Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon wasn’t just teasing you whiners who blabbed on about how you’d rather just read ebooks on your iPhone: The iPhone and iPod Touch app has arrived.

The free program brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s much smaller, non-E-Ink screen, including the same electronic books, magazines and newspapers that Kindle owners can buy, and the ability to change text size, add bookmarks, note and highlight stuff. From what we can see at first glance of the app itself, there’s no dictionary or search.

If you already have both a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon’s program syncs the two so that you can keep your bookmarks on both devices. Immediately after loading up the app, this worked exactly as billed, and the page we’re on in the Kindle 2 showed on the iPhone.

While my first thought was “Jesus (not Diaz), Amazon’s bent on cannibalizing itself,” I guess the move kind of makes sense. People who want E-Ink will still buy the Kindle 2 (reviewed here), but perhaps this will steer people away from the other multitudinous, less complete iTunes ebook options. [iTunes Link to Amazon Kindle App]

Some people, like Madonna, say we’re living in a certain kind of world–a material world. Whether or not you’re a Madonna fan, check out Gearlog’s deals for Tuesday, March 3:

1. Amazon is selling the Canon PowerShot SD770IS 10-megapixel Digital Camera for only $144.95 today only. Regularly @229.99, the camera has many features, including 3x optical image-stabilized zoom, 2.5-inch PureColor LCD II screen,and face and motion detection technology to automatically reduce blur. Again, the sale only last for today as part of Amazon’s Deal-of-the-Day.

2. Save up to 20 percent off of select HBO series at Best Buy this week. Choose from titles like “Flight of the Conchords,” “Big Love,” and “John Adams.” Hurry, the sale ends on March 7.

3. The Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2 Portable Speakers for iPhone 3G and iPod is 30 percent off at Buy.com. Down from $129.99, the speakers are just $89.99 with free shipping. It has a 10-hour battery life, so you can take it anywhere, especially with the included traveling case. The speakers also charge your iPhone or iPod as it plays your tunes.

Roku was nice enough to upgrade our player for Amazon Video on Demand a little early, and we’re basically impressed — although we’re not in love with SD video and stereo audio, it’s hard to complain about a free service update. Actually, that might be the best thing about the newly-rebranded Roku Video Player: Roku’s opening the platform to third-party channels, so eventually the $99 box will be able to stream from all kinds of sources. Amazon is just the first additional channel built using the new tools, and for the most part, things work just like Netflix — the interface has been only slightly modified to enable selecting content from the box itself instead of from your online queue. We’re talking really slightly: there’s no search interface, so it’s sort of like having lots of categorized queues. One minor complaint: the rental clock starts when you purchase content, not when you start playback, which isn’t necessarily the most flexible setup, but it makes sense given the streaming-only nature of the service, we suppose. That said, purchasing is easy and fast, and we had no problems streaming in the highest-available quality on our 10Mbps cable connection — Max Payne didn’t look super-awesome in SD, but it was certainly watchable. Bottom line? It’s perfect for a bedroom, but we’re way more particular about the home theater — Roku tells us the Video Player can actually do 1080i and 5.1 if the content is there, so hopefully we’ll see someone leverage those capabilities and turn this thing into a $99 Apple TV / Vudu killer. Quick little demo vid after the break.

Continue reading Roku Amazon Video on Demand hands-on

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Roku Amazon Video on Demand hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s ultrathin X360 didn’t quite get the love of some of its competition out of the gate, and has already been preempted by the X460, but the X360 has always had a lovable price tag on its side. Not like this, though. The originally $1900-ish laptop is now going for $750 after rebate on Amazon.com, and that includes 3GB of RAM and Vista Biz to boot. Sure, the 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo SU9300 and Intel integrated graphics never did anyone any favors, but at least this should shut up your non-productive Atom-powered bowling buddies. Or you could wait a month for every other ultraportable on earth to best this pricetag and netbook specs to catch up.

Filed under: Laptops

Samsung X360 ultraportable dips below $800 mark originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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News that the second iteration of the Amazon Kindle would have text-to-speech functionality prompted talk about the death of the audio book, but those fears appear to have been premature.

Amazon will now have rights holders opt in to the Kindle 2’s “Read to Me” feature, the company announced on Friday, so it will likely take some time before Amazon gets approval from those rights holders on its entire collection.

The offering converts books into speech. Customers can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and can select a female or male voice. Read-to-Me also works for newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other personal documents.

“If you are in the kitchen and you want to put the feel like being read to, the Kindle will read to you,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Kindle 2 launch, where he demoed the technology by having the Kindle 2 read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aloud through its stereo speakers.

Rights holders were apparently not too thrilled with the feature. Amazon maintains that it has not violated any law with “Read to Me” but wants to respect the rights of copyright holders.

“Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given,” the company said in a statement. “We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”