If not for the valid Archos email address given as contact, I would have thought this was another knockoff.

Archos are planning an ereader, and it just cleared the FCC. We can’t tell much from the FCC docs, but it looks like it’s based on a 7″ touch screen and runs Android. It has Wifi, a SD card slot, and ships with the basic abilities (like web browsing).

I do find it interesting that Archos are going down the same path as everyone else. Look at the manual, and you’ll see they’re using a custom home screen. But the thing is, it looks pretty much like everyone else’s custom home screen. Interesting.

FCC

Do you recall that big story last week about Amazon charging for public domain ebooks? Did you nootice how much publicity it got? Well, apparently Amazon noticed, and according to Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, Amazon has started bouncing pd ebooks from the Kindle Store. He got this email from Amazon:

We’re implementing a new policy that addresses the customer experience problem caused by multiple, undifferentiated copies of public domain titles in our Kindle catalog.

Our vision is to have high-quality editions of every public domain title in the world available on Kindle, including a free edition of each, and to avoid the confusion that is caused by having a large number of undifferentiated (or barely differentiated) versions of each.

To protect the customer experience we have decided to stop accepting and selling duplicate, undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where there is a free edition already available for sale.  As a result, we are removing the following title(s) for sale on our web site:

Charles Dickens Tale Of Two Cities (The Works Of Charles Dickens) by Dickens, Charles, Digital Item ID: 847429

Don’t take this as a criticism of Morris; he’s been following this issue for a while and only submitted that ebook as a experiment. He’s not trying to profit off pd ebooks; he just wanted to see what would happen.

I’m hoping that if we draw enough attention to the fact that Amazon is pruning the Kindle Store, we might see other stores follow suit.

Now this is a weird one.

The lens manufacturer  Quantaray have decided to start carrying an Android tablet. It runs v2.1 and is based on a 7″ resistive touchscreen with a 720MHz CPU, 2GB Flash, a miniSD card slot, Wifi, camera, USB Host, speaker, microphone, and 3 hours battery life.

You can buy it from Ritz Camera for $199.

BTW, I want you to take another look at the picture. Can you see the ripple in the bevel around the screen? The screen contents are an obvious photoshop on top of an actual photo of the tablet. That ripple pattern is a sign of poor manufacturing.

Also, if this really does have a minSD card slot then for that alone you should pass. miniSD is the size in between microSD and regular SD. It’s not all that common anymore; this is the first in a very long time that I found a device that used it. (Good luck trying to find a cheap compatible card.)

Ritz Camera

I decided to get a head start on all the pundits that tomorrow are going to post  stories with titles like "GE will Kill the Kindle". I’m not going to discuss the obvious format issue (I don’t think it’s that important). But I did find a problem. I’ve been looking over GE since it launched this morning, and I think it’s missing a critical component.

Customer service.

This is Google’s biggest failing.

I recall back when Google  were selling movies online, and what happened when they canceled the service.  Anyone who’d bought one was simply SOL. Google only reversed their position after a public outcry.

I recall when Google killed a bunch of music blogs without warning, and I recall how several never did get back online (in spite of following Google’s procedures).

I recall a bunchaton of stories about owners of Google phones asking for tech help and the only response they got was a link to a FAQ (if that).

And then there is Google Books, where Google are letting claim a copyright on pd titles.

I’m looking over the GE website today, and there’s no clear way to reach out to Google if you have a problem. (Okay, there is one, but it’s hidden at the bottom of the page. You’ll only find it if you know it’s there.) Google are good at building monolithic systems, but they’re not good at catching what falls through the cracks.

On the other hand, Google could prove me wrong.

Overdrive announced another library ereader cheat sheet last week. This one, like the last, shows ereaders that are compatible with Overdrive’s ebook library system.  But this one differs from the last in that it was made for the user, not the librarian.

There’s a big problem with it becuase it is woefully incomplete. leaving aside the fact that it shows only one of the Pandigital Novels and only 1 of the Literati, it’s missing 3 manufacturers.  Pocketbook (6 models), Bookeen (3 models), and Bebook (4 models) aren’t listed, and that’s just the big guys.

