8 Reasons You Can Finally Love Ebook Readers

I’m still not getting a dedicated reader until e-ink screens can do color so I can read comics on them as well, but Barnes and Noble’s new Nook reader is definitely an improvement…

Gizmodo:

“I’m an avid reader, studied literature in school, and nerd out over tech, yet past ebook readers have left me cold. The Nook is the first reader I really want, and I won’t be alone. Here’s why.

“It’s cost-effective. Yeah, at $260 it’s the same price as the Kindle 2, but you’re getting so much more for your money: Wi-Fi, native PDF support, an SD slot and that crazy second screen makes it seem out of the Kindle’s league. It makes the Sony Reader and iRex look absurdly overpriced and the Plastic Logic Que look like a shot in the dark.

Lending and Sharing. One of my main objections to the Kindle and other readers is that most of my books come from friends, rather than bookstores. The Nook realizes that and integrates a 2-week lending period—plenty of time for a quick read. Plus, you can lend to tons of different devices: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile (soon).

Sharing is also done really well: As opposed to the Kindle, which only lets you read purchased ebooks on a same-account iPhone or iPod Touch, the Nook lets you read on any device supported, the most important of which are PC and Mac. So you and your significant other could read the same book at the same time, on whatever devices you each prefer. The Kindle, in contrast, doesn’t support PC and Mac at all—but we’d be willing to bet Amazon is rethinking that decision right about now. Plus, the Nook syncs both your place in the book and any highlights or annotations you’ve made, which could be great for students.

Free in-store reading. You’ll be able to take the Nook to any of Barnes & Noble’s gajillion stores and read one ebook, for free, each time—the same way you might wander into the store, pick up a book and read it for an hour or two. Barnes & Noble is really thinking about how people actually read, which is a great sign: This kind of feature makes the Kindle feel like it’s forcing you to change your reading habits rather than adapting to them.

And potential Nook customers will be able to go into a retail store with which they’re comfortable and play around with the actual device, an advantage not shared by the Kindle. Given Matt’s impressions of the Nook, I think seeing the hardware in person will convince a lot of people to buy it.

Head-turning looks. The Kindle 1 was, um, distinctive, and the Kindle 2 is inoffensive and sleek enough, but the Nook has legitimate style. As Matt said, “it makes even the relatively benign-looking Kindle 2 seem like it was beaten with an ugly stick.” It was clear from the first leak that we were dealing with something very different.

Android. There are two things to be excited about when it comes to Android. First is the legit apps, which B&N seems open to—in today’s presentation, John wrote “They, ahem, ‘haven’t announced’ anything about app development, but they’re comfortable using the phrase “when we do,” which is veeeery promising.” My personal most-wanted app? Pandora (or Slacker, or Last.FM).

Secondly, there’s the more, well, illicit possibilities: The Nook both runs Android (which we already know is easily and enthusiastically modified) and has a microUSB jack, which should make for easy hacking. Imagine user-created skins, apps, games (in case reading gets boring)—the possibilities are just about endless. The Nook already supports PDF natively (yes!) but we could definitely see it hacked to embrace other formats like Word docs.

The second screen. Yeah, it’s weird, and we wouldn’t have believed it if it didn’t, you know, exist, but it just makes so much sense: Browsing for books on e-ink is an exercise in frustration, and touchscreen e-ink is even worse. With its capacitive touchscreen, the Nook offers a keyboard and Cover-Flow-esque browsing without the awkwardness and lethargy of e-ink, but it also opens the door for multitasking. You’ll be able to read a book and control your music at the same time, and because the music browser will be on the LCD screen, it won’t look like e-inked crap. It should also support photo browsing and the ability to set your own wallpaper.

Battery life. The Nook’s 10-day battery life may not be quite as long as the Kindle 2’s 14 days, but 10 days is still insane—especially if we think about the tablets that will vie to make ebook readers obsolete. Whenever the Apple tablet is announced, you can bet its battery life will be measured in hours, not days. Plus, the Nook’s battery is replaceable, always a welcome decision (you could have a spare battery, and when yours does eventually die, it’s easy to replace).

Both 3G and Wi-Fi. I’m not exactly sure about the benefits of Wi-Fi right now (besides international travel, where AT&T may not work), but given the possibilities of Android, it’s essential that the Nook includes it. In the future, we may want to download files bigger than ebooks—apps, games, videos, whatever—and Wi-Fi will be vital once the potential of the Nook is unlocked. Plus, there could well be Wi-Fi-only features of the kind AT&T wouldn’t support: Streaming content, web browsing, VoIP, whatever. Wi-Fi is a killer feature not for what it does right now, but for what it could allow the Nook could do in the future.”

