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Barnes and Noble offers new Nook and Amazon Kindle 3G with Special Offers

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon

 

Amazon has launched a Kindle 3G with Special Offers. The Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers has been their best-selling Kindle so far. The same discount of $25 off will be offered off of the regular Kindle 3G.

Barnes and Noble, meantime, released its new wi-fi only Nook, which will compete with the Kindle Wi-Fi. Unlike the Kindle, the Nook will offer a touch screen, a two month battery. It only offers one button, compared to the Kindle’s 38, with full mini keyboard.The device runs Android 2.1.

Barnes and Noble’s basic improvement over the Kindle 3, the current king of e-ink, is to eliminate the hardware keyboard in favor of a touchscreen to allow for a smaller device with the same screen. We look forward to seeing Amazon’s response, but this is a worthy competitor to the Kindle 3.

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Published on May 24, 2011
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Product Review: Charging High Amp USB devices

When we first started with the Motorola Droid, we discovered early on that despite it using a USB based charger, not every USB AC adapter would charge it. The Droid wants 0.85A and not every charger puts that out. The Nook Color we own is even worse, at 1.9A and a special USB cable with extra pins to carry the charge.

At home and on the go, we most often will bring more than one device, and were looking for a single device that had everything. We’d previously recommended the Belkin Travel USB surge protector, but it only supported .5A on each USB port…not enough for the demands of modern hardware. It is still a good design, but needs to be updated. The competive items we found have the same delivery problem.

Finally, we found an item that offers travel portability and delivers the 2A power needs for our devices. It is the IPAD-2USB High Power Slim AC Wall Plug, offering two USB ports with the charge levels we need.

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The power plug rotates and folds flat into the unit, making it perfect for travel and will allow it to be flush with a wall in the event you want to permanently mount it behind a piece of furniture. If you pair it with a small travel surge protector and/or a short extension cord, it will be usable in a variety of narrow or limited situations. It supports 220V, so it can be paired with a plug adapter to make it truly international.

Not everything is overly complicated. Sometimes, you just want something that works as advertised. This does everything we need it to.

Published on May 22, 2011
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Review: Kindle with Special Offers

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Update: The $114 Kindle has been deprecated, please try the new $79 Kindle linked above

The Gadget Wisdom labs got in the $114 Kindle with Special Offers today, on launch day for the item. As previously mentioned, the Kindle with Special Offers is, hardware-wise, identical to the Kindle Wi-Fi, currently listed at $139.

So, what do you get for your $25 savings? You get ads on the bottom of the home screen and as the screen saver, instead of random images of authors and such, you get ads. Ironically, you will likely have more dynamic screensaver options on this Kindle with Special Offers than you will on the more expensive Kindles, which do not let you customize your screensaver at all, unless you hack it.

Aside from that, the Kindle, no matter what version, has its place. Even Joe Wikert, who shuttered his Kindleville blog when he went out and bought an iPad, came back a year later, declaring the Kindle the perfect iPad accessory. We’re not quite so sure about that, but a lightweight reading device at $114, while not the magic $99 price people speak of, is inexpensive enough to feel comfortable taking it anywhere.

With Whispersync, even if the Kindle is stolen, it can be deregistered and nothing(save the device) is lost. You cannot say that about an iPad. While e-readers may change over the years, and get cheaper, we cannot say, like some pundits, that the tablet computer will make the e-reader obsolete any time soon.

That said, buy the Kindle with Special Offers. Save yourself $25. You aren’t losing anything by having ads.

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Published on April 29, 2011
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Amazon Releases New Ad-Supported Kindle – Save 25

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon

Amazon announced on Monday a new Kindle option, Kindle with Special Offers. It is a $139 Kindle Wi-Fi selling for $114 if you agree to have ads on it. The ads would appear as part of the screensaver, and at the bottom of the Home Page, but not inside the reading experience. This is the sort of ad experience we can live with.

