Movies on Android

So the Android Market now rents movies. That's good, that's a piece that was missing compared to iOS.
The downside is that it seems not to have TV shows so far, and the prices, unlike Amazon US's one-dollar rental, are high. And only 48 hours, and no buying.
(Apart from that, I have a bug: when they take payment, my login works fine, but when I try to download the movie, it doesn't! Too precious.)

Size Matters, or The Five-inch Phone

Size matters, no matter what your first girlfriend told you.

I think the future of the phone is in the 5-inch size. Apple may be slow to go there, since they didn't invent it, and they can be a bit stubborn about such things. But I think it's like with desktop monitors, why does Apple no longer make a 15-inch or even a 17-inch iMac? Because everything else being equal, bigger is better. Once you could make screens cheap enough, they grew.

And I tell you, the usability difference between a 3.5-inch screen and a 5-inch screen with the same pixel density is very far from trivial. With web surfing, with reading, and with video, it's a big difference. I could never use an iPhone for web surfing, it feels like doing the tango in a phone booth. But with the Samsung Galaxy Note's 5.3-inch screen it's much more palatable. And the Note is thinner and barely weighs more than the iPhone.

So now the price difference is becoming trivial, the question is if anybody has too small pockets for a 5-inch phone? Maybe on some garments for children and women, I'm honestly not sure, but none of my clothes can't easily fit one.

An iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy Note

Adam Engst wrote:

Pockets for women are an interesting topic - they either don't exist reliably enough or aren't large enough (even for the iPhone) so women generally have to come up with another way of carrying devices anyway.

It is indeed interesting. To men, the idea of not having pockets is ludicrous.

What puzzles me most is that so many ladies’ purses (most?) have no shoulder-strap, so their hands are never free. What they do sacrifice for fashion!

Update:
To me, the Galaxy Note is the Kindle to the Nth degree. It's screen is barely smaller, but it's a ton smaller and lighter, the screen has twice the resolution and ten times the contrast (for a e-ink Kindle),  it is way faster, it can handle whatever content you can throw at it, text or otherwise...
As a reader, it sucks me in. Even a full magazine format is quite easy to read on it, and for something formatted for smaller screens, I don't see how you can make a better device and keep it pocket-sized.
I'd prefer iOS (it would make video and vodcasts easier to get at with iTunes), but otherwise...

[Update] ...I realize that opinion is odd to some and unlikeable to others. But I throw it out in this brash fashion because 1) the e-ink Kindle hardly needs more promoters and 2) I think this idea is not one many have yet, but I think it's a very promising one. The Galaxy Note is not cheap, but if done purposefully, I don't see why something like it could not be done for a price similar to the Kindle Fire's price. And to me it's more useful than the Fire, which needs to shred 200 grams and half the thickness, and even then wouldn't be pocketable for most. 

"Casellet" iPhone case/wallet

Here's the Kickstarter page for an upcoming iPhone case/wallet called Casellet.

I think it looks like a nice idea. Except perhaps that it holds few coins, and you have to remove bills and credit cards to get to them. But on the other hand, I have seen wallet designs (not even phone cases) which had no space at all for coins!

So perhaps one can at least use it for short outings where one does not expect to use cash a lot. It'll mean one less object to keep track of.

Airbook (vs iPad)

MacWorld's hardware best list has the 11-inch MacBook Air as no 1. I won't argue, it's a spectacular machine, beautiful and totally right as a compact laptop, even speedy in the last couple of renditions. Barely larger than an iPad, but a full-powered Mac computer.

I've been dreaming about such a machine since 1995 when I got my first Mac, but it took 15 years for technology to get up to it.
It's a dream machine for the writer on the road, or almost anybody on the road.

Update:

Tonya Engst (co-founder and -editor of TidBITS, the longest-ongoing tech newsletter on the Net) said...

I just bought a new 11" MacBook Air. Much as I enjoy my iPad, I've not been able to type as quickly on the onscreen keyboard as I can on a physical keyboard. Even for just email and Web, when I get into some of the more complex things that I do, I need to type a lot or to do a lot of complex things with Web-based content management or administrative tools. So, while I can do them on an iPad, it is a lot faster on a Mac, with it's bigger screen, more sophisticated text-entry options for inputting standard chunks of text, and ability to show two windows at once. I thought the iPad would be great for mobile email/Web even so (when traveling), but I need to do certain customer support tasks (even when on vacation/traveling), and the MacBook Air should make them faster and easier. Although the MacBook Air is bigger than the iPad, it's not bigger by much. The main downside is no built-in data modem [no cell phone network connection), so I'll be dependent on finding Wi-Fi or I could set up my iPhone in tethering mode.


