The Digital Reader |
- The Morning Coffee – 9 January 2014
- The Alcatel MagicFlip is Probably the Lightest eBook Reader I’ve Ever Handled
- B&N at CES 2014, In a Single Photo
- Gallery: A Dozen Smartwatches From CES 2014
- Amazon Now Poaching Customers From College Bookstores
- The Blank Slate Case Adds an E-ink Screen to Your iPhone
- Hands On With the New Hisense Tablets
| The Morning Coffee – 9 January 2014 Posted: 08 Jan 2014 09:30 PM PST Top stories this Thursday morning include a list of 9 books that don’t exist (link), another look at the sale of Bookish (link), a rant about iBooks for OSX (link), an interview of LeVar Burton (link), and more.
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| The Alcatel MagicFlip is Probably the Lightest eBook Reader I’ve Ever Handled Posted: 08 Jan 2014 02:27 PM PST Alcatel This prototype, which is currently being called the MagicFlip, is a svelte 4″ ereader with a USB port, page turn buttons, Bluetooth, and not much else. Like the E-ink smartphone cover which Alcatel teased back in September, this was a very early prototype which can’t do very much. Of the 3 buttons on the front only the page turn buttons worked. There is a home button, but it didn’t do anything. In fact, the device itself couldn’t do much, but unlike Engadget, I was able to get the Magic Flip to work as an ereader – until it decided to rest itself. It can’t do anything else yet, but i was told that Alcatel is planning to let you send info to the MagicFlip so you can use the paper-like qualities of the persistent E-ink screen, thus saving battery life on your smartphone or tablet.    This was a really cool device, and I was frankly surprised at how small and thin it was. It could indeed be an excellent complement to a smartphone, even more so than the txtr beagle (a 5″ ereader with a similar smartphone companion design). The MagicFlip is lacking the ungainly bulge found on the back of the txtr beagle, and that’s going to make it a lot easier to slip this ereader in and out of a pocket. It’s scheduled to go into production in the first quarter of this year; I don’t know the retail price.
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| B&N at CES 2014, In a Single Photo Posted: 08 Jan 2014 01:37 PM PST When I wrote a few days ago about B&N not bringing the Nook to CES 2014, I questioned whether they were making a wise investment in bringing only books to a gadget trade show. But after I saw their booth this morning I’m not sure that it counts as a major investment for B&N. Check out the branding: The Gary mentioned all over the signage is probably Gary Shapiro, the head of CEA (the trade group behind CES). Do you notice how he is mentioned in larger font than Barnes & Noble? That is probably a sign that this isn’t actually B&N’s booth; they’re simply running it on behalf of the CEA. And that changes everything. I doubt B&N is actually paying for this booth (or at least they are getting a huge discount), and in retrospect I now doubt that they paid for the booth last year either (kudos to Vonda Z for suggesting that possibility last year). If B&N’s only investment is overhead then their costs drop considerably and their presence here is no longer inexplicable. odd, yes, but not inexplicable.
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| Gallery: A Dozen Smartwatches From CES 2014 Posted: 08 Jan 2014 08:01 AM PST I have Wearable devices like Google Glass and smartwatches are a hot topic this year at CES, so you can image how many companies brought their prototypes, reference designs, and hopes and dreams to the show. I don’t think I found them all, but I did find quite a few including a watch from ZTE (found by Brad Linder of Liliputing), a couple dumb watches that have E-ink screens, and smartwatches that offer a more diverse range of features than can be imagined. Not all of the devices pictured below are technically smartwatches, and it might surprise you to learn that some of the watches with E-ink screens aren’t smart. What’s even more interesting is that some of the smartwatches don’t have screens. Some of the watches with an ordinary watchface can receive notifications from a smartphone and either flash a symbol or light up. Does that make them smart? Maybe not, but they do serve a similar purpose to a “true” smartwatch. Until the product category is better defined I think they should be included.             The gallery of photos above include watches from the following companies. Unfortunately I cannot embed the links in the gallery of images, so instead I have to post the links in a separate list. Click the links for more information.