Folks, you can’t claim that this is for everyone when you forget to include half the market.

PDF

P.S. Here's another ereader cheat sheets I’ve blogged about in the past.

I’m in the middle of a very unpleasant experience with Dell, and I’m tired of this shit.

My issue with Dell stems from the fact that I have a Next Business Day service contract with Dell and what exactly that means. If you visit Dell’s website, you will find "Next Business Day Service" defined literally. Contact Dell on Monday before 5m and you will get a service tech out on Tuesday. That detail is on Dell’s website in any number of places.

But if you ask Dell tech support, "Next Business Day" means that they’ll send a part to the tech and he’ll contact you the day after he recieves the part.

WTF?!?

There are a couple serious problems with that statement. I’ll start with the obvious. First, what their tech support describes as "Next Business Day Service" is the ordinary service I would have expected with a service contract. That was an option when I bought my laptop, but I chose to pay extra for faster service.  Second, when I bought my laptop from Dell I checked and "Next Business Day Service" meant just that. I paid extra in order to guarantee that I would have as little downtime as possible. I know what the contract said when I signed it. "Next Business Day Service" meant exactly that.

Leaving aside my issues with Dell, here’s the larger issue. Dell say one thing on their website and have their tech support say another. At the very least this is duplicitous, but I think it would be more accurate to simply call it lying to their customers. I wonder if it rises to the level of fraud?

Now I did eventually get the service specified in my contract, but only after 6 emails demanding they honor the terms on their website and after it was escalated to executive customer service. So it is possible to get Dell to live up to their side of the deal. But it’s too much effort, so I’m going elsewhere for my next computer.

BTW, I’ve had this laptop for 4 years now and I can say with reasonable certainty that Dell have not been honoring the warranty for at least the last year. It probably goes further back, but I cannot find emails to support it. About a year ago I killed my keyboard again (I go through them every 8 months or so) and requested a replacement from Dell. They mailed me one and told me to install it myself. HAHAHAHA Um, no. I have the service contract so I _don’t_ have to do this myself, not to mention the fact I don’t have any experience with repairing laptops.

Has anyone else caught Dell trying to cheat them?

P.S. Now I understand why there are so many Google search results for dell sucks. I thought they were just malcontents. My apologies.

Last night Pocketbook uploaded a new firmware update for the Pocketbook IQ. I got the IQ on Tuesday, and it had been sitting on my desk. I had played with it a couple times, but I was busy with other devices and I was going to get to it eventually. I thought the firmware update was excellent opportunity to try the IQ and tell you what I think.

There are a couple short videos mixed in.

First, a little background on the hardware. The IQ is basically the same hardware as the Cruz Reader and the white Pandigital Novel. It’s based on a 7″ LCD screen and it has a resistive touchscreen, 2GB Flash, Wifi, a SD card slot, accelerometer, and a custom Home screen designed by Pocketbook.

The Home screen on the Pocketbook IQ has the ugliest color scheme I have ever seen on a device. The general layout is okay, but I have seen better color palettes in the abstract artwork of college students. Pocketbook apparently thought it was a good idea to have a yellow to blue fade running left to right as the wallpaper. What’s worse is that the 8 default icons are grayscale. *shudder*

My guess is that their genius user interface designer is color blind, and no one noticed when he was hired to work on Pocketbook’s previous ereaders (they all had  grayscale  screens). But when the IQ came down the pipeline, no one thought to double check his work. Actually, I have an alternate theory. Perhaps Pocketbook’s UI designer suffered a blow to the head and they let him keep the job out of sympathy. That would explain this monstrosity.

I thought this was supposed to be the new and improved version of Foxconn’s 7″ tablet. It can’t be all that much improved, becuase it takes a really long time to load anything, and I often can’t tell if it’s loading or if I didn’t click quite right.

Apps

I can’t install apps. The IQ ships with Slideme, but whenever I try to download something Slideme gets stuck in a loop.

