Gadget Wisdom

Last week, Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle to $299, a reduction of $60. We want a Kindle, but we don’t want to want a Kindle. It is still a bit pricey for its limitations.

What does that mean? Well, the Kindle is the greatest e-book reader out there…not because of its hardware, but because of the sheer amount of titles Amazon offers and the ease of getting them through the Kindle. The smartest thing Amazon could do is license the Kindle source to anyone, and we still await that.

Reports indicate that Amazon is exploring ad-supported Kindle books for additional revenue. Publishers are afraid Amazon will force them to lower their profit margins on e-books. Publishers hope new players like PlasticLogic, FirstPaper, ScrollMotion, and Google’s e-publishing service could help turn the tables in their favor. But so far, Amazon has an early lead.

We are hoping competition does come along. Google plans to sell readers online access to digital versions of various books, and the books would be cached in their browser when offline. This seems like an improved system. A simple browser plugin could handle this. They appear, for their early copyright-free public domain books, to be working with the ePub format, which is an official open standard.

Our fondest dream is to use the Kindle to free up space. We have so many shelves of books. Some of them could be digitized. We’ve done this when we rid ourselves of most of our VHS cassettes and started to replace audio cassettes with CDs.

We’ve maintained, and continue to maintain the Kindle is not yet at the price point where the upfront cost is offset enough by the benefits. Endgadget, however, reports that Amazon has dropped indications it sees the Kindle readers and Kindle books as two separate businesses.

This is actually good for us…the people who want e-books to become more ubiquitous. We don’t want the paper book to go away though. We believe there is a place for it in this world. Our concern is that the lowering of the hardware will produce an increase in the price of the book itself. Currently, a Kindle book can average $9.99, more or less. A hardcover book could be over double that. On a $9.95 book, an analysis suggests Amazon only makes 61 cents.

In the fight of Kindle vs. Netbook, we opted for netbook, because it is a multifunciton device, compared to the Kindle, which is good for one thing only. But imagine if the Kindle reader became a software program available for all operating systems? What if Amazon licensed the reader software to other companies to allow the books to be read on many systems? What could that mean for the future?

The latest confusion over the Kindle is its DRM policy. Apparently, there is a limit to how many times you can download the book, even though you have bought it, and it varies from publisher to publisher…even better, no one at Amazon seems to know how to find out what the number is. The limit may actually be on the number of devices you can have the book on simultaneously, but as of now, it is still unclear. Ultimately, we remain curious what limits are put on the free distribution of content you bought amongst your own devices. Since your ownership of the book now depends on a third-party…namely Amazon, supporting your device, how does this effect your life?

So, what are the alternatives? We’ll be looking into them a bit more, as we want to take advantage of them.

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Recently, we did a post on behalf of Infrequent Flier on the subject of packing a bag with your mobile electronics. We wanted to explore the idea further, as such a bag wouldn’t just apply to air travel…there are considerations for every time you go anywhere. Here are some things to consider when packing your mobile bag.

