User Devices

From the too good to be true dept:

It is well known that the amount of data you leave around is there forever, and youthful indiscretions on Facebook today will come back to haunt you later - but who would have thought digital footfalls on a Wiil could expose infidelity. Sez the Register about a US soldier who suspected cuckoldry but whose wife denied it:

However, he continued: "All that changed when I plug in my Nintendo Wii for some Wii Sports. I flip through the Wii menu and visit the Mii channel so I can peruse the many friends that I have created with the guys that I played with in Iraq. As I go through the characters I see there is a Mii that I have not created."

Tony concluded: "I went into the Wii message board and click on the calendar option. Through this menu I was able to identify the many nights my wife's Mii and this other Mii character played Wii bowling."

And she was bowling with his balls.....

We've said it before. we'll say it now, and we'll say it again - be careful about what you put online - it will come back to haunt you.....

Yesterday Amazon launched the Kindle e-Reader, and as Dave Winer complained, the GeekPress clamped on in a big way (see Techmeme this time yesterday) without really knowing what they were talking about. (We were too busy being thrown out of Facebook yesterday to comment).

Anyway, Sez Dave:

Steve Levy writes an article that appears in Newsweek about new hardware from Amazon, and it's an instant coral reef, within an hour or two it's the top item on TechMeme and there's a whole ecosystem of thought about it, published by people who have no information other than what they read in Levy's article.

But rest assured, dear reader - having worked on e-Reader projects ourselves (see here), we can honestly say that we do know what we are talking about

So, lets talk a bit about Kindle then:

Kindle is available starting today for $399 at http://amazon.com/kindle.

OK...road warrior / pro-sumer market for now.

Downloads Content Wirelessly (via EVDO), No PC Required, No Hunting for Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Interesting...thats a lot of onboard cost and weight, its a small computer rather than a pure reader - why not just use bluetooth to hook to a PC or Mobile?

No Monthly Wireless Bills or Commitments

Clearly...people already pay for mobile and broadband. Amazon says it has to pay, so thats a subsidy model (or more likely built into the book charges) - weakness if a reader comes out that can piggyback off PC / Mobile

Reads Like Paper

No, nothing reads quite like paper yet, though the next generation e-papers are getting good.

Books, Blogs, Magazines and Newspapers
On an e-Reader - well I never! Oh...you mean there's a price tag?

The same Amazon shopping experience customers are accustomed to is offered in the Kindle Store, including customer reviews, personalized recommendations, 1-Click purchasing, and everyday low prices. Additionally, Kindle customers can download and read the first chapter of most Kindle books for free.

Kindle customers can select from the most recognized U.S. newspapers, as well as popular magazines and journals, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, TIME and Fortune. The Kindle Store also includes top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland, including Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine and The Irish Times. Subscriptions are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle overnight so that the latest edition is waiting for customers when they wake up. Monthly Kindle newspaper subscriptions are $5.99 to $14.99 per month, and Kindle magazines are $1.25 to $3.49 per month. All magazines and newspapers include a free two-week trial.

Ah...a closed loop end to end system like...oh...iTunes, but with stuff costing more. Who would have thought? And even blogs...but no longer free, we note, and an incredibly limited choice!

The Kindle Store has over 300 blogs on topics ranging from Internet and technology to culture, lifestyle, and humor, to politics and opinion. Examples include Slashdot, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, The Onion, The Huffington Post, and ESPN blogs. Blogs are updated and downloaded wirelessly throughout the day so Kindle customers can read blogs whenever and wherever they want. Wireless delivery of blogs costs as little as $0.99 each per month and also includes a free two-week trial.

Not a dicky bird about the DRM I note....what gives there, Amazon?
(Update - more on DRM here in boing boing. Not good news.)

Holds Hundreds of Books in 10.3 Ounces
On the heavy end of design envelopes (for its size)....clearly a lot of in-board gear

Built-In Dictionary and Wikipedia

Well well...and a thesauraus too, we'll bet!

Long Battery Life

More weight

Search (of the Kindle store for Stuff to Buy variety)

Surprise

Annotation and Bookmarks

A must have


Ergonomic Design
Not sure about this one...that screen looks a bit small to give a book-like experience

Adjustable Text Size
Must have

Personal Documents
At a price:

Customers can take their personal documents with them on their Kindle. Customers and their contacts can e-mail Word documents and pictures directly to their unique and customizable Kindle e-mail address for $0.10 each. Kindle supports wireless delivery of unprotected Microsoft(R) Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP files.

Comes Ready To Use

Must have.

Our take - this will limit its own market - device is too clunky (and small screen) for general use, and the economics are usurious - making me pay $0.10 every time I want to download my own stuff is unacceptable. $399 is quite a heft considering you have to keep on paying into a closed system to buy content ( Quiz - do closed systems usually sell stuff at (i) premium or (ii) discount).

In addition, this device disobeys the No. 1 Law of all consumer devices - The Free Ride - this device does not give me any benefits for my existing assets - my connectivity, geekware, material I have already - and quite simply it doesn't allow people to enjoy material from their friends' collections for free (unlike, say, a book, where I buy it and loan it to you for...free)

(Afterthought - Its something I'd have expected a mobile phone company to come up with...)