And last but not least, the final smartwatch from CES 2014 is a development kit from E–ink. They’ll sell you a curved screen unit similar to the one used on the Sonostar and let you build something from it. And to make things even more interesting, I haven’t even mentioned the dozen other wearable devices I saw for the first time at CES 2014. Most, but not all, are exercise accessories. The post Gallery: A Dozen Smartwatches From CES 2014 appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Amazon Now Poaching Customers From College Bookstores Posted: 08 Jan 2014 06:20 AM PST Remember Shelf Awareness has discovered that Amazon is now poaching customers from college bookstores. They reported in their newsletter today that Amazon recently set up a table outside a UW-S bookstore:
The Amazon reps approached students and asked them if they had purchased their textbooks already, and the reps also gave away several Kindle Fires in a raffle. SA reported this story under the headline that Amazon was trying to steal customers from an indie bookstore, but that isn’t quite accurate. The University Book Store is technically an independent trust which operates college bookstores in 7 locations on UW campuses, but since it is so closely associated with the University of Washington (even the trustees are drawn from students and faculty) I am not sure that you can accurately describe this as an indie bookseller. But even so, Amazon is being rather brazen here. They rented space from the university for the purpose of poaching customers from the university’s bookstore. (Don’t you wonder why the university let that happen?) Credit card companies operate on that level, though the deals they offer would better be described as predatory and not to the student’s benefit. Amazon, on the other hand, is offering a very nice membership program. Even if students don’t take advantage of the free shipping, the free content alone makes Amazon Student and Amazon Prime a reasonable deal. I think Amazon should do more deals like this; it is to the student’s benefit. And if the bookstore at the University of Washington really is dedicated to the benefit of students then they should welcome Amazon as well. In fact, the bookstore might want to look into the pilot program that the UC-Davis Bookstore is testing at the moment. This college bookstore has a portal on the Amazon website where they earn a commission on Amazon sales. That program launched with the 2013 school year, and it is an ongoing test to see if bookstore benefits from the relationship as much as Amazon. The post Amazon Now Poaching Customers From College Bookstores appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| The Blank Slate Case Adds an E-ink Screen to Your iPhone Posted: 08 Jan 2014 04:45 AM PST Frustrated by the perpetually-delayed PopSlate and can’t get your hands on the InkCase from Gajah? Then you might want to keep an eye on a new case maker I just discovered. While I was in the E-ink booth on Tuesday I happened to run into Neil Blank. He’s the principal of nBlank, a product development consulting firm, and he showed me nBlank’s latest project. It’s called the Blank Slate, and like the PopSlate and the InkCase the Blank Slate adds a second E-ink screen to your iPhone. The Blank Slate case sports a 3.5″ E-ink screen (640 x 360) and connects to the iPhone via the lightening connector. Unlike the InkCase, this isn’t intended to be a BT accessory but an integrated component. This case is still in the early development stages, and in fact the prototype I saw wasn’t even a pre-production model. It worked, yes, but from the way it was described this was a “everything fits in the case, and it works” model. nBlank has been working on the Blank Slate for about 6 months, so the fact that they have a working model is remarkable. I don’t have any firm details on when it will hit the market, but I do know that it will go through at least one design iteration before going into production Until then, all I have is this demo video that Neil posted on Youtube: The post The Blank Slate Case Adds an E-ink Screen to Your iPhone appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Hands On With the New Hisense Tablets Posted: 08 Jan 2014 03:34 AM PST Hisense Mixed in with the many smartphone, phablets, and TVs that filled the Hisense both were a couple 7″ tablets. Neither model is as good as the Sero 7 Pro, but they do offer an option that older tablet lacks: optional 3g. The E2070 and E5070 are running Android 4.2 on Mediatek CPUs, which is a step down from the Tegra 3 chip in the Sero 7 Pro. Update: I’ve just been told by Brad Linder of Lilputing that these tablets are destined for the Chinese market, not the US market. The F5070 has a 7″ screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 (the same as on the Sero 7 Pro). It’s built around a quad-core 1.2GHZ Mediatek chip with 1GB RAM, 8GB Flash storage, microSD card slot, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, and optional 3g. It still has the 5MP and 2MP cameras found on the Sero 7 Pro, but it lacks the LED Flash which made that older tablet stand out.     The E2070, on the other hand, has a 7″ screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600. This tablet is clearly intended to be the lighter weight companion to the F5070, and it has a dual-core 1.2GHz Mediatek chip with 1GB RAM, only 4GB Flash storage, microSD card slot, GPS, Wifi, and Bluetooth. It still has the optional 3g, and it even has a pair of cameras (VGA and 2MP).     The specs for these tablets might not grab your attention, but the build quality might. Both tablets were built almost as nice as the Sero 7 Pro I carry around. The have a similar pebbled back and an integrated cover for the card slots. The software could have used some work, though; it was listed as an experimental build and lacked any refinement. This unfortunately keeps me from commenting on their performance. I couldn’t get any details on the price or release date (TBH I got distracted by a debate on the merits of Hisense’s old models vs new), but I was told that the tablets would be priced competitively. I would expect to see the Wifi version of the E2070 priced at around $99. As for the 3g models, I am not sure how to guestimate the retail price. But I will note that the F5070 has specs about the same as the Verizon Ellipsis tablet (same CPU, t00) so I wouldn’t be surprised if the F5070 arrived on the US market with a $250 price tag. These tablets are in almost every way a step down from the current Hisense, and I think that tells us something about how they see the budget tablet market. Price, and not specs, is the dominant factor. The post Hands On With the New Hisense Tablets appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
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