• Power
  • Chargers – Every day on the go we use several chargers. For our cell phone, our music players, our notebook. Try to unify these. Instead of four power bricks, use USB-based charging cables. Then you can only bring along a single USB to AC Adapter.
  • USB and Batteries - Several companies, including Duracell and Kensington, make USB portable battery packs, that can be charged via USB, and can charge mobile devices that have USB based cables. Sticking a small one of these in your bag can be critical in emergencies. You may also need to charge standard AA or AAA batteries. There are a variety of USB battery chargers, but we switched to USBcell, the battery has a built-in USB charger. We keep two of them for our AA-based digital camera.
  • Extension cords and Surge Protectors – There will be cases when you wish to share electricity with others. In this case, a cheap dollar store power splitter or multi-extension cord is useful to carry around. We recommend using the Belkin Mini Surge Protector, which has three outlets and two USB charging ports. Two useful add-ons to this would be an extension cord for hard to reach areas and/or a 3 to 2 prong converter in the event you find only two-prong outlets.
• Cables
  • Network – Wireless is wonderful, but don’t be caught without a small network cable in case you have to physically connect to a network.
  • Earphones – Keep a pair of earphones in your bag. Not only will the people around you appreciate it, but a pair of cheap earbuds cna double as earplugs, reducing background noise so you can relax.
  • Headphone Splitter – Allows you to share the audio output of a device with a friend.
  • USB Cable – A standard USB cable to hook into peripherals should always be in your bag.
  • Retractable Cables – A variety of companies produce retractable cables now of varying qualities that can increase the space saving qualities of your bag. Ultimately though, a regular cable may be cheaper and is certainly more durable in the long run. Do your homework though.
• Emergency Items
  • Blank CD/DVD – You never know when you might need to burn something or have it burned in a hurry.
  • Live CD/USB – With a bootable operating system on a CD or USB drive, you can turn any computer…for a time, into your personal system. Alternate options include a series of portable applications on your USB drive that would work with any Windows-based computer.
  • DropBox – Dropbox is a file syncing service that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux that syncs the contents of a folder to its servers and can be used for multiple systems. If your computer goes bust, you can ensure your data was synced during your last network connection.
• Portable Electronics
  • Cell Phone – We’re not going to tell you what sort of cell phone to get. There are a variety of options. Find the one that is good for you.
  • Portable Media Players – You can go with music, video, etc. You can even now use your cell phone. Again, scale this to your needs. We have two different ones, one small and one larger. The small, a Sansa Clip, is our ‘throwaway’ player. It is cheap, durable, and does what we want it to.
  • E-Book Readers – You can read information now on your cell phone or notebook, but there is a place in this world for dedicated devices. If you feel the cost is justified…otherwise, a good book is much cheaper and is even free at your local library.
• Goodies and Misc.
  • Refreshments – Sticking a granola bar or some other long-lasting reasonable healthy snack in your bag will pay off in the long run when you are starving and need something quick. Equally useful is something to drink.
  • Pen and Paper – For when all electronics fail…or when you simply want to give your contact info to a less tech enabled person, stick these into your bag.
  • Cleaning Cloth – A microfibre cloth is perfect for cleaning the dust off your screen.
  • Wipes or Hand Sanitizer – You get dirty too.

Now, we are assuming you are lugging around a notebook of some sort. If you are a frequent ‘mobile warrior’, consider downsizing. Don’t lug around a 17″ desktop replacement, go for a 12-14″ screen…or even a netbook with a 10″ screen. These netbooks are inexpensive, and becoming popular for their easy portability. Remember, you can always come home to your fully functional machine.

Go smaller with your laptop bag as well. Try to find the smallest bag that neatly fits all of your things and make the hard decisions about what to leave out. No one wants to carry around too much.

In order to avoid needing to carry a spare battery, consider the following tips:

• Dim the Brightness of your Screen – Many notebooks have a setting for dimming based on inactivity. Try to maximize your power saving options.
• Go with an Extended Battery – Many notebooks have multiple battery options. Go with the best one.
• Avoid using your Optical Drive -  Nothing drains power like the DVD/CD drive on your system. Try to copy the information to your drive before you leave, even if it is a movie or such you wish to watch on the road, you can rip it and delete it when you’re done.
• Consider an SSD drive – These drives are not quite 100% yet. Their price is starting to come down, and the higher quality drives will eventually be cost-effective for the individual. For now though, the inexpensive ones have some problems, but with proper use(there are many tutorials on this), they can improve your experience. We’re waiting on this one though.

Do you have any suggestions of your own?

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A while back, we commented on why a Kindle might not be so cost-effective.

