Saturday, May 19, 2012

"Prize fight" reviews

Entertaining, but also informative in a short format. Good quick overview of some of the most popular devices.



Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Rumors of next Kindles

Here's speculation about a front-lit e-ink Kindle, and a slightly bigger Kindle Fire (9 inches).
Both interesting if they are true. I particularly wonder if a front lit e-ink reader could overcome my aversion to the grey background, which otherwise is a deal-breaker for me, sadly. Or maybe it's too late, having been reading on the iPad 3, with the super awesome razor-sharp Retina display. I'm not sure.

iPad and common formats

I'm a huge iPad fan, that's well know. But there are a few issues.
One is: if Apple is going to prance around bragging about how they are inventing the platform which will replace most of the desktop and laptop computers in the world, it is amazingly lame that:
1: Pages on iPad does not use the same file format as Pages on the Mac.
2: The iPad does not support .RTF, one of the most common text formats in the world, and the one used by default by the Mac Apple text processor, TextEdit.

In fact, overall, document exchange between iPad and the existing power platforms is a nightmare, and very limited. If the iPad was being sold as a reader and entertainment center, that would be understandable, but right from the very introduction, Apple made and makes a big deal about the "post-PC world". And for the iPad to build this Brave New Production world without any contact with desktops or laptops and the mountain of existing work is just a crazy idea.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Rooting e-ink Nook

Did you know you can root a Nook (e-ink) ereader so it becomes an Android Tablet? I sure didn’t. I guess most games won't run well on it, but there's bound to be some interesting options which open up, like first of all several different e-reading applications one can use. And Instapaper (or Readability) -compatible apps, making it easy to send web articles to the Nook to be read in clear formatting.