Friday, October 5, 2012

My Paperwhite...

Oh durnit, I could have had my Kindle Paperwhite today. But it's just sitting on a shelf in Manchester, "available upon receipt of payment", according the DHL's site. (Import tax.)
Why didn't they just turn up with the parcel and a credit card reader?
That's what UPS does. Or at least they take cash, for reasonable amounts.
I didn't even get any notice about this. I thought courier services were all about speed and efficiency.

Update:
I got it today, early Monday morning.
It was the usual guy, and he told me that the thing about leaving it a day to soak when they need to collect a fee, is Just Something They Do Now, he didn't know why.
He also didn't know why they stopped just sending out a bill after delivery, but probably they had too much work collecting, I'd guess.

Steve

Dang, is it already a year since Jobs died? (Apple memorial video)

Thursday, October 4, 2012

New Study Suggests E-ink is NOT Better for Your Eyes Than LCDs

New Study Suggests E-ink is NOT Better for Your Eyes Than LCDs, article.
The results of the study didn’t show a significant difference in reading on the two types of screens, and in fact that the effect of reading on the two display types is very similar in terms of both subjective and objective measures.

Older studies did tend to show a difference, with screen reading being worse. So the article speculates that the new results may be due to the iPad's very high screen resolution, which fortunately is rapidly becoming the new norm on tablets.

I dunno. I was never sure I could tell the difference. And it never seemed logical to me that it should make a difference whether the light reaching your eyes was backlit or reflected. Light is light. When people say "it's like having a flashlight in your eyes", they are not really talking about the source of the light, they are talking about contrast. If you're outside on a bright day, there's nothing uncomfortable about  looking at a flashlight. So part of the problem may be that many people have the contrast between the screen and the room being too high.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Fresh reviews of Kindle Paperwhite



And here is Wired's KP review.

Sun-Times KP review.

Gizmodo KP review.

Engadget KP review.

The Verge KP review.
The Kindle Paperwhite is the successor to a long line of innovative and daring products that seek to move book reading into the new century — and it's a terrific product. I was truly delighted while using the device, and for a moment at least, actually envisioned a future where something like the Paperwhite was the only way that I read books. That was a weird moment. 

I felt that way after I'd been using the iPad for a couple of months. Which surprised me, I had just hoped ereading could become "as good as" paper, not better.
You'd think that something like paperbooks, something that's been one of the most important things in my life since I was seven, would be slow to let go of, but it just slipped to the side like a hotdog wrapper out of a car window. (Which I don't do, thank you very much!) Here was the same in a better form.