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

(Updated) Highly mixed reviews of Kindle Fire

Update:
OK, I just got my Kindle Fire today, overseas to UK. And it's early days yet, but I felt I better report that I don't really see any of all that sluggishness, non-responsiveness, and bugginess that some of the reviewers below talk about. So far, it really seems like a nice Android experience. Main liability I note so far is the weight, 410 grams (14.5oz) is a bit on the heavy side for relaxed reading, especially in bed or when you want to read one-handedly for a while. In this aspect the Galaxy Note beats the pants off the Fire at 170 grams, although of course the Note is more expensive and smaller (but with a sharper screen).

Although it ostensibly works only in the US, it has no problem letting me read my Kindle library, or surf the web, and so on. So this was my main objectives for getting it, all is well.
When  try getting to videos, paid or included, it does not seem to realize "consciously" that I'm not in the US, but I do get an error message when I try to play a video. I had not expected to get away with that either.

OK, it's clear that I can't buy media on this one. I can buy books though, via the Amazon UK ebook store. Although oddly, so far I've only been able to make purchased books turn up on my iPad, not on the Kindle Fire itself. Don't know what's going on there, demands more investigating.


Original post:
The Fire Aside, Amazon’s Lower-Priced Kindles Also Shine, David Pogue in NYT.
Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.

Walt Mossberg Reviews Kindle Fire, article.

This new $199 device is called the Kindle Fire, and after testing it for a week, I think it's a good—though not a great—product and a very good value. [...] 
To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple's.

A human review of the Kindle Fire, article from the maker of Instapaper.
I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative, but I can’t call it delightful, fun, or pleasant to use. Quite the opposite, actually: using the Fire is frustrating and unpleasant, and it feels like work.
[...]

Magazines are a special beast on the Fire. They can either be custom apps, like on the iPad, or they can provide their content in a split “Page View”/”Text View” interface provided by Amazon.
The “Page View” is unusable. It’s literally just a big image of the magazine pages, like someone scanned them in. There’s nothing modern about it — the table of contents, being just an image, doesn’t even link to the articles. The Fire’s screen is so much smaller than a magazine that you need to zoom and pan constantly, and the zooming and panning is frustratingly sluggish, jerky, and clumsy. Even when zoomed in, my example issue of The Economist didn’t even have sharp text.

This is a great pity, and very different from Zinio's usability, it has working links, and if you zoom in all the way, the text stays pin-sharp, it's real text, not just an image.
Marco also replies to one of those who say that the negative reviews of the Fire are wrong because they compare it to the much more expensive iPad:

As an aside, I need to argue with Steve in good fun about his car analogy:


"Complaining that the Fire is less thrilling or compelling than an iPad is a bit like grumbling that a Honda Civic is less fun and exciting than an Audi A6. Both do what they are intended to do very well (though their intended functions are a lot more alike than the Fire and the iPad.)
The Civic is a great car. It’s not the fastest, the most fun, or the must luxurious, but it’s smooth, comfortable, versatile, and extremely reliable. It does what it’s supposed to do exceptionally."


The Kindle Fire is not a great tablet. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do well. That’s the difference. If Amazon had made a “Civic of tablets”, it would have been a much better product. Maybe, someday, they will.

Maybe Amazon really over-reached in wanting to beat the market to death with a super-low-priced color Kindle?
But then the original Kindle also had lots of problem, poor usability and frailty for example, and it still succeeded and got better in later generations. And of course, with Amazon's sheer momentum, it will take some huge problems to make the Fire anything like a failure.

How to make a full Android tablet of a Kindle Fire

How to make a full Android tablet of a Kindle Fire.
I knew this would happen, but this was fast! Only a couple of days.



The article and video also explains about doing similar things to the new Nook Tablet.

And it mentions how to get a regular Android browser if you don't like Amazon's fancy "cover flow" one (to use Apple's term).
I did something similar a couple days ago: I updated the software on my Dell Streak which I bought a year ago (neat little 5-inch tablette). And after I had done so, the home screen/launcer had been replaced by a horrible interface called "Dell Stage". What it basically did was place the icons on a little stage on the screen, and the net (and so far I could see, only) effect was to reduce useable screen space to under one third! Most idiotic thing I ever saw. So I googled "remove Dell Stage" and I found out I merely had to download a free app launcher from the Market, and I was back to a sensible use of the screen again.

Now we're cooking. iPad is still missing real competition in the full-sized tablet space, but it has very tough competition now in the 7-inch space, the Fire is only 40% of the iPad's price! And it would surprise me if Amazon does not follow up next year with a larger model. Their magazine and video services pretty much demand it.

Talking about the Kindle: the fact that it's running an old version (2.3) of Android which was not meant for tablets (only phones) does not exactly help with the problem of fragmentation of Android. Developers will have to make special versions of their apps if they want in on this popular device.

Dangers of assuming Amazon will destroy B&N

Dangers of assuming Amazon will destroy B&N, article.

This is some of the stuff B&N pulled off in the last year -
Released a Reading Tablet a year before Amazon.
Released a touch-screen eReader months before Amazon. Almost eliminated the page-turn problem.
Turned Nook Color into the #2 selling Tablet after iPad. You can argue technicalities, but the bottom line is that Nook Color has sold more than any other non-iPad tablet.
Showed that there is a market for non-iPad Tablets. This is a HUGE thing. It has given everyone else hope and will lead to the end of the iPad’s domination in Tablets. The biggest lesson it has taught everyone is – Don’t compete on your enemy’s strengths. A lesson that Amazon has learnt very well.
Released a Nook Tablet that pulls off some impressive things – 1 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB RAM, HD support, IPS screen, 16 GB memory. That’s a LOT of goodness for $249 – Tablets and smartphones with comparable specifications retail for $400 to $500.
Built up a very interesting Nook Color App Store. 1,100 Apps aimed at Tablets.
Added Email support and lots of other features to Nook Color and morphed it from a Reading Tablet to an almost full-fledged Tablet.
-

Got my Galaxy Note

Just got my Samsung Galaxy Note (N7000) today. First impressions: wow, this may be the most impressive "BigPhone" yet. (Let's see if that term catches on.) Apple really needs to make a larger iPhone or Touch, stat. This screen blows the iPhone 4(S) away. It is almost the same sharpness (pixel size etc) and color quality, but it's twice the size, area-wise, and that puts it into another ballpark when we talk enjoying reading and video on the go.

On the downside so far I notice that it does not always have the "instant app change" that iOS has, if I leave the Zinio app (which Samsung use for magazines in their "Reader's Hub"), it has to start up again when I come back to it, this is unfortunate. Also I have so far a bit of trouble with it losing Net connection, on both my wifi networks, let's see how that plays out, it really should not be common.

(iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy Note, both displaying American Photo on Zinio.) 
(Note, in the Zinio app you can zoom in to your heart's content, I think it works pretty well even on a 5.3-inch screen. I won't hesitate to read on it when I don't have my iPad around.)

Update: 

I'd say that apart from the price, this is currently the portable ereader to have, unless eyesight is an issue, or one prefers a non-backlit screen (I don't care for the Kindle's passive, grey screen, but some do). The Note weighs only 180 grams and is very thin. And it is easily held in one hand from behind, you don't have to try and find space for the finger on the bezel as with a 7-inch or 10-inch device.

On another note, the Kindle Fire started shipping today, so we should get early reviews soon. I'm starting to lean a little towards thinking that it may be the 7-inch tablet/reader which is the "tweener" though, and five inches right for pockets, and ten inches or larger right for stands and bookholders. 

Our Holy Fire, Advertising, and Android’s Fragmentation

Android’s Fragmentation Mess–and How to Fix It, article.

Even when Android handsets do get updates, it can take eons. Sprint’s Epic 4G, for instance, just got Gingerbread, almost a year after the software shipped. For Epic owners, Gingerbread finally showing up was less a happy event than a brusque reminder that they shouldn’t count on seeing Ice Cream Sandwich any time soon.

A funny thing is that this article itself suffers from fragmentation. In this case, page fragmentation. A cool thing about the web is that space is infinite, so you don't have to have "pages" except to organize things. And yet many web sites split articles up into several pages for no reason. Except: to get more page counts for their advertisers. They try to earn more money by irritating their customers, which is classic advertising strategy, it's no wonder it's in trouble.

I think advertising in general is an aesthetic and perhaps even ethical blight upon our culture. In Bruce Sterling's excellent book Holy Fire* there's a brief line which tells us that in the book's time, about 60 years from now, advertising has been outlawed globally for years. I like that thought. But I don't consider it likely, simply because advertising is big money, and anything pulling in big money simply can't be suppressed in human society, just take street drugs for example, despite seemingly universal opposition and illegality, it's a huge business.

And I guess if advertising were actually to be outlawed, it would be forced underground, and become an even bigger problem because we would never know to which degree a book or film is art or advertising, and for me that would spoil them a lot. This is already partly so with "product placement".


*Holy Fire is about a very old and careful and well-preserved woman who gets a highly experimental youth-treatment, which is very successful. But her inner "holy fire" is so strong that she runs away from her medical monitors and goes to Europe (from the US). It's a sprawling adventure, but what impresses me is the subtle, underlying feeling of this "holy fire" which the woman regains, the "lust for life" as the classic van Gogh bio expresses it. It is so very undefinable, and yet it's there, and we can lose it, and possibly regain it.