Business Insider insists that this is the future of gadgets…ads that are not annoying, but are present. Remember, a newspaper has ads and people do not find them offensive. The subsidy is $25 now, but it could be more on future projects, depending on the results. And as long as the ads aren’t annoying, and you have the choice to buy adless…why not?

As for why the Kindle isn’t free with ads…there is no proven business model for that. But maybe, after this, there will be.

From a Kindle perspective, we are very disappointed that you can get a custom screensaver that shows ads, but you can’t get one that shows something other than the random authors and art Amazon chooses. Seems a shame.

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Published on April 13, 2011
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LaCie PassKey

LaCie USB KeysToday, we were at the store returning a faulty hard drive and saw the LaCie PassKey sitting there, and picked it up at a discount.

LaCie(pictured right), makes a line of USB keys that are shaped like keys. The Passkey is a microSDHC reader you can keep in your pocket.

The Passkey, as opposed to some of others, is pretty bulky up at the key section, but it is solid metal. Most USB drives use a plastic exterior, and can crack under heavy use. And it takes microSDHC cards, the same sort used in cell phones, which we are carrying anyway inside a cell phone.

It isn’t news, but it is certainly worth a look. There is nothing geekier than a giant USB key on your keychain.

Published on October 31, 2010
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Why You Might Finally Give in and Buy a Kindle

booting up the Kindle 3
Image by The Shifted Librarian via Flickr

It is time to revisit the pros and cons of the Kindle, which has finally plummeted into the land of reasonable pricing. Let’s go back to some of the reasons we quoted for buying and not buying a Kindle last year, and update it a bit.

Reasons to Buy a Kindle

  • It’s Great For Travel
  • You can email files to your Kindle address. With the new Wi-Fi option, you can do so for free. Over 3G it costs a few cents. But you can set a threshold to avoid overcharging
  • It looks great. Especially in graphite. The screen is much more conducive to long periods of reading than a conventional LCD screen. They’ve really improved the contrast. It is still in greyscale, but this is for reading. You want color, go to your computer.
  • Almost any book is available. And publishers and content owners can pull out old and out of print books and sell them on the Kindle as there is only a small cost to start out. Crunchgear reports the U.S. Kindle store has over 700,000 books. Barnes and Noble claims more, but includes public domain books in its tally, something Amazon apparently does not.
  • It is the future. Paper books won’t die, we don’t want them to.
  • You can switch seamlessly between your Kindle and reading the book on your computer, smartphone, etc. as Amazon has released Kindle apps for most major platforms.
  • Amazon is a large, stable company and the likelihood of them discontinuing the Kindle and taking your e-books with them is probably slim.

Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle

  • Books…old ones at least, can be cheaper.
  • There is still a value to the printed book
  • No expansion slot, but the new one has 4GB of memory, which is an estimated 3,500 books.
  • It must be charged. Your paper book never needs any batteries. Admittedly, advertised battery life is measured in weeks, not hours like most devices.
  • You are locked into the Kindle format. Your property is licensed, not owned, and you cannot move it to other platforms.
  • It doesn’t support EPUB format, which means you’d have to convert any book delivered in that format.
  • It doesn’t support lending, which the Nook limitedly does.
  • You can read periodicals for free online, why do they make you pay to subscribe to a blog?

Just remember, when we started advising against the cost of an e-book reader, it cost about four hundred dollars. For that price you could buy a computer. Now, at $139 for the wi-fi only version that we bought, or $50 more for adding 3G, it is at a price point that makes it more realistic. We’d like to see sub-$100 pricing soon, at least on the wi-fi version. The Kindle has estimated sales of about 5 million since it launched in 2007. The latest one is so popular it keeps getting sold out. The Nook, by comparison, has sold 1 million since it launched last year.

Books are are an over twenty billion a year business. About eight percent of U.S. readers use an e-book reader and in a recent poll, twelve percent of Americans said they are likely to get one within the next six months. Of course, the same poll indicated that e-reader purchasers were more likely to read(not a big surprise) and that the majority of them read more now than they did six months ago.

