text articles with pictures, but paying a fee within the app unlocks an entire new digital experience packed with music and video. This is an example of the “freemium” model that Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson explains in his book Free. It’s a model that some publishers, including Wired’s parent company Condé Nast, are already experimenting with on their websites. (Our sister publication Ars Technica, for example, offers its general content for free, as well as a “Premier” subscription option for readers to access exclusive content.)

If Apple does indeed deliver a tablet, the key for publishers is to create a convenient experience that readers will pay for, as opposed to the content itself. A free app would be the first step toward offering that experience. (And then the publisher will have to figure out what to do about ads, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.)

It’s plausible to imagine that a freemium strategy would be much more effective through a tablet app than a website. If the tablet is indeed designed like a 10-inch iPod Touch or iPhone, as insiders have described it, then publishers developing apps will be able to take advantage of features such as the accelerometer, GPS, live video streaming and multitouch to innovate the way they engage with their audience — and, ultimately, persuade them to pay.

Only now is the relevance of a touchscreen tablet becoming more clear. Scores of tablet devices have come and gone in years past, and many analysts and tech enthusiasts wondered why Apple would enter what is considered a failed product category. Clearly, Apple sees a gaping hole — the publishing industry’s lack of vision for a working digital model — and a touchscreen tablet, combined with the App Store and this new in-app sales model, would seek to fill it.

What’s in it for Apple? Primarily, squashing Amazon’s Kindle. Who would wish to read a digital newspaper or magazine on the Kindle’s drab e-ink screen if Apple delivers a multimedia-centric tablet? Wired’s Steven Levy shares my view in his assessment of the Kindle’s newspaper experience: “[The Kindle DX’s] plodding menu-based interface still made navigating newspapers difficult, and the rich graphic quality that makes magazines such an indulgence is totally missing. Even the flashiest print publication looks like The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Can Apple redefine print media to save the publishing industry? It probably has a higher chance than any other tech company out there. Apple is a market-shaper, and that’s the kind of a company the publishing industry needs to resuscitate it as the traditional advertising model continues to collapse. Daily Beast editor Tina Brown believes that, thanks to the powers of the internet and technology, we’re entering the “golden age” of journalism in the next three years. Perhaps Apple’s tablet will be a crucial part of it.

See Also:

• Everything We Know About Apple’s Touchscreen Tablet
• Apple’s Tablet Could Be Print Industry’s Lifeboat
• Rumor: Back at Work, Jobs Cracks the Whip on Tablet Designers
  
• How an Apple Tablet Could Pit iTunes Against Amazon.com
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• Wall Street Journal Takes Paywall Fight to Mobiles
• Financial Times iPhone App Worse Than Trialware
• CNN’s iPhone News App Is Informative and Empowering

Illustration of an Apple tablet: Photo Giddy/Flickr