Upgrade Your Xbox 360’s Hard Drive on the Cheap

PCWorld:

“Microsoft expects you to pay close to $200 to upgrade your Xbox 360’s hard drive from 20GB to 120GB. That’s about $150 more than a 120GB SATA drive actually costs. But with this slightly tricky hack, you can save a bundle while boosting your game console’s storage capacity to hold more music, video, and other media files.”

FULL ARTICLE

How to Build Your Very Own Badass Windows Home Server

Gizmodo:

“Jason lurves Windows Home Server—it does automated backups over your network, streams movies, music and photos and is a general-purpose fileshare. If you don’t wanna hand HP $400, Maximum PC’s got a build-to-stream guide to rolling your own.

And, even if you’d rather buy a pre-made box—built-in Time Machine support for Macs is a good reason to go with HP’s, for instance—they’ve got some essential add-ins and performance tweaks to get the most out of your Home Server.” [Maximum PC]

Pigeons faster than DSL

Boing Boing:

“A South African IT company got so fed up with the national telco’s notoriously poor Internet service that they decided to set up a race that pitted the telco’s network against a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won.

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

“We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement,” Unlimited’s Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper. “

SA pigeon ‘faster than broadband’ (via Engadget)

The New iPod Nano Shoots Video, Plays Radio

Gizmodo:

“As well-documented by the “word on the street,” the fifth generation iPod nano is also a video camera…and radio and a pedometer and a voice recorder too…and it’s available today. Details:

• Video camera (640×480)
• Integrated mic
• Integrated speaker
• FM Radio
• One-click YouTube uploads
• Voice Over like Shuffle
• Pedometer with Nike+ syncing online
• Voice Recorder
• 2.2-inch screen is possibly larger than last model

Starting today, the 8GB nano will cost $150 while the 16GB comes in at $180. (So why buy the 8?) What’s the biggest surprise here? The camera we knew about. But the radio? The video support? I do have to admit, if it’s this or a Flip, the nano is certainly more tempting.”

iPod Touch Third Generation: Now Up to 64GB

Shew, managed to avoid iPod lust this year….they didn’t add the camera to the Touch after all!

Gizmodo:

“As expected, the iPod touch third generation is here. It comes in 16, 32, and 64 GB—for $199, $299, and $399. The new 32 and 64GB version has a faster processor, 50% faster. Just like the iPhone 3GS.

Also like the iPhone 3GS, the graphics processor in the new iPod touch has OpenGL ES 2.0 capability. No wonder they are pushing so much on the gaming front.

No sight of the rumored camera. A lot of case manufacturers are going to spend a lot of time fixing holes.”

Sony Unveils Smaller, Cheaper PS3 Slim

OK, it’s definitely on my Christmas list now…..

DVICE:

“If you’ve been waiting for the PlayStation 3 to get cheaper before you jumped on board, your wait is over. Sony just announced the new PS3 Slim, a 120GB PS3 that slims down the form factor of the console while also slimming the price down to $299. It’s 33% smaller and 36% lighter than the original, and it’ll be available the first week of September.

Don’t need a smaller console? The old, fatty PS3s are still available while supplies last, with a price drop on those guys to be announced tomorrow.. All PS3s still stand up as the best Blu-ray players around, so now seems like as good a time as any to upgrade your movie discs.”

802.11n Should Be Finalized By September

Slashdot: “It’s probable that the 802.11n standard will finally be approved at a scheduled IEEE meeting this September, ending a contentious round of infighting that has delayed the standard for years. For the 802.11n standard, progress has been agonizingly slow, dating back almost five years to 2004, when 802.11g held sway. It struggled throughout 2005 and 2006, when members supposedly settled on the TGnSync standard, then formed the Enhanced Wireless Consortium in 2006 to speed the process along. A draft version of 802.11n was approved in January 2006, prompting the first wave of routers based on the so-called draft-n standard shortly thereafter.”

USB thumb drives hit 256GB mark

DVICE:

“I remember my first USB thumb drive. It was a 256MB Samsung number, about the size of an old, Pez-dispenser-shaped iPod Shuffle (with the same annoying habit of blocking the USB port right beside the one you plugged it into). That was about six years ago, and in that time solid-state memory has made a lot of progress. As in, three-orders-of-magnitude progress.

Flash-memory purveyor Kingston now sells a thumb drive with a capacity 256 gigabytes: the DataTraveler 300. Yep, 256GB, all in single plastic wafer less than 3 inches long. According to the product page, that’s the equivalent of 10 Blu-ray Discs, 54 DVDs or 365 CDs. It truly is a new era.”

Kingston, via Gizmodo

iPod dock in an Atari 2600

BB Gadgets:

“Creator Byron Casebier, at Gizmodo:

Here is my weak (and slightly unfinished) Atari iPod Dock. I thought sharing may create interest for someone that can do this better. As far as specs, I gutted a broken, iPod clock radio and put it all inside the Atari.”

See a gallery o’er the Giz: The Atari 2600 iPod Dock