Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 147 of 168)

      What It Would Take To Get Me Interested In A Kindle

      June 14, 2009 /

      The Kindle DX.With the release of the Kindle DX, plenty of folks have been asking the same question: will you get one? For me, the answer is no. I like the feel of a physical book in my hands too much to let a Kindle take its place. I also love used book shopping, where I can pick up classic (and sometimes new) titles for less than a buck.

      It was this post over at Crave that really made me wonder, what would it take to get me interested in a Kindle? For me that question has a simple translation. When is it more convenient to have a Kindle than a book? The Kindle doesn’t have enough features outside book reading to make it compelling for reasons other than book reading, so I’m going to ignore them. For me, it comes down to convenience and the emotional experience I get from reading a book.

      I like the reasons Stein gives for his own experience. Pulling a book out on the subway is much more cumbersome than flipping to the Kindle app on his iPhone. The appeal is the same in my life, but paying full book price for something I can only read on a Kindle or an iPhone seems ridiculous.

      What I could really use is both – something like movie studios have been doing recently to attempt to combat downloads – adding a digital copy to the physical media. As it currently stands, downloading books from the Kindle store is incredibly restrictive, and if you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books as well. Offering an option to download the book when I purchase the physical media could change that, giving me control of the storage (and yes, distribution) of my media.

      Obviously there are pirating concerns for Amazon, and they lose the sweet deal they have going now whereby they reap most of the profit from selling digital copies. It’s hard to imagine, though, that they wouldn’t see increased usage from this sort of change. The iPhone Kindle App becomes a lot more appealing when it means I can continue my reading without lugging a book around but still have the option to kick back and fill margins with notes when I get the urge.

      For now, a Kindle is the wrong device for me. I can’t help but think I’m paying a fee to relinquish control of my purchase, and that just doesn’t feel right.

      Apps, Digital Media

      Nokia’s New Smartphone is $700

      June 14, 2009 /

      Nokia N97Coming between what are probably the two biggest smartphone launches of the year, Nokia unveiled their new contender to the throne, the N97. The Finnish phone maker packed their newest device with plenty of features you’d want in a decent phone. There’s just one thing they overlooked – price.

      The N97 comes in at a whopping $700. Of course, that’s outside contract, which serves to explain the price. Plenty of cells, including this year’s big launches, would sell for that amount if purchased without a contract. The problem, for Nokia at least, is that American consumers are so conditioned to contract subsidized pricing that $700 is going to feel like a swift kick to the groin.

      Feature by feature, the N97 closely matches the Palm Pre and the iPhone 3GS. It’s got 32GB of internal memory, a multi-touch touchscreen, and a slide out QWERTY keyboard. Nokia has said on several occasions that they would like to be more competitive in the U.S. market. How they hope to do that with phones at more than double the major carriers’ premium prices is beyond me.

      You know what they say, though; freedom isn’t free, but aside from the folks who really despise contracts, I doubt you’ll see many N95s in hand this summer.

      Mobile

      Play Doom On Your Pre

      June 13, 2009 /

      Doom!Despite the short list of Palm Pre apps available from the app catalog, plenty of folks are choosing Palm as their smartphone provider of choice. As soon as the application dev kit gets out, hopefully the list will continue to expand, including some new games.

      In the meantime, take a look at this homebrew fix from a guy known only as Sargun. He’s managed to port Doom (at least the open source version, PRDoom) to the Pre, bringing demonized, gun-riddled hell to Palm’s newest release. Sargun used DirectFB to load the graphics through the Pre framebuffer and says getting the hack to work is fairly trivial.

      If you’ve got some time on your hands, and decent geeky ninja skills, you should be able to get this (nearly) fully-functional game to your Pre without much trouble. I hope you also sport some TINY thumbs. The controls look…unwieldy at best.

      Gaming, Mobile

      Getting Your Hands On A 3GS

      June 12, 2009 /

      We’re just a week from launch day of the newest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, which brings a whole host of new features and some notable new graphical capabilities. If you want to have a 3GS in your pretty paws on launch day you’re going to need a chair and a decent water supply or a prepaid order.

      iPhone launch day crowds.

      Apple and AT&T have publicly announced plans for early store opening, though few of the representatives (in the Cleveland area at least) seem to know what’s going on.

      I visited two Apple stores in the past week to talk about launch plans. For the most part, the employees didn’t know what was going on, as in, “I don’t know when we’ll open,” or, “I don’t know what the inventory will be like.” Most of them cited a lack of training on the new phone, which seems unrelated to their store scheduling, but who am I to judge. After talking through four different people at the last store (and hearing about one of their new exercise plans – I didn’t ask, she just felt the need to share) I found out they would indeed open at 8am, allowing lines to form at 5am. No one, from the store manager down, seems to know about inventory. It’s not just that they don’t want to say, but rather they get that glazed look whereby you know there is no information they can access on the subject at hand.

      A trip to my local AT&T store was worlds more helpful, and they offer the surest route to locking up the phone at launch. I was able to preorder a phone on the spot, which means the phone will ship to the store reserved in my name, available for pickup seven days from the time of arrival. While no one was willing to guarantee I would have the phone (and smartly so), they did say the word from Apple was not to expect inventory problems. For all of their helpful info concerning launch, though, the AT&T folks also could not dig up details on store hours for the day, or whether they would be honoring the 7am preorder line, 8am point-of-purchase line.

      If you’re one for lines, Apple stores and AT&T stores will both have that option. If you’re more interested in having the phone in hand, get to an AT&T store and preorder. It’s only so long before you’ll be waitlisted behind droves of preorders from, say, June 8th.

      Uncategorized

      3GS GPU Is All Out of Gum

      June 12, 2009 /

      Doom on the iPhone.Hailed (by Apple) as the fastest iPhone ever made, a lot of attention has been paid to the new processor and RAM specs in the iPhone 3GS. Those new specs will certainly translate to a faster phone, but most likely marginally so, noticeable only within apps that do a lot of algorithm munching. What’s likely to be truly impressive on the 3GS is the new graphical capabilities that come from the Power-VR SGX GPU inside the phone.

      Hubert at Ubergizmo, who used to program for Nvidia, gave a quick breakdown of the improvements we could see in iPhone gaming, and they’re pretty damn impressive. As the article notes, the new GPU offers improvements in two traditional aspects of development. First, it allows more triangle processing per second, and second, it gives a serious boost to the number of pixels that can be modified per second.

      More than the hardware, though, is the options the new GPU will offer developers. The new chip gives coders access to some of the same principles used when developing games for the Xbox 360 or the PS3. Haven’t seen many shadows on the iPhone? They’re coming. So is bump mapping, normal mapping, light mapping, and multi-textures, making it possible to render complex 3D environments with an unprecedented sense of realism.

      While people complained that this iPhone release was an evolution rather than a revolution, the changes to the GPU will be revolutionary for the hand-held device, making gaming the real breakout feature of the 3GS. I was unimpressed by the game demos at WWDC. Hopefully that wil change when developers have had their new kit for a few months.

      Source: Ubergizmo

      Apple, Gaming, iPhone

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