Hasta La Gadget!

Image by VirginAmerica.com

I flew Virgin America for the first and only time in December 2008, from New York to San Francisco. When I used its interactive back-of-the-headrest food-and-media menu, the first button I pressed, naturally, was Books. “Coming soon,” it said. Two years later, when you use the menu, books are still “coming soon.”

EBookNewser’s Dianna Dilworth recently had the same experience, and wondered whether Virgin might be on the verge of brokering some content agreements to finally bring reading into the picture:

There are a number of ways that it could work. Perhaps you could sign in to an existing Amazon or Barnes & Noble account and access your digital bookshelf directly. Or perhaps the airline could sell bestsellers or short stories directly. Think Atlantic Fiction’s monthly short stories in the Kindle store.

It could also be a great place for publishers to market their books and give away sample chapters. I like to catch up on new music videos on Virgin’s entertainment system, so why not read a couple of chapters from a few new bestsellers to decide which ones I might actually like to buy and read.

Some objections and counterarguments: Don’t people already bring their own books and magazines onto planes? Why would you want to buy one from Virgin? True: But airplanes and airports do a brisk business selling at a markup plenty of things you could consume more cheaply at home or on the ground. Books would be no different. You’re paying for convenience — or, looked at another way, as penance for your poor planning.

Don’t e-readers, tablets, laptops and online Wi-Fi make this moot? People won’t read from the back of a headrest — they’ll read on the devices they own already. Also true. But don’t discount the power of free, ad-subsidized, or exclusive reading materials. Some of the fun of using these screens is the entertainment/video-game aspect of it: Let me goof around with this and see if I can find anything good. And Virgin already lets their first-class and business-class (excuse me, “Main Cabin select”) customers enjoy all the entertainment they want. If Dilworth is right, publishers could use sample chapters or whole books like music labels use music videos — as promotional material targeted for an affluent, tech-savvy audience that literally can’t get out of their seats.

Obviously, in the future, this won’t be limited to Virgin, or even to airplanes: You could imagine similar screens being deployed on trains or intercity buses, performing the same multimedia functions. As these tiny screens become more ubiquitous and we become more accustomed to reading from them, the more likely it becomes that we’ll do more and more reading of all kinds on screens anywhere and everywhere. But as Dilworth says, there’s something about reading books on airplanes that just makes sense.

See Also:

• Airline 2.0: Virgin America Geek Plane Takes Off
• Virgin America Admits It's a Dirty Bird
• Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
• The Future Of Reading
• Stephen Fry and Our Transmedia Reading Future

What’s this — the slim, Verizon-bound successor to the Entourage Edge, out in plain sight? Just so, because Marvell wanted to look its best when the Governator came by. When California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger toured Marvell headquarters as part of a trade mission to Asia, a Forbes camera crew tagged along, and got us this first glimpse of the “Verizon Pocket Edge” shown immediately above. Though it’s hard to tell what’s changed from this angle — save a lack of front-facing camera on the right — a second photo taken by the Associated Press (after the break) shows the e-reader is significantly smaller in size, so perhaps it’s the 7-inch device we were originally told about. Hats off to The Digital Reader for spotting the device, weeks after the newswires had packed up and moved on.

Continue reading Entourage Pocket Edge in the wild at Marvell event, scared out of hiding by Schwarzenegger

Entourage Pocket Edge in the wild at Marvell event, scared out of hiding by Schwarzenegger originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Sep 2010 16:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s new commercial puts the Kindle in the best possible light: poolside, in the hands of a beautiful, bikini-clad woman. It even works in a dig at the iPad and other LCD tablets; the dweeby guy next to the Kindle reader can only see his own ugly reflection.

This video has been percolating around the tech blogosphere for a couple of days, but I don’t think anyone has gotten it quite right. (I was off yesterday. Sorry.) I honestly don’t think it’s about competing with the iPad, or touting the benefits of non-reflective screens, as much as it’s about re-positioning the Kindle in the popular imagination.

Think back three years to when the Kindle was first announced. Yes, there was a splashy cover story about the future of reading. But everyone agreed: the device itself was ugly, it was expensive, and its market was limited to rich bookwormy dorks who needed something to read on airplanes. There, the physical world could vanish, leaving behind the virtual mindspace of a not-quite-real book.

Now, the Kindle is stylish; it’s relatively inexpensive; and the world in which you read from it doesn’t look like a place you’d want to escape from at all. That is, apart from your nosy neighbors and their self-involved not-quite-pickup lines.

See Also:

• Amazon Kindle Third Generation With 3G + Wi-Fi
• Photos: Putting Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 Head-to-Head
• You Can Read Manga On Your Kindle With Mangle
• Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?
• Pictures: Kindle and iPad Screens Under Microscope
• Could a $50 'Paperback' Kindle Beat the iPad?
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle's Space, And Other First …
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers

Last week, Amazon decided to expand the B&M presence of its famed e-reader by throwing Best Buy the same bone already thrown to Staples and Target, and it looks as if “this fall” is about to get going. We’ve received word that demo units are already popping up in Best Buy locations (for running advertorial loops to entice you and yours, we’re surmising), and mere mortals should be able to procure them starting next week. We suspect the $139 Wi-Fi and $189 3G model will both be making their yellow-tag debut, and we fully expect this ad right here to be looped ad naseum in whatever aisle BB decides to slot these in.

Amazon Kindle demo unit arrives in Best Buy, should populate shelves soon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like everyone else, Velocity Micro’s about to cannonball into the tablet pool with the hope of making a big splash. Its first product, the $199 Cruz Reader is already boxed up and arriving on store shelves this week. The seven-inch tablet / e-reader runs Android 2.0 and comes preloaded with Borders’ e-book application. We got a chance to check out the device this morning, and while we’re impressed with the solid build and rubbery back, it’s fairly heavy at a pound and the glossy screen results in less-than-excellent viewing angles. Still, it shows a lot more promise than the Pandigital Novel and Augen GenTouch 78 — we’ll never like resistive screens on this sort of device, but we were able to turn pages by tapping as well as scroll relatively well by dragging a nail down the screen. There’s no access to the Android Market, but Velocity has its own Cruz Market and preloads some apps like Twidroid.

But the tablet buck doesn’t stop there for Velocity Micro. The Cruz Tablet that we’ve been hearing about since April will hit a “major electronics retailer” in October for $299. The Tablet we saw today wasn’t working, but we nabbed some shots of the hardware below. This one will have a capacitive screen; however, the company isn’t planning on rolling it out with Android 2.0 — it feels the 600MHz processor isn’t quite powerful enough to handle that Froyo and Flash goodness. Not to worry: its future eight- and 10-inch capacitive tablets, which will be announced at CES, are going to be powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPU and run Android 3.0. Told you it’s aiming for a big splash! Hit the break for a short hands-on video of the Cruz Reader and stay tuned for a full review of that one soon.

Continue reading Velocity Micro Cruz Reader hits stores, Cruz Tablet hitting in October along with more in January

Velocity Micro Cruz Reader hits stores, Cruz Tablet hitting in October along with more in January originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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