I tried to reboot in the hopes that it would kick Slideme out of whatever rut it’s in, and that’s when I discovered that every time I boot the IQ, I have to go through the setup process again. That’s not fun. Oh, and the home screen sometimes crashes on boot, and it looks something like this:

And now I can’t load the anything at all. I’ll go reboot it again (I think this makes the 6th time since I started writing this post).

Reading

I was really hoping that I could install Aldiko. Every time I exit a book the IQ forgets my place, and this is starting to piss me off. But on the upside Pocketbook had the good sense to let me use the volume buttons to turn the page. (They got the pairing wrong, but you can’t have everything.)

Page turns are rather slow; my K3 is actually faster. Don’t beleive me? Check out the video:

Files

Speaking of loading ebooks, there’s something wrong with the file associations. The file manager doesn’t know to open Epub with the reading app.

Also, the file manager they’re using wasn’t a good choice. A well designed file manager would make it easy for you to find the user accessible storage first (SD card and Flash) and make it slightly difficult to see the rest.   A person shouldn’t have to know the Linux file system in order to use this tablet.

Opinion

I’m really not impressed with the IQ. It seems to me like Pocketbook released an Android tablet simply becuase everyone else was doing it.  That’s not good enough, IMO.

This post is rather long and it tends to ramble. I’m writing not just as a review, but also as a epitaph for an ereader that I expect to disappear from the market in the next month or so.

But first let me give you my opinion of the VEB 620: Buy something else. This ereader was Viewsonic’s first real attempt to enter the ereader market, and while it would have been fine in 2008 or acceptable in 2009, by the standards of November 2010 this is a poor ereader.

Viewsonic has been dabbling in the ereader industry for a couple years now. Their first ereader showed up in late 2008 and like most first ereaders, it was a Netronix clone. I didn’t cover it at the time because it wasn’t all that interesting, and there was really nothing new about it besides the label. Curiously enough, you can still get that ereader on Amazon. (But if you buy it I’ll laugh at you.)

The VEB 620 was first announced in the UK in April 2010, and it was never officially launched in the US.  I was able to get it only because J&R, a NYC based electronics store, are determined to have the best ereader selection anywhere. J&R started carrying it in August, and I bought it for $99 last week on Amazon.

Mike Cane tipped me to this ereader showing up on the J&R website back in August. He also took the time to visit a J&R store and fondle the VEB-620. You can read what he says in order to get a second opinion. I don’t always agree with him, but this time he was right.

Hardware

This ereader is based on a 6″ E-ink screen, but there’s no touchscreen or Wifi. It has the power switch on the upper edge and the SD card slot, headphone jack, and USB port on the lower edge. There are2 page turn buttons, a d-pad, and a row of 5 buttons (back, menu, home, bookmark, font size) on the face of the device. There’s also a speaker on the back.

It ships with a black book style case. 2 pins on the leftmost corners hold the ereader in the case. The pins feel like cheap plastic, and I’m afraid they’ll break and leave me with no way to use the case. BTW, Sony are using a similar design with their cases, only Sony’s design feels much sturdier.

The overall design of the ereader is minimalist (which I usually like), but not this time. The labels on the buttons are subtle and thus difficult to discern by touch, and they are also not that easy to see because they’re the same shade of white. I’m also not pleased with the build quality.  The 5 buttons do not line up either horizontally or vertically (they don’t stick out the same amount).

I don’t see why the VEB 620 doesn’t have 2 pairs of page turn buttons on each edge; there’s certainly room for it around the screen.  And lastly, the back panel is a single piece that snaps into place so you won’t be able to replace the battery without prying it off (and probably scratching it in the process).

Software

There’s no really interesting software features that I can find. Well, it has a MP3 player, but so do everyone else. Other than that this is basic ereader running Adobe software. It does support DRMed Epub and you can reflow PDFs, but at this point so can everyone else. The only annotation option is bookmarks.

You can also do a text search and page jump inside an ebook, but to do that you’re forced to use the onscreen keyboard. It’s not worth it. Check out the video to see why.