I should add that I've tried traveling with an external keyboard for the iPad, and it was okay, but it was harder to pull out and use quickly, say, while waiting in the airport, harder to use while reclining on a hotel bed, and just generally more clunky than the ease of sliding a laptop out of a bag and getting to work immediately.

Thank you Tonya, helpful to hear this.
I think we will learn in what ways tablets are different beasts over the coming years, as they develop and we learn to use them for what they are best for. They may have some maturing to do before they can replace most computers as Steve Jobs predicted. The keyboard is an interesting factor, I wonder if there'll ever be a perfect solution.

Of course one might take into consideration that Tonya is not exactly the typical mass-market customer, being arguably a geek of geeks with specialized needs. Not that this changes the physical aspects of these issues of course.

All the same apps

I am on a mailing list for Apple-related, IOS-related press releases. I find it interesting that it sometimes feels like everybody is doing the same things, and expecting to make money on it. They either make note-taking apps, or task-management apps, or children's books/apps. The market is just flooded with these things.

Reasonably rental

I didn't care much that Kindle fire can't be used to buy video outside the US, but now I care a little bit at least. Because I just found out that a 48-hour rental of such a movie as the last Harry Potter movie is only one dollar!
Now, that's more like it. I've been frustrated with the online/cable rental systems, because typically they'd charge five to eight dollars for a rental, which I think it really simply too much. It's almost half the price of getting the disc with the extras and limitless viewings.

So I hope the music and video content will not take too long for Amazon to establish outside the US.

BTW, they just opened Kindle stores in Italy and Spain (we already had UK, Germany, and France), good stuff.

Kindle cases

Waterfield Kindle cases.
I love their products, I have so many of their bags and cases.

If you want to carry a little more, try the Muzetto. It's so nice it could make the Clint Eastwood carry a murse.

So many chargers

Man, if I were to slip in the bathtub and die, I am sure the number of battery chargers for different devices and cameras in my apartment would make the local newspaper. "Local bachelor dies, leaves loaf of black bread and 154 battery chargers."

Kindle gift

Isn't it bizarre that you still can't buy a kindle ebook as a gift for somebody else? iTunes solved this years ago.

Update:

Jason said...
Am I missing something? I see the big "Give as a Gift" button on every Kindel ebook page. Just under buy with one-click.

That's interesting. Maybe they have introduced it on the US site and not the UK one yet. (And I can't buy from the US one.)

The old Rocket Ebook (updated again)

Did you know about the Rocket Ebook from just before the millennium? As an ereader enthusiast, I just had to have this classic. I found it on eBay for 21 dollars! (with all parts, and working fine, "very good" condition. A lucky buy, the only other one was 90 bucks.)

It's ten years old, and apparently it was well ahead of it's time, for it was a colossal flop, it's amazing how little material there is available on it, and all the related web sites (the manufacturer  library, etc) are just gone.

For all that, apart from the bulk/weight (620 grams/22oz, size of a paperback, really not bad), a bit of jaggies (no grey tones), and not much memory (held less than 15 books), it is surprisingly good. With the backlight on, I find it in some ways better to read on than an e-ink Kindle. And the interface is nice and simple.

OK, like came with the times, you had to have a wired (serial) connection to your computer to transfer files, and special software and such. But for the time, I think it really was very good, and deserved to had succeeded some way.

Haha, it even comes with a serial-to-MacSerial adapter. There has not been a Mac made with a serial port for over a decade. I could get a parallel to USB adapter, but the software of course is for Mac OS 8, which modern Macs won't even run in emulation. Ah well, I didn't really get it for use, more for the historical value.

Update:
Hey, I just remembered I have an old HP laptop running XP. What do you know, it has the requisite ports, the software installed perfectly, and it's working! Now just to see if the software still has any valid Net connections to content...
Update: Long story short, of course it doesn't. Sites are long gone.
And it's hard to find books in .rb format. But I realized that probably the reader could read plain old .txt files, so I went to Gutenberg.org and found a book, Bleak House by Dickens (which somebody recommended recently), and got it transferred to the Rocket. It works!
Unfortunately there are many ugly line breaks. Who puts line breaks in a .txt file??! But anyway, I can fix that on my Mac, but at least now I know that I can get books the Rocket Ebook, and that makes it more fun.

Update:
A recommended the Baen Free Library, which (probably due to its ancienity) includes the Rocket format. Thanks, dude.

For those interested, here is a another ebook reader of the time, a big one, the Softbook Reader. The screen was almost as big as the iPad's!