The delightfully curmudgeonly Nick Carr notes that:

The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.

Its just that with a real book, the sanctity is pay once lend many. With this, its the gift that keeps on taking.

Postscript - not trying to be snarky, but whats with the tame research houses coverage of stuff these days? Facebook got a paean of praise from Forrester, this one from Jupiter, while the blogosphere is much more balanced....and free!

Post Postscript - and even the Blodget Blog only got the "pay for free newspapers" one today (thats Wednesday, two days later) - read da small print ladz

We are following Bug Labs with interest.....the idea of modular component based hardware is (we reckon) potentially quite disruptive....its the antithesis to both the "you need different devices to do each thing" and the "one device fits all" schools. Anyway, here is the first little bugger out the labs.



Silicon Alley Insider is less polite, The Henry Blodgett noting that:

It is a SERIOUSLY geek toy--similar to a build-your-own-radio kit. Can't imagine he's going to sell many to end users. Is there a market in OEM-land?

I don't know...for a generation growing up with Heathkits and Meccano, what could be better

Sed the Grauniad*:

Apple’s much-hyped iPhone is prompting a rush to stores when it finally launches in the UK.

Carphone Warehouse, O2 and Apple are braced for huge queues and a surge of customers when the must-have gadget goes on sale.

and more......

Die-hard fans started queuing outside Apple’s flagship store on London’s Regent Street on Thursday morning.

Friends Graham Gilbert and Nik Fletcher huddled under umbrellas equipped with sleeping bags, food and chairs as they began their wait...

Silly boys...they could have trundled into town after a warm nights sleep, had a good coffee and panini at Pret or Costas or Starbucks, and just wandered in to buy one. Because all this hoo ha, dear reader, was pre-canned PR soup.

Yes, the UK has been completely and utterly overwhelmed by a wave of indifference towards the iPhone, as The Register points out here (and the Grauniad tries to pull back some street cred here).

Why is this....the sheer amount spent on PR, per head of population likely to buy a phone, was probably enough to buy the entire first wave a free phone each.

The reason is this - its still a cr*p deal.

Its £270 odd for the phone before "extras"** (in a country where we are used to having phones heavily subsidised), you can only use it on O2 (which has c 20% market share), and it won't do things we really want like run on 3G, make Skype calls, or hook into any WiFi network around. And as it was such a long time coming post US launch, people like 3 UK and Blyk have been able to launch "good enough" services to chip away at some of the reasons to change.

It will sell, but we predict it will sell as people come off their contracts from the other operators over the next 12 months or so, as there is just no compelling reason to switch operator to buy one yet, at that price and with that level of lock in. And as everyone knows, if you wait 6 months after launch with hyped stuff like this there will be better deals, and like DVDs, the unofficial hacks will be in place....

The Guardian article I quoted above also makes a bigger point, however (as does the New York Times here):

Until now, phones have been relatively primitive devices, so the corrupt absurdity of the closed systems operated by networks has not been obvious to most. The arrival of the iPhone lays it bare. Having an iPhone locked to a network which doesn’t provide 3G connectivity, and is unable to make VoIP calls despite having good wireless networking built in, is like buying a Ferrari and finding that the only thing you can do with it is power your lawnmower. It’s nuts - and our regulators have allowed it to happen.

I agree re the UK Regulators - Ofcom have come down on the fixed line services like a ton of bricks over the last 10 years, while at the same time allowing the mobile operators to run an effective oligopoly, and its only really the EU regulators that have fought the good fight for roaming price reduction, and even that has been painfully slow. Once again i am impressed by French law, which rules this sort of anti-competitive behaviour illegal.

* But no...they claim they did not in fact say this, merely published the news from AP under their own brand header. Tsk tsk...next time any MSM accuses the blogosphere of running with half truths ....

** £7.50 per month for theft insurance....according to O2, if you lose your iPhone and then buy another one (bear in mind there is no subsidy) you have to take out another network contract (£35+ pm) as well as keep paying on the first one. The £7.50 prevents this terrible occurrence and allows cancellation of the first contract. Says we - is that legal under UK contract law, as in theory they bear no loss on the first contract after loss of phone ?

We've been tracking the potential of the PS3 as a Superecomputer since it came out, this is a very interesting additional story

A project that harnesses the spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) to help understand the cause of diseases has entered the record books.

Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The network has more than one petaflop of computing power - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Watch this space, I don't think we've seen that last of this machine's potential. Previous posts of ours on this beastie are here and here.

Engadget has some blurb and pix of Bug Lab's first demo mockups...Bug Labs is one of the companies in the emerging area of modular (and potentially open) electronics device building, an area we have been following with some interest as the (theoretical) economics are very disruptive, especially if you add m2m capability.

This is a DiY camera kit in the picture, but you can imagine the day when you carry around your tiles and assemble them into what you need right there and then.

Time Magazine has already voted the iPhone as product of the year (with 2 months to go!), but to my mind this is potentially more revolutionary.