Today, things change. On Wednesday, the Kindle DX was introduced. It will be an alternative, not a replacement for the Kindle 2. It boasts a 9.7-inch display with auto-rotation, high-speed wireless access to 275,000 books, 3.3 gigabytes of storage(roughly 3,500 books), native support for PDF documents, with no panning, zooming or scrolling necessary.

The product will begin shipping this summer and will cost $489. Three newspapers will offer a reduced price on the Kindle DX in exchange for a long-term subscription: The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. This is where one might reconsider the Kindle, if the reduction is enough to justify the purchase. However, this apparently will only be offered where Home Delivery of the papers are not. That may be offered through the Kindle 2 as well. Details are not yet available.

The Kindle DX eliminates some of the problems with the Kindle…namely that documents are printed on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper most commonly, and the Kindle 2 is half that size at 6 inches. The DX has 2.5 times the surface area. Amazon has reached agreements with three leading textbook publishers that represent 60 percent of the market: Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley(But not McGraw-Hill Education.). Thus, the Kindle DX will be a perfect tool for college campuses, where textbook savings(hopefully) can be applied toward the device. Students will try out the Kindle DX this fall at Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Reed College and Pace.

As Techcrunch pointed out, for the 275,000 books that are available on the Kindle, sales are already 35 percent of the same books in print. That is a shocking statistic.  But while we continue to be impressed by the Kindle and its variants, the price tag is still a matter of concern. BusinessInsider pointed out devices you can buy for less than $489, including a netbook, iPhone, AppleTV, Wii, Xbox 360, 22″ LCD HDTV, etc.

Which is our point. When given the choice between a netbook and a Kindle, we opted for the netbook, where we can read the New York Times and most news sources free with a net connection. It isn’t a dedicated device, which has its pros and cons, and it lacks the always-on connection included with the price of purchase(which is certainly an advantage) Web anywhere for life is certainly a pro as well.

On the software side of things, we feel certain a Kindle Reader will come for the PC(although Linux will no doubt take more time), as they already have an iPhone reader and they want to corner the e-book market. Barring that, you can always turn a netbook into an e-book reader with something like FBReader, which supports most non-DRMed formats, and buy your books from non-Amazon sources(More on this in a future post).

What it comes down to is that we love what the Kindle represents, and we are impressed by its continual evolution, but we are staying away for now.

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CNet reports that the netbook is a hit with consumers, and likely will continue to be so for the foreseaable future. According to Displaysearch, they will comprise 20% of the 133 million notebooks to be shipped this year, amazing considering the netbook category had no market share in 2008. however, they predict consumers will return to buying notebooks with more features as the economy turns around.

We, and many others disagree with the idea that netbooks are popular because of the economy. That’s certainly a small part of it, but we bought one, and we are not alone, for the portability. For many years, a tiny, reasonably powerful notebook costs big bucks. A 14″ laptop always cost us more than the same laptop in a 15″.

Then comes the Eee, and launches the netbook category. We hate carrying around a 14-17″ laptop. It is portable, but most of the time, it is a pain to carry around. We don’t need a mobile computer for gaming. And even if we were gamers, we can have a computer at home to handle that. Netbooks are for productivity…perhaps video/sound on the go as well.

We wonder if the manufacturers see these machines differently than we do. Asus announced the upcoming Eee 1004DN, the first of the netbooks to offer a built-in optical drive. One of the best things about the netbook is the form factor. Adding an optical drive will turn it into a more efficient video playback system, if that is what someone wants, but it endangers the form factor. Already, the netbook has grown. Going from a 7″ screen to 9″ and 10″ was a good improvement, and did not increase the size incredibly, but additional weight of continually adding features, as well as increased costs, will eliminate the distinctiveness of the class.

Personally, we’ll just rip something and load it onto the hard drive or onto a flash card and stick it in the side. Otherwise, we have an external USB DVD burner we made out of a liberated notebook DVD drive and a converter case we bought online. It keps the equipment we have to carry to a minimum. We’re not the only ones who are concerned about the manufacturers destroying the idea of the netbook. The net is full of thoughts on the subject.

