Hasta La Gadget!

If you just ordered a Kindle, stop reading now or you’re in for a giant dose of buyer’s remorse. Barnes and Noble unveiled a new e-book reader called ‘Nook’, and it is hot, both inside and out.

Nook looks a lot like Amazon’s white plastic e-book reader, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multitouch screen, to be used as a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style. The machine runs Google’s Android OS and it will have wireless capability from AT&T.

The $260 Nook–same price as the Kindle 2-is expected to be on sale at the end of November.

The Nook has the regular black-and-white E Ink display and a 3.5-inch color touchscreen. The latter allows users to browse books. The Nook also comes with built-in WiFi, 2GB of internal storage, MP3 player and supports open formats such as EPUB. Nook users have features such as bookmarks, and the ability to share books with friends for up to a fortnight through other e-readers, smartphones or computers.

Barnes and Noble has said Nook customers will have access to its online bookstore that includes books, newspapers and magazines. The Nook itself can hold up to 1,500 e-books.

Gizmodo, first showed leaked images of the Nook last week. The blog said that B&N will be discounting titles heavily in their electronic format, which is as is should be (no paper, printing or shipping costs). The Nook will also be able to get books from the Google Books Project.

Earlier Tuesday, Wall Street Journal, had a peek at an at ad set to run in The New York Times this coming Sunday. The ad features the line “Lend eBooks to friends,” and this has the potential to destroy the Kindle model. One of the biggest problems with e-books is that you can’t lend or re-sell them. If B&N is selling e-books cheaper than the paper versions, then the resale issue is moot. And lending, even if your friends need a Nook, too, takes away the other big advantage of paper.

In fact, this loaning function could be the viral feature that makes the device spread. Who would buy a walled-garden machine like the Kindle when the Nook has the same titles, cheaper, and you can borrow? The Nook is already starting to look like the real internet to the Kindle’s AOL.

Exclusive: First Photos of Barnes & Noble’s Double Screen E-Reader [Gizmodo]
Barnes & Noble Reader Out Tuesday [All Things D/ WSJ]

See Also:

• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T
• 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 …

Eying a Popcorn Hour device, are you? We know Patriot isn’t exactly the first name you think of when pondering your next media streamer, but the $129.99 price tag affixed to the black box shown above definitely piqued our interest. Like most of its rivals, this one features a 2.5-inch HDD slot (though you’ll need to bring your own drive, obviously), a trio of USB sockets, 10/100 Ethernet for content streaming, UPnP support, a rather decent file support list and a bundled remote. There’s also an optional USB WiFi adapter for those not keen on running 80 feet of Ethernet cabling through their den, and while the GUI won’t revolutionize your life, it certainly ain’t bad given the low barrier to entry. Too bad it’s still stuck in that painful-to-watch “pre-order” stage, huh?

[Via thegadgetsite]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Patriot’s $130 Box Office 1080p media player streams on the cheap originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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

Just as promised, the (still SD only) Blockbuster OnDemand service is now available on a slew of Samsung hardware via firmware update, while the Internet@TV lineup (LCD and Plasma HDTVs Series 650 and above and LED HDTVs Series 7000) has a brand new toy with the Amazon VOD Yahoo! widget (which does support HD.) Both services offer a slew of rental and/or purchase options for the digital delivery fanatic, though we still hunger for the audio and quality of VUDU plus the all you can eat goodness of Netflix Watch Instantly, of the millions of TVs out there, there’s surely someone willing to sift through those menus for the ease of viewing Ghosts of Girlfriends Past without resorting to cable VOD — or getting up from the couch. The “convenience” goes both ways, since they’ll also be able to pick up compatible Samsung blu-ray players at Blockbuster stores, right next to the TiVo section — check for exact model #s supported in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Samsung rolls out Amazon, Blockbuster video store access across HDTVs, HTIBs and Blu-ray players everywhere

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Samsung rolls out Amazon, Blockbuster video store access across HDTVs, HTIBs and Blu-ray players everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The future of media isn’t on paper. And a device just dedicated to replicating dead trees is a waste of time. Let me show you why electronic ink’s virtues don’t matter as much as its weaknesses do.

Click through the gallery for a blow-by-blow of e-ink’s strengths and failures:

E-ink is a great digital tool for emulating what books were. But a horse with rollershoes can’t keep up with the automobile, so why should we expect a digital book to keep up with modern media habits?

I fell in love with the Kindle last year, but I think you’re a fool to buy one now—let alone any of its lesser competitors—when so much new technology is about to hit over the next six months. I’m giving up on it. I am waiting for a tablet. Same size, different priorities. And unless you love novels and non-fiction more than TV, movies, cookbooks and glossy magazines all together, you should, too. [Fantastic rendering above by Rob Beschizza]