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

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 …

After weeks of leaked photos and videos, Samsung’s 7-inch tablet called the Galaxy Tab is finally here. Samsung has announced the launch of the tablet that could become the first major Android-powered challenger to the Apple iPad.

The Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 Froyo operating system and has a 7-inch LCD display with a 1024 x 600 resolution. At 0.8 pounds, the device weighs just about half as much as the iPad.  It also supports Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 so it can display web pages that run Flash — something the iPad can’t.

Samsung hasn’t announced a price yet for the Galaxy Tab.

Since Apple launched the iPad in April, almost every major consumer electronics maker has said it is working on a slate of its own. Yet only a few have yet made it to the market.

Earlier this month, Dell launched the Streak, a device with a 5-inch display that has been billed as a tablet but is priced and acts like a phone. Dell plans to introduce more tablets. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and HP are also reportedly developing tablets. The JooJoo tablet, launched in March by a former partner of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, debuted to negative reviews, has not sold well and is embroiled in legal wrangling.

Meanwhile, Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads.

The Galaxy Tab has a smooth, slab-like design that’s similar to the iPad. It packs in a powerful Cortex A8 1.0-GHz processor and supports HD video. The device has a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video telephony over 3G and a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera to capture images and video. It will offer 16 GB or 32 GB of internal storage and will have microSD expansion for up to 32 GB of additional storage.

The Galaxy Tab will support 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, along with push e-mail. It will not offer voice-calling features (except via VoIP apps).

Android OS fills out a smart hardware package

Hold the Galaxy Tab and the first thing that strikes you is how compact the device is. The Galaxy Tab has a smaller screen than the iPad and that translates into a lighter device.

The tablet’s smaller size also makes it easier to hold it in just one hand as you would with an e-reader like the Kindle or the Nook. The 7-inch display means the device is small enough to slip into the pocket of a suit or a purse.

The Galaxy Tab runs Android, an operating system that so far has done best on smartphones.

But Samsung seems to have done a good job of making the Android OS work on the tablet form factor. Samsung has an attractive calendar app for the Galaxy Tab and the e-mail app on the tablet is comparable to that on the iPad.

The Galaxy Tab also includes an e-reading application powered by Kobo — the e-reader sold at Borders. The tablet has a Media Hub for video clips and movies, which Samsung hopes to offer as rentals or downloads that users can buy.

Almost all independent apps in the Android Market will work for the Galaxy Tab, says Samsung. So users can buy the tablet and immediately have apps they can download and play with. But we will have to test this to see if it will work for all apps in the Market.

Samsung plans to launch the device in Europe in mid September, and in the United States and Asia shortly thereafter.

See Also:

• Samsung to Launch 7-inch Tablet in September
• Video: Samsung Tablet Looks Like a Strong iPad Rival
• Samsung Enters Tablet Race With the Galaxy Tape
• First Look: ELocity’s Android Tablet Makes Great Media Player …
• Attack of the Pads: Tablets Take On Apple

Photos: Samsung

Since his company was bought out by HP, Jon Rubinstein and what remains of the Palm team have kept busy. Due out later this year is WebOS 2.0, the OS that we expect HP to use on a tablet device, and Palm has given us a sneak-peek of what’s new.

Stack was the thing we liked best about the original WebOS. It puts each app or task onto a “card” and lets you swoosh them around the screen to either stack them out of the way or flip between tasks. New in 2.0 is auto-stacking, which will group card by type. Think iOS folders, only with running windows instead of apps.

The next biggest change is with Quick Actions, the universal search function. If you have ever used an application launcher like Quicksilver or LaunchBar on the Mac, or Launchy on the PC, you’ll know what to expect.

Tap the rebranded Just Type box on the home screen (it is always there) and, well, just type. You can launch apps, search contacts and so on, but now Just Type is opened up to third party apps, letting you search within them. This is big, and something iOS still doesn’t do.

There are more tweaks and additions detailed over at Pre Central, but the last one we’ll look at is call “Exhibition”. Essentially, this lets you choose an app to display when the Pre (or whatever device it ends up on) is charging in a dock. Thus you could display a Twitter stream, a weather widget or anything else. I like this one a lot.

The WebOS is looking more and more suitable for a tablet. It has the simplicity and polish of Apple iOS which will appeal to a mainstream user: something that Android is getting closer to, and Windows is hopelessly lacking. Look out for the WebOS when it comes: it could be the first proper tablet since the iPad.

webOS 2.0 details: Stacks, Just Type, Exhibition, and more! [Pre Central via ★]

See Also:

• HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion
• Palm webOS Headed to HP Tablet, Printer
• HP Slate Could Get a Makeover With Palm's WebOS
• Official: HP Slate Will Run WebOS
• Rumor: Palm May Ditch WebOS for Android

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Samsung has been trying to keep the lid on its upcoming 7-inch tablet called ‘Galaxy Tab’ ahead of the device’s official release later this week. But a video clip seems to have captured most of the details of the device.

The video from a Korean TV channel shows the Galaxy Tab as a device that could well rival Apple’s iPad in its sleek hardware. The Galaxy Tab includes a nice virtual keyboard, nifty features like Swype for easier text input, high-definition video, and what looks like a very responsive touchscreen with pinch-to-zoom capability.

Much of the text in the video, posted by Giz-China, including the user interface is in Korean but here’s what we know about the Galaxy Tab so far.

The device will run Android 2.2 Froyo operating system, include video-calling capability and full web browsing—which likely means support for Flash, according to an official teaser video that Samsung posted last week. The company expects to announce additional details on Sept. 2 at the IFA Berlin consumer electronics show.

Meanwhile, more news about the Galaxy Tab is trickling out. Verizon Wireless will likely offer the Galaxy Tab to the consumers in the U.S., according to the Boy Genius Report, which got a quick peek into Verizon’s inventory system.

The Galaxy Tab will be the first tablet from a big consumer electronics maker to compete with Apple’s iPad. Earlier this month, Dell launched the Streak, a device with a 5-inch display that has been billed as a tablet but is priced and acts like a phone. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and HP are reportedly developing tablets but those devices are little more than rumors at this point. Meanwhile, Apple has sold more than 3 million units of the iPad since the gadget’s debut in April.

If you are trying to decide whether you should get the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab or wait for some of the rumored tablets, check out this tablet buying guide from PhoneDog.com for a neat overview.

See Also:

• Samsung to Launch 7-inch Tablet in September
• Samsung Enters Tablet Race With the Galaxy Tape
• First Look: ELocity’s Android Tablet Makes Great Media Player
• Samsung Ships One Million Galaxy S Phones in 45 Days

Photo: An earlier leaked photo of the Samsung tablet