Reading Experience

This ereader is slow. It’s the kind of slowness that would be tolerated in 2008, but I won’t in 2010 because I have other options. The screen is not the cause; IMO the software needs work. You have to press and hold a button and wait for it to respond. If you’re in a menu, you can’t press the down arrow several times; it will only respond to the first press.

The VEB 620 is okay to hold one handed, but with the slow page turns I abandoned it pretty quickly.

Opinion

This ereader cost me $99, and it’s not as good as other you can find at that price. Augen The Book is better, and the Ectaco Jetbook and Aluratek Libre are just as good.

But if you did get one as a gift, it should work okay. It’s only real problem is that it’s slow.

Video

So B&N just sent out an email announcing that the Nook SDK is now available. Now any Android developer can port their app to the NookColor. There’s one detail I want you to notice.  This is actually the NookColor SDK and it will not help you port Android apps to the Nook. Isn’t that interesting? B&N want people to develop for their platform, but only for their tablet and not the more numerous Nook ereader. I wonder why? Yes, I know they announced that it would be for the NookColor back when the NC was launched, but I half expected the SDK to support both platforms.

BTW, I’m not sure this is worth the bother. The NC has been hacked, and apparently it’s a bog standard Android tablet.  Here's a long list of apps that have been tried and work just fine. Look it over, and then ask yourself if you really want to have to work through B&N.

NookDeveloper

I’ve just gotten this juicy piece of gossip from an former txtr employee. The 6″ txtr reader, which was supposed to have launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, has been quietly abandoned by the company.

Note that I’m calling it gossip because I don’t have confirmation yet, but it does fit with mutterings I’ve heard elsewhere. And the txtr reader did drop from sight in mid September, so this rumor is plausible.

Txtr (the company) are actually not doing all that well; they’re also losing a lot of customers to Bluefire. I’ve heard from my contact with Bluefire, Micah, that Bluefire have so many ebookstores who want to hire Bluefire to make an app that he can’t even respond to all the emails.

And if you’re wondering how a 50+ person company is being beaten by a 6 person team then I suggest you download both apps on to your iPhone. Try them and ask yourself which one is better.

Here’s a video of what the txtr reader looked like before it died:

The World Wildlife Fund hve announced a new "save a tree" initiative. They’ve developed printer drivers for a new document format called WWF (it’s based on PDF), and they want you to use it instead of PDFs. Why? Because unlike PDFs,  it can’t be printed.

Okay, WWF actually is PDF, and it’s slightly silly for them to call it a new format. The only difference is that the WWF format has the "do not print" flag checked.

I like the idea. I rarely print PDFs, and I would like to try to discourage others from doing so. Unfortunately, the drivers only work on OSX at the moment, so I’ll have to wait.

Save as WWF

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to change the firmware on the black Novel. Since I now had a new firmware to try, I decided to write a second review of the black Novel. The review was delayed, because I spent a few weeks trying to find a way to overcome this tablet’s shortcomings.

Update: Much of this post is outdated. Rather than read this review, why don’t you go install the latest firmware update for this tablet (here)?

So what do I think of it? To put it simply, there are better options out there.

The video is at the end of the post.

First let me give you some background. The black Novel is based on a 7″ LCD  screen with a capacitive resistive touchscreen, Wifi, accelerometer, 2 GB Flash, SD card slot, and a stylus. And in case you were wondering, the black Novel is an entirely different set of hardware from the 7″ white Novel.  They do not run the same firmware.

There are a couple official firmwares for this tablet (also several hacked firmwares). There’s the US firmware, which is tied into the B&N ebookstore, and there’s a CA firmware, which uses the Kobo ebookstore. The US firmware is a locked down ereader design with a custom home screen. You’re blocked from adding any new apps or doing anything other than the limited activities that it ships with (read, browse the web, music, video etc). On the other hand, the CA firmware is an open Android tablet with a normal home screen, apps menu, etc.

Apps

Both the US and CA firmwares run on Android v1.5, and that’s a problem. It’s very difficult to find apps that will run on v1.5. None of my ebookstore apps (like the Kindle app) will install, and while Aldiko did install it doesn