“”Customers tell us they love the freedom and flexibility of our Buy Once, Read Everywhere approach because they always have their full reading library at their fingertips and never lose their place in a book-whether they are reading on a Kindle or one of their other favorite devices,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle, in a recent press release announcing an update to Kindle for Android. The idea is this. If your platform is locked down, but you can get it on any device, is that not the type of DRM you can live with? The biggest complaint about DRM is the lack of portability. We’d like to see things more open, but given the choice between DRM content and no content at all…

In the music business, choosing between DRM-music and buying a CD kept us with CDs, which could be turned into DRM free music. We’ll see what happens. For the Kindle, the issue of library lending has to be handled. the revenue from selling licenses and services to libraries can be a wonderful one if they unveil a system to do so. Why should Overdrive Media Console and Adobe Digital Editions have this market?

To go back to the issue of EPUB and loading your own stuff onto it…you can load PDF files onto it. And if you don’t want to hook up via USB, you can email it to username@free.kindle.com to get it over Wireless. username@kindle.com to be charged for over 3G. And programs like Calibre, which we will get into in another post, can be set up to not only convert e-books from Google and Project Gutenberg, but support Kindle profiles and assemble news sources into an e-book format and autotransfer it to the Kindle every day, so you do not get charged(which you will if you subscribe to same through Amazon).

There is one final thing we have to get to. Many of us, including our editor, are Android phone users. Reading books on a 3-4 inch phone screen is doable, but it is small and can hurt one’s eyes. so, while it is doable for short periods, there is still a market for a device more conducive to reading.

And even with the larger LCD screen, the iPad hasn’t killed the Kindle yet, has it?

What do you think?

Published on September 26, 2010
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Review: MJSI Hydroright Dual Flush Converter

After writing about a dual flush retrofit kit, we became enthused about the idea of installing one of these ourselves. We don’t have a plumber on staff, so our intrepid editor was forced to play with his own toilet. Please excuse if our terminology falls short as we try to explain basic toilet technology.

Our toilet is a 1.6 Gallon model installed around 2000. A traditional toilet uses a simple system. The ballcock floats on top of the water. when the tank is emptied, the ballcock lowers, thus activating the fill valve until the ballcock is lifted up to the off position by the water. The fill valve on this toilet was replaced with a newer, more reliable design, the concentric-float fill valve, and thus there is no ballcock. The concentric design is required for this retrofit kit.

The model is the MJSI HYR270 HydroRight Drop-In Dual Flush Converter, purchased at a local Home Depot. The nice thing about this design is that it does not require removal of the toilet tank to install. If you have to go as far as to remove the toilet tank, you might as well buy a new toilet with integrated dual flush, which we recommend if you have a really old toilet.

If you need to replace your fill valve with a concentric float one, which as mentioned is required, MJSI makes an adjustable one that can also help you save water, and sometimes it is better to get components from the same manufacturer, as you can be reasonably certain they work together.

As you can see in the image, this toilet has a typical flapper. The flapper is a rubber stopper that is connected to the handle by a chain. When you press the handle, it pulls up, allowing water to empty from tank to bowl. For this retrofit, we will be replacing the flapper with the retrofit unit.

Installation was surprisingly easy. First we shut off the water and drained the tank. Then we removed the handle and the flapper and set them inside in case the mechanism did not work. The retrofit mechanism slips in place of the flapper and is a tall unit, so you need sufficient clearance. It is then secured with a zip tie in the back to the overflow tube. The overflow tube is next to the drain(where the flapper is normally inserted), and serves the purpose of preventing the tank from overflowing.

A button is then inserted into the hole where the handle once was, and attached to the control box, which is connected to the retrofit unit by a blue cable(as pictured)

Then, after following some calibration tests, your toilet is ready to be more water efficient. Fun, huh? The actual installation only took about twenty minutes, and we’re sure it would be faster the second time. We’ve given some time to test and the toilet is running without problem. The button mechanism has a low flush for liquid waste and a high flush for solid waste.