Continue to push the envelope, add in better low-power processors as they become available…improve the graphics, the screen build quality, the battery life. But keep the size and price points.

Meanwhile, OCZ launched a DIY netbook called the Neutrino. It has the standard netbook accoutrements…10 inch 1024×600 screen, Atrom N270, etc. Missing is a hard drive, RAM, multicard reader and an operating system, all of which you add as you wish. We’re in favor of customization, but the price point of $300 is a bit much for a system that doesn’t work out of the box considering the competition.

However, that said, many of the netbooks are not geared toward upgrades. The MSI Wind we bought has no slots on the bottom to open. You have to remove the whole bottom to access the hard drive. Some of the systems have the SSD drives or the RAM soldered onto the main board. Upgrade paths allow users to buy now, improve later.

Speaking of the Wind, MSI has announced the U123, a three pound laptop with a 6 or 9 cell battery, powered by the Atom N280 1.66Ghz CPU and the Intel 945GSE chipset. There’s 1GB of RAM expandable to 2GB, wireless, Bluetooth , camera, and a card reader. Essentially, the equivalent of the Eee 1000HE, although likely less expensive, as the Wind has been.

There’s more to say about netbooks. Next time, we’ll discuss how we outfitted our MSI Wind in more detail to make it the best it could be.

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We just acquired our first netbook. We’ve been thinking about getting one of these for our mobile computing needs, but we held off, and we’re happy we did. The first netbook, the Asus Eee had a 7″ screen, a small solid state drive, a Celeron processor, and limited RAM, caught our interest for its small size.

Now, most netbooks have 10″ screens, solid state drives have been tabled till they become more stable and reliable, replaced with more conventional hard drives. Most of them use the Intel Atom N270 CPU. They are optimized for low power consumption. Ironically, while the Atom chipset is optimized for low power, the Intel chipset it is paired with is not so much, and the CPU accounts for only 20% of the total power consuption of most netbooks. Being as most use the same chipset and motherboard, there is little variation on that front between not only the various Eee models, but the MSI Wind, the Acer Aspire, and the HP Mini.

Whereas initially, netbooks ran a stripped down Linux distribution, which many replaced with other distributions, or Windows. Now, most ship with Windows XP, although Microsoft has a version of Windows 7 which will be for netbook use.  Windows 7 may has some major limitations though, especially in the Starter version likely to end up on netbooks, but it is a major improvement over Windows Vista. We’ll stick with Linux though.

After all that, we’ve bought a MSI Wind to enjoy. The Wind was available to us in a U100 or U120 configuration. We got the U100 for only $299. Unlike the U120, it offers an extra slot for an additional GB of RAM. The 120 is more streamlined, and offered additional battery life. We opted to buy an extra battery separately. We have thoughts of upgrading it with additional RAM and possibly a new wireless card.

The Wind will serve us well on the go, small enough to be carried around anywhere we go, without the bulkiness of a regular laptop. We may even write some entries on it. More to come on this.

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We troll the tech websites looking for things we find interesting or potentially useful. Here are a few selections…

• Crunchgear turned us on to this car cigarette lighter with 4 USB connections.Most things can charge via USB nowadays…Cell phones, music players, etc. If you have four devices you want to charge and still have your cigarette lighter free for other things, this is certainly useful. The cost is $22.99 as of this post from USBFever.com with 2.99 per order S&H.



• This tiny keyboard with a retractable USB cable was also revealed to us on Crunchgear. Cost is $25 from Brando.com.hk. It would certainly work better as a wireless keyboard, but something like this is useful to have in one’s arsenal of tools. We keep a toolbox with a spare mouse, screwdrivers, misc. little computer and data cables, etc for when we are off repairing something.
• Ion, the company known for cheap analog to digital converters including Record Players, is releasing a $100 slide and negative scanner called Slides 2 PC. for those of us wanting to get rid of boxes of analog media, items like this that make it simple are worth the investment. Scan your media, archive it, and dispose of the slides. You can even make a DVD. If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are plenty of organizations that will do it for you, even your local Costco.
• This tiny USB powered LCD monitor is useful, although we’ll wait till it is much much cheaper.

For more looks at the stuff we find interesting to consider as part of your hardware arsenal, keep reading…

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ThWhen you go to the airport with your laptop, you are forced to go through the annoyance of removing your laptop from its bag and placing it in a bin. However, the TSA last month announced the results of its initiative to encourage manufacturers to design checkpoint-friendly laptop bags. Below is an image of the friendliest styles of laptop bags.

Now, the problem is the most popular styles are these unapproved ones. Purchasing one of the approved bags will not guarantee that you can leave your laptop in your bag for screening. If the bag does not present a clear and distinct image of the laptop separate from the rest of the bag, you’ll still have to remove it.

The guidelines for these bags are as follows:

• Your laptop bag has a designated laptop-only section that you can lay flat on the X-ray belt
• There are no metal snaps, zippers or buckles inside, underneath or on-top of the laptop-only section
• There are no pockets on the inside or outside of the laptop-only section
• There is nothing in the laptop compartment other than the laptop
• You have completely unfolded your bag so that there is nothing above or below the laptop-only section, allowing the bag to lie flat on the X-ray belt

The TSA does not endorse any specific bag. And these new bags that have been reviewed according to their guidelines will take time to flood the market, and will likely initially be more expensive than other bags.

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Image via Wikipedia

SanDisk has announced(see Press Release) the launch of a new music option. microSD cards will soon be made available with pre-loaded high-quality DRM-free MP3 music of top artists from EMI Music, SONY BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group.

slotMusic cards enable consumers to instantly and easily enjoy music from their favorite artists without being dependent on a PC or internet connection. Users simply insert the slotMusic card into their microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player to hear the music – without passwords, downloading or digital-rights-management interfering with their personal use.

The cards will be packaged with a USB sleeve to allow them to be interfaced with a computer. They will be encoded at 320kbps and…

Musicians will find slotMusic cards offer a compelling new way to express themselves to their fans. With 1GB1 (gigabyte) of capacity, slotMusic cards can hold songs, as well as liner notes, album art, videos, and other creative content that an artist may choose. Consumers can also add their own content to a slotMusic card, creating a personal plug-and-play media library.

We tried to be enthusiastic about this idea. We realize that the RIAA and SanDisk are trying. We reviewed the comments on a CrunchGear post about this very development. Many people feel they can just make their own, that a 1GB card was small.

However, they’ve overlooked an untapped market. The impulse buyer. They intend to distribute this at brick-and-mortar and online stores. Online is the worst distribution method for this. slotMusic will have a market in people who are in a hurry. They should sell it at convenience stores, airports, and train stations. It will do well with people who suddenly decide to buy some music. Best Buy and Walmart will do well with the impulse buy as well.

Wherever there are people who cannot be bothered to do otherwise, there will be a market. We also predict that this is merely the first step. Imagine this system linked into an online system where you go into a store, select your album or albums from a machine, and it is delivered to you on a card. But this has to start somewhere.

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Image via Wikipedia

Lifehacker alerted us this week to the release of Rockbox 3.0. Rockbox is a product we already use on our MP3 player. It is an alternative open-source firmware which includes not only expanded music support, but album art, games, video playback, and more.

For those of you wishing to try it, but not willing to give up the manufacturer’s firmware, it installs a dual-boot firmware loader, allowing you to press a hotkey to boot into the old firmware.

We have switched from MP3 to playing files encoded using open-source format OGG and this software allows us to do so. It runs on a variety of players produced by Apple, Archos, Cowon, iriver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba. More will come, as people work to port it.

So, check Rockbox out. If you don’t like it, you can uninstall it.

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