I stopped by my local Kmart store Monday night, and much to my surprise they had The Book in stock. I bought one, and I opened the box before before leaving the parking lot. I have to say I’m rather impressed. It’s not perfect, but in the sub $100 price range it’s fairly good.
Click here for the videos. Read the rest of this entry »
What with the hype over Android tablets lately I thought I’d get an early start on the next frenzy. This beauty is being sold by a German company called Smartbook.It retails for 249€, and is available now.
BTW, I’ve spent the last couple hours trying to figure out if this is the same hardware as the Augen Gentouch78. It might not be. The Surfer shares some hardware specs with the Gentouch78 and it shares a certain visual similarity, but the Surfer also has a webcam, GPS module, microphone, 2 USB ports, and HDMI out. It also costs considerably more (249 €).
On the other hand, once you deduct the tax that’s included in the German retail price and then convert to USD, you end up with a price of ~$261. That’s only $90 more than the retail for the Gentouch78. Given the added cost of the extra hardware, these 2 tablets could indeed have come from the same developer.
It’s been a week since this tablet first appeared in the Kmart circular, and I still haven’t been able to get my hands on it. But after thinking about all that has happened in the past week, I realized that just collecting links to all the tidbits might make a worthwhile blog post.
So it’s been a week, and the Gentouch 78 is still not n stock in most Kmart stores (and probably won’t be in most stores). At this point all I have are the specs; I’m waiting on a promised review unit. But a number of people have gotten their hands on it. The first to do so shot hands on videos as soon as they could.
LaptopMag was the first to write a post about getting their hands on the tablet (they also posted a video). Considering that they wrote it on the day they got the tablet, it was a pretty thorough look it.They caught a lot of the less obvious bugs.
Engadget followed a couple hours with their own preview. It’s not quite as good as that of LaptopMag, though. Engadget didn’t look quite as close the build quality.
But by far the best source for info about this tablet would be Slatedroid Forums. I don’t know how they did it, but at least a dozen members of Slatedroid bought a Gentouch78. This is a community of tablet enthusiasts, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve found all the current problems with the tablet, so if you want get the full picture then you should check them out.
The best part about Slatedroid is that a good portion of the membership are capable hackers. They’ve already posted instructions on how to restore access to the Android Market (this was one of the bugs). There are also a couple people who’ve run benchmark tests just to see if the reported specs are correct.
BTW, I’ve also read on the Slatedroid forum that Augen have promised a firmware update soon, mostly in response to the bug reports they’ve generated.
P.S. I thought I’d save the best for last. I just found a video on Youtube where someone opened their Gentouch78.
I was digging through Youtube, looking for videos on the Gentouch78 when I found this one. Someone’s already taken the cover off their tablet. It’s interesting. There has been some debate over at Slatedroid about whether the Gentouch78 really had the 800MHz CPU in the specs. Now we know that the stock speed of the CPU is actually 720MHz. (Close enough for me.)
Financial Times are reporting:
News Corp is nearing a decision on whether to start a news organisation to provide content for a subscription application on digital tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad, according to people close to the plans.
…
If News Corp gives the green light to the tablet-centric news organisation plans, it will hire a new staff while borrowing from the resources, but not the content, of its news assets, which include the New York Post and Dow Jones. The product would include coverage of news, entertainment, sports and politics.
Okay, so they’re talking about creating new content just for tablets. Considering the duplication of effort, I’d have to say that this would be a waste of money.
I also have a theory that tablets are going to follow the development path of netbooks. Look at where netbooks were 2 years ago (that’s where we are with tablets). The hype was high and everyone was going to make one. But where are netbooks now? When was the last time that someone released a netbook that wasn’t simply an underpowered laptop?
Tags: fail, focused, launch, news, newscorp, organization, tablet
Bloomberg are reporting:
Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, plans to introduce a tablet computer in November to compete with Apple Inc’s iPad, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans.
The device will have roughly the same dimensions as the iPad, which has a 9.7-inch diagonal screen, said the two people who wouldn’t be identified because the plans haven’t been made public. The device will include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technology that will allow people to use their BlackBerry smartphones to connect to the Internet, the two people said.
…
RIM plans to call the tablet Blackpad, according to one of the people familiar with the company’s plans. RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, acquired the Internet rights to blackpad.com this month, according to the Whois database of domain names.
Ten bucks says that by the time November rolls around it won’t be called the BlackPad. I got another$10 that says it won’t be released at all.
Tags: cartoon, ebook, impressivie, library
I’m trying it right now on my iTouch, and I can’t see any major chnge in the reading experience. But on the upside, they did add the ability to lookup a word in a dictionary, Google, or Wikipedia. (My iTouch is frozen at the moment while the dictionary is downloaded.) Some of the other improvements include:
The NYTimes has the story:
In September, the chain will begin an aggressive promotion of its Nook e-readers by building 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all of its stores, with sample Nooks, demonstration tables, video screens and employees who will give customers advice and operating instructions.
…
Barnes & Noble has already installed small counters in its stores where customers can test out the Nook. The new display space would be much larger, and it would be located next to each store’s cafe, to encourage customers to stop by the Nook space, coffee or tea in hand. It would also sell more than 100 accessories for the Nook, like padded covers designed by Kate Spade and Jonathan Adler.
…
To make room for the new Nook displays, Barnes & Noble plans to clear out some of its music merchandise, which in its superstores takes up 3,600 square feet, and to arrange its books more efficiently. Mr. Lynch said that the number of books on display in Barnes & Noble stores would not decrease.
The Financial Times are reporting that rogue agent Andrew Wylie is planning to expand beyond the 20 titles that he has contracted to Amazon:
In an interview, Mr Wylie said he preferred to negotiate a deal with publishers that combined the print and digital rights, but had failed to reach a satisfactory compromise after nine months of discussions with all large publishing houses.
“If we do not reach an accord, Odyssey will grow. It will not publish 20 books, it will publish 2,000 and have outside investors and make itself available to other agents,” Mr Wylie told the Financial Times this week.
“I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams,” Mr Wylie said.
Well, duh.
Tags: babies, eat, editions, expand, kick, kittens, odyssey, wylie
A couple days ago I posted on WorldReader.org and their Kindle pilot program. They’re working to create rural literacy programs in third world countries.
I took the position that paper would be a better solution, and I still think that.
Yesterday I came across a post on the OLPC News blog about the efforts needed to keep large quantities of the XO-1 laptop maintained and functioning. Admittedly, this is a laptop, not an e-reader, but this isn’t a problem you’d have with paper books.
According to an official report which received quite a bit of media attention last week 14,2% of the XOs in 275 surveyed classes at 55 different schools (out of more than 2000 schools participating in Plan Ceibal) where unusable due to some form of breakage. An additional 6,2% of XOs was currently undergoing repairs and hence unavailable for the children. Together with machines blocked by the security system or a full Journal (3,9%) and ones where the state was either unknown or something else (3,1%) this means that 27,4% of the XOs weren’t in a usable state.