The only problem is making sure guest know how to properly use the new mechanism, but that is fairly easy to explain. So, for less than thirty dollars, we’ve committed to water savings, efficiency…and it makes for an interesting conversation piece.

Any questions?

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Published on June 2, 2010
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Eee Keyboard May Finally Ship

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leTCKDmnnSQ

Liliputing, premiere site for netbooks and other compact computers, reports that Asus is finally set to ship the Eee Keyboard this month. We reported on the Eee Keyboard when it was first demoed at CES a year and a half ago.

It features wireless HDMI, and a built in touchscreen that can act as a small informational display.

The Eee Keyboard would make a compelling HTPC. It reminds us of our old Commodore 64, which had the entire computer within the keyboard enclosure. Of course, it would also, minus the computer power, make a nice keyboard by itself. We’re not sure of how this will take off. But we’ll be watching.

Published on April 12, 2010
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Review: The Sansa Clip Plus

Sansa Clip+ Front
Image by Touzeen Hussain via Flickr

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We love the Sansa Clip. We bought a 1GB Clip refurbished a while back, and it replaced a slightly more sophisticated player with video playback capabilities. Sometimes, simplicity is more useful. Now, we’ve replaced our 1GB Sansa Clip with a new Sansa Clip Plus(or Clip+).

The Plus offers a slightly sturdier construction, the buttons have been reorganized, and one big new feature…a microSDHC slot for expansion. It also contains the features that we loved about the Clip.

  • It can play FLAC and OGG files.
  • It has good Podcast and Audiobook support.
  • The sound quality is good.
  • It is REALLY small
  • It has a screen, something the Shuffle lacks
  • It has a built in FM radio

We commented on the Clip+ when it first came out. Sandisk advertises the expansion slot as a slotMusic slot. slotMusic and slotRadio were Sandisk’s attempt at selling preloaded microSD cards, which we still insist, on the face of it, is not a bad idea, but never took off. Sandisk’s implementation was not quite what we thought would work. We’d like to see an on-demand kiosk that would allow you to buy files, load them onto the little card, and that could be available in airports and music stores.

That aside, the Clip form factor is the perfect size for sticking into a bag. Everyone we’ve shown it to, even iPod lovers, have agreed that if you are looking for a simple, utilitarian, good quality music player, the Clip is superior to the iPod shuffle and to many other players on the market in similiar price ranges. For those who are Linux users, or like a simple interface, the Clip offers easy loading of new music by copying it over a USB cable. The jack built-in is a standard Mini-USB jack, as opposed to any proprietary plug.

It relies on ID3 tagging to allow you to browse for files to play, but offers Playlist(created on your computer not the device, although this may change), and an folder browse mode to allow you to select by the directories you have put on the device. When we bought it, there was already a new firmware we could load on, which gives us hope Sandisk will continue to maintain it. AnythinButiPod has a list of possible firmware improvements.

They also show how you can get a microSD to SD converter to, with a corresponding increase in size, get cheaper SD as opposed to microSD memory for the Clip.

Elsewhere, the Clip V1 has unstable support for the Rockbox alternative music firmware and other versions may come someday.

The only complaint we could see having about it is that it is so small, it is easy to lose. We’ve narrowly avoided misplacing it a few times for that reason. But a device being too portable is the sort of complaint we can live with.

Update: There is a newer version of the Sansa Clip, called the Sansa Clip Zip. Have not tried it, but the link appears below.

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Published on January 24, 2010
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Didn’t Buy an Ebook Reader – But We Were Alone

The front of the Kindle 1 (Left) and Kindle 2 ...
Image via Wikipedia

For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

Update: Since this post, we have now purchased a Kindle. The price is now manageable. See below link to current Kindle offering.

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Published on January 3, 2010
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