Gadget Wisdom

There is fragmentation in the Android market. Due to carrier approval delays on operating system updates, among other things, the Android marketplace is split between 1.5, 1.6, and 2.1. This means that going forward, unless you want to hack your phone, you may experience long delays in upgrades.

Engadget reported that Google has a solution(via Mobiputing). It plans to unbundle the apps from core operating system. And this makes sense. If a new update to the web browser comes, you don’t have to wait for it to go through the manufacturer and carrier approval process.  Carriers should approve and test the basic phone functionality…integration with the carrier’s network, reliability, etc…all the things we expect of them.

But if Google wants to push out an update to the alarm clock app, or something that won’t change its phone functionality(except at a very high level, ie appearance/organization), they won’t need approval. And customers will be happier. They’ve already done updates to Google Maps, for example, without needing to run that by the carriers and manufacturers.

By decreasing the amount of pieces of the puzzle that are part of the OS and rolling them into the Android Market for updates, we would all get a better experience. But that is just our opinion, we suppose.

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.