Reading and Time, Artists And Illustrators

I thought to check if Artists And Illustrators would happen to be available via Zinio on my iPad. It was. And I was already subscribing and had two issues waiting, I’d forgotten! 

This illustrates (pun not intended) how many different things I’m reading, or trying to, these days. I think my Zinio subs would keep me in reading alone, and then there is news and articles from the web, various ebooks fiction and non-fiction, comics, audiobooks and so on. It's an embarrassment of riches. 

I remember about 20 years I told a friend: I wish I had the money to buy all the books I'd like. He said: but how'd you get the time to read it? I said: time is your problem, not mine*.
So years later I became successful enough to buy any book I wanted. And I admit it is indeed nice.
And time? ... I don't know, would we really accomplish more with 30 hours in a day? Or are there other factors at play, like what we really want to do, and what we can face doing?

---
*He was always complaining about not enough time, for example to make his music. Once I pointed out that maybe he was fooling himself, because when he'd gotten a grant and taken two months off in Paris to work on his music, all he got done was revisions of a couple of lyrics. He couldn't refuse that point, so he laughed and said: "well, at least it's only myself I'm trying to fool." I let him have that, no reason to kick a man when  he's down, it was a very brave admission.     :-)

DNA-Case for iPhone

If like me you enjoy the sheer quality of good hardware and this is one of the reasons you have an iPhone 4(s), you may like the DNA-Case.
It's from aluminium and doesn't weigh much in itself, but still together with the iPhone it does make for a solid little package, in that the phone is all glass and metal itself. One may like that or not. But I think it may be one of the best looking cases made just for the iPhone 4, and the only one I've seen which showcases the iPhone's beautiful metal sides.

It comes in black, white, alu, or Chrome.
It has rubber lining inside. It's not difficult to mount, though of course it does require a small screwdriver (which they provide).

Update:
Maybe I should have got the alu or white model, because I must admit that while this black case looks pretty good on the white iPhone, it looks just stunning on a black one.

The New Yorker and digital magazines' future

I've talked about how I like the Zinio magazines, which make magazines into PDFs, including infinitely zoomed text (unlike some Kindle Fire magazines which apparently get pixelated text when you zoom in, highly unfortunate).
But there's an even better thing: the format The New Yorker and a few other mags use: a custom design for the iPad/Android magazine, where you browse each article horizontally, and if an article/item has more than one page, you read on vertically. This is very simple and very logical. Of course it takes more work to convert a magazine into such a format. I wonder how much more it would cost Zinio to make the magazines into this format, surely not trivial.

One odd choice (oversight?) in the iPad New Yorker though is that like with many of these magazines, one can't change the text size. To be frank about it, this is like making a car where you can't turn the wheels. Admittedly the chosen text size is comfortable for me, but it might seem large to one with 20/20 vision, and it might be too small for somebody with poorer vision. Changeable text size is one of the biggest boons of digital publishing, it puzzles me why anybody would throw that away.

It anyway seems to me that magazines/papers are well on their way in the digital realm, though only a few of them make good money on it yet. I suspect that the take-off point will be when we have a reader device which is twice the size of the iPad, half the weight of the iPad, and half the price of the iPad. That might take a few years, but it will happen. I believe. It has to, otherwise the job is just half done, for many reasons.

I have heard so many people who like myself, after they have been reading electronically for a couple of months, really don't want to go back to paper. It's surprising to all of us, and I'm very curious what, apart of course from convenience and speed, this attraction is. I have a feeling there's more to it.

Update:
Re The New Yorker itself, being Danish I have not been exposed to it in the past, but I've always heard about what fantastic quality it is, for example one writer said that his personal hardly-achievable goal is to write as well as those published in the New Yorker. But so far I must admit I don't really see what all the hullabaloo is about, nothing in the first issue I've read seemed outstanding in any way. (And not substantial either, people said TNY has such long articles, but I didn't see any.)

Accents are a problem for voice software

Well, it's becoming more and more clear (thanks to my readers who commented) that an accent is a big problem for dictation- or voice-command software. Generally speaking it seems that unless you have a clear and accent-free English, the computer does not understand you well enough for it to be really useful.

That's a big challenge for all, because the number of people in this world speaking English as a second language or with regional accent is huge. And my hope is not great that anybody will make, for example, Danish voice-recognition and dictation software in the near future. And in any case that would not help me all that much, because I almost always write in English (excepting of course emails to my danish friends and family). If I write a novel (or just a blog), I want it to not be limited to the tiny Danish audience.

I guess, theoretically, if people generally understand what you say, at some point computers will get to that point too. But when? In ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Sigh.

 

iPad snowboard