Hasta La Gadget!

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

See Also:

• Photos: Putting Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 Head-to-Head
• Amazon Kindle Third Generation With 3G + Wi-Fi
• Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?
• Simple Tip Turns Kindle into Ultimate News Reader
• Amazon Now Offers WiiWare Games
• Amazon Launches Casual Game Download Service
• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle

Remember that iriver Story Touch Edition e-reader we spied last month? Well, iriver is showing it off at IFA this week, with plans to release the little 6-inch touchscreen device in Europe and Korea in the next week or so. We played around with it a bit, and while the 800 x 600 E Ink screen resolution is a little disappointing, and the resistive touchscreen layer impacts readability in a small but noticeable way, the software is certainly pleasant, and iriver is up to its usual standard in hardware design. There’s a small included stylus that slots in at the top of the screen (or the bottom, the screen auto-flips vertically based on how you hold the device) but while the stylus is fun for drawing notes, all you really need is a light tap or swipe with your fingers to operate the device. With 2GB of storage, a €229-ish pricetag for the WiFi-free version (there’s another WiFi version coming with an email app and a lightweight browser), and that low resolution screen, iriver probably wouldn’t have much luck going up against the Kindle and its ilk in the US, but they’re hoping to carve out a niche in Europe and Asia, and we can’t begrudge them that.

iriver Story Touch Edition preview originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

All images via Got Medieval.

Story continues …

Sony’s not taking competition from the Amazon Kindle lying down. The company has added touchscreens to its three e-reader models, while switching to the new ‘Pearl’ screen from E Ink for better contrast and improving the user interface on the devices.

What the company hasn’t done is drop the price. Sony’s cheapest e-reader will cost $180–and that’s without Wi-Fi or 3G–while Amazon charges $140 for the Wi-Fi version of the Kindle.

“The bottom line is we didn’t want to compete on price,” says Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division. “We wanted to build quality and overall experience. We want to give consumers the feel of buying an e-reader, not a toy.”

Sony three e-reader models are the Pocket, Touch and Daily Edition. The $180 Pocket Reader has a 5-inch display, 2 GB memory and will come without W-Fi or 3G access. That means users can only load books by connecting the device to their PC using a USB cable.

The $230 Touch Edition has a 6-inch display, 2 GB onboard memory, expansion slots for up to 32 GB of additional memory, the ability to play audio files and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The $300 Daily Edition model includes both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and sports an even larger 7-inch display. It too has 2 GB of onboard memory and an expansion slot for up to 32 GB additional.

Sony’s new e-readers raise the stakes in the e-reader market. In July, Amazon introduced the third generation of its Kindle e-reader, including a Wi-Fi only model, and slashed the price to make it more competitive with rival Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The move took a toll on smaller e-reader makers who haven’t been able to compete on either price or scale of their book stores. Earlier this month, Foxit announced it will stop development on its eSlick e-reader. Plastic Logic canceled its plans to bring its e-reader to market, while Cool-er’s e-readers have been listed out of stock in the U.S. for months.

Sony is betting on better design to draw in users. Its new e-readers are colorful (hot pink, red, silver and black) and have an aluminum body that gives them a better finish and feel compared to the plasticky- shell of the Kindle or the Nook.

But the biggest change has been the introduction of the touchscreen across all models. Previously only one of the models called Touch Edition had a touchscreen.

Unlike the capacitive touchscreens popular on mobile phones, Sony’s e-readers use optical touchscreen technology so it responds to both finger and a stylus.

A major problem with the earlier version of Sony’s touchscreen e-reader was the touchscreen layer added to the top of the display. The layer decreased contrast, making the e-reader’s display difficult to read compared to the Kindle or the Nook, and also offered a sluggish response to touch. The optical touchscreen technology seems to have solved some of the problems and in my brief hands-on with the devices I found the display to be startlingly responsive and quick.

The Pearl display has also helped improve contrast and render crisper text.

“The number one focus for us is the reading experience,” says Haber.”The e-reader is not the Swiss Army knife of devices so we have done everything to make the experience immersive.”

Over the next few weeks, Sony also plans to launch mobile apps of its reader software for the iPhone, iPad and Android.

In improvements to the user interface, Sony will incorporate book reviews from the GoodReads site into its book store. It has also expanded the news stand section of its book store and partnered with more news publishers such as The Guardian and The Harvard Business Review.

Sony hopes to ship the Touch and Pocket models in the next few days. The Daily Edition e-reader will not be available till early November.

See Also:

• Upstart E-readers Fade to Black as Tablets Gain Momentum
• Now Sharper Image Launches an E-Reader
• E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Plastic Logic Que E-Reader Turns Into Vaporware

Photo: Sony Touch e-reader/Sony

Stream TV is an unlikely player in the Great Tablet Race of 2010, but its new Android tablet might just find a niche among media-hungry consumers who want the option of throwing their games and movies up on a big-screen HDTV.

I got a chance to test-drive the eLocity A7 recently at Stream TV’s Philadelphia offices, and it looks like a solid, versatile tablet with a lot to offer, especially as a portable media player. (Philadelphia has plenty of telecoms and pharmaceutical companies, but not much in the way of consumer tech, so I was lucky that the company is just 12 blocks from my house.)

The three key phrases that will get geeks excited about the A7 are “Froyo,” “NVidia Tegra,” and “1080p output.” Translation: the A7’s shipping with the newest Android OS, a processor chip optimized for gaming, graphics, and video processing, and it spits out true HD video, so you can plug it into a TV.

Look at the hardware controls on the picture above: They are the standard control buttons that appear on every Android phone (plus a volume button), but they’re oriented for landscape mode. Some people knocked the iPad for being a media player rather than a portable computer, but eLocity is clearly aimed directly at media consumers.

One way to think about this class of tablets: imagine a more-versatile Apple TV, with a built-in touchscreen, that also plays video games, runs apps, and browses the web. Oh, and you can carry it around with you.

Because of the NVidia chip and 1080p, the A7 shines when it’s hooked up to an HDTV. (eLocity’s including an HDMI cable and Bluetooth-fob keyboard with the A7 in its $400 kit.) Because it uses Android, it can play almost any file format. You don’t have to worry about buying video in different resolutions for your portable device and your set-top box. We watched an HD trailer for Avatar, some clips from Shark Tale, including a Blu-Ray rip, and all looked great.

You can also play video games on the big screen while hooked up to your TV — we played the racing game Asphalt 5 — but here the HDMI cable was really awkward. Cables and accelerometers do not mix. The gameplay was much better when using the tablet like a PSP, without connecting it to a TV. It’ll be even better once there are more Android games that take advantage of the tablet form factor.

The other hurdle to clear when the A7 is hooked up to the TV is inputting data. You can walk over and use the touchscreen, but that’s very pre-remote. There’s the included keyboard, but it is just the teensiest bit awkward using a device that big when you’re not at a desk or conference table. It worked fine — I just wonder whether people who aren’t me will enjoy sitting back, relaxing, and pulling out a big keyboard to watch a movie.

Part of the problem is that there just aren’t many good peripherals for Android devices yet. The keyboard eLocity is including is branded for Windows (“We’ll include an Android sticker to put over the Windows logo,” company reps told me), and there aren’t any Bluetooth mice, trackpads, or remotes, although clever people might get something unofficially supported to work.

The hardware keyboard is also an acknowledgment that software keyboards for these tablets are fine for casual use, but not knocking anybody over just yet. My editor called it “a deconstructed netbook,” and that’s not far off. But again, part of the appeal is that it can alternately be a tablet, netbook, and set-top box as needed.

It also makes for a fairly slick e-reader. It’s not as light as a Kindle, but smaller and lighter than an iPad, and the touch controls and Aidiko e-book software worked great. You’ve can also get the Nook and Kindle apps for Android. Instead of using Pages to read PDFs, you’ve got Adobe Reader (or whatever other PDF app you can find). It also supports Adobe Flash. (Add your cheers/boos, as you’re so inclined.)

The company’s shipping the devices with Facebook, Documents to Go (the trial/read-only version), Twidroid, and other popular apps preloaded, so it’s ready to use out of the box. I didn’t see anything that looked like bloatware. Unless you really, really hate mobile Flash.

Now, some caveats. I did not get to test the device that’s actually shipping this fall. It will be available for exclusive preorder with Amazon after Labor Day (probably September 8), and will ship after mid-October. The demo unit was basically identical to the Compal- and Aigo-branded tablets that appeared at some consumer shows earlier this year, right down to the metallic red body and Android 2.1 OS. The unit that’s shipping will have 2.2, which has finally been pushed out. It will also be black/graphite, like the photos above.

It’s Wi-Fi only, since StreamTV still doesn’t have carrier deals in place. But it only has 802.11 b/g networking, not n. It outputs video in 1080p, but on-screen resolution is 800×480 — much less than the current iPad, and almost certainly much less than the next-gen iPad. There are some things it does not do well; there’s a 1.3MP front-facing webcam, which is pretty low resolution for video chat. (It looks way worse when you take video of me and blow it up on an HDTV.) But it’s there if you want it.

The A7 might be more comparable to the Motorola Stingray or Toshiba Folio 100 (née “SmartPad”) than the much-anticipated Samsung Galaxy Tab.  The Stingray will also be sporting an NVidia Tegra II chip and will actually have better on-screen resolution than any other tablet we’ve heard of so far (1280×780). But it will also be huge (10″), packaged by Verizon, and isn’t coming out until after Android 3.0 is released (rumored as early as October, but nobody knows for sure).

There’s also the question of scale. StreamTV is not Samsung; they can’t crank out their own accessories, and there’s no way of knowing how many of these they’ll be able to ship. (“Not enough,” I was told.) But I can definitely say that if it’s any indication of what the Android tablet ecosystem is going to look like, this is going to be very exciting for makers, retailers, carriers, and consumers. You’ll see a lot of devices that will all be very versatile, some of which will be good at specific things. If it wasn’t already, tablets just became the new wild West.

Images courtesy of StreamTV.

See also:

• $250 Korean Android Tablet Looks Strangely Familiar
• Video: Samsung Galaxy Tab Caught in the Wild
• Samsung to Launch 7-inch Tablet in September
• Android ePad Tablet Reviewed. Verdict: Junk
• U.S. Customers Are Tablet-Hungry, and Not Just for the iPad
• Rumor Shootout: Google Tablet Will Be Made by HTC — Or Maybe Motorola
• Dell’s Streak Tablet Is Priced Like a Phone
• BlackBerry Tablet ‘BlackPad’ Readies to Take On the iPad