Hasta La Gadget!

If we take a can of Spam and call it “Engadget’s precooked pork meat product,” you’ll still know it’s the same mystery meat you ate for lunch, right? Under the idea of “private label rights,” authors can do just that: sell their works to others who can rebrand and resell them. This week, Amazon cracked down on duplicate ebooks in its Kindle Store, pulling titles because they “diminish the experience for customers.” One copycat who got the smack down called it a “kick in the pants” when his 22 titles got yanked. He did, however, admit he had the swift one coming. Aping authors can expect more book banning Kung Fu as Amazon continues to rid itself of “undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of e-books.” Hi-yah!

Amazon axes copied content, duplicate Kindle Store ebooks get the boot originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Aug 2011 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink New York Times  |  Warrior Forum  | Email this | Comments

Here comes a public service announcement: Eat slower and you’ll feel fuller. Oh sorry, wrong one. We meant: Nook Color owners, you can now dual-boot your slate using the specially-created Nook2Android SD card. The card makes installing Android 2.3 a snap and it’s now shipping with a dual-boot file courtesy of XDA developers, which means you can choose to boot into the original Nook OS without having to remove the card. You’re looking at $35 for an 8GB card, rising to $90 for 32GB. Alternatively, if you’re happy to get a bit of oil on your hands, you can try the manual approach. Mmmm, Gingerbread, chew every mouthful.

PSA: Got a Nook Color? Then you can get dual-booting Nook2Android originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Nook2Android  | Email this | Comments

It’s hard not to love Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, especially if you’re amongst those who’d rather look at text on a quality backlit screen than an e-paper display. Not only did we enjoy the e-book reader when we first reviewed it, but it keeps getting better thanks to updates to its hidden Android core plus the recent addition of its own app store complete with Pandora and Angry Birds. And while there’s also a decent bundled web browser and music player, it’s not the software that we like the most — it’s the hardware, and particularly the value proposition.

See, $250 ($200 on sale) buys you a gorgeous 7-inch 1024×600 pixel capacitive IPS panel with excellent contrast and viewing angles, an 800MHz TI OMAP 3621 CPU, a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU, 512MB RAM, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth, 8GB of built-in storage, an accelerometer, and a microSD card slot — all wrapped in an attractive 12mm thin package. Sure, there’s no 3G radio, no camera, no microphone, no ambient light sensor, and no haptic feedback, but despite its lower-end specs, the Nook Color just begs to be turned into a full blown Android tablet.

And that’s just what we did, by installing CyanogenMod 7 on Barnes & Noble’s color reader, complete with Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) and the full suite of Google apps. Take a look at our screenshots gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video and impressions.

Continue reading CyanogenMod 7 on the Nook Color hands-on (video)

CyanogenMod 7 on the Nook Color hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  YouTube (PC), (Mac)  | Email this | Comments

It seems natural selection has finally caught up with the Entourage Edge. When we first reviewed the combination touchscreen/E Ink “dualbook,” we wondered whether its neither-fish-nor-fowl design would catch on — especially priced at $500. That price dropped substantially with its successor, the Pocket Edge, but neither device truly found its feet, in part because of a lack of applications and no updates beyond Android 1.6. And now comes word that the Edge store has officially closed, with customers having until May 27 to download any purchased content. It all points to RIP for the Edge family, and Good E-Reader claims to have recent confirmation from the company. In its goodbye message Entourage steers users toward the Amazon app store, where it notes “you will now have access to a lot of Android Apps that Google would never give us access to.” Obvious bitterness aside, the team reportedly has a new device in the works, this time in the typical slate model.

[Thanks, Roy]

Entourage shuts down Edge content store, devices reportedly discontinued originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 08:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Entourage Edge Store, Good E-Reader  | Email this | Comments

Adhering to strict alphabetical order, where Amazon leads, Barnes & Noble follows. The Kindle was last week announced to include access beyond the New York Times‘ freshly erected online paywall as part of its device subscription to the NYT and now, lo and behold, the Nook family (including the Nook Color) is following suit in identical fashion. If you’re happy to obtain your sub to New York’s finest paper from the Nook Newsstand — which costs $20 per month, same as Amazon’s levy — you’ll get the bonus, complimentary, free-of-charge privilege of being able to access NYTimes.com without any constraints as well. So what if the online edition used to be free for the past eleventy years? The new Times dictates some fealty be paid and we’re happy to see these e-reader purveyors helping to alleviate (mask?) that cost for some of us. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Nook matches Kindle by bundling free web access to NYTimes.com with digital edition sub

Nook matches Kindle by bundling free web access to NYTimes.com with digital edition sub originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Barnes & Noble  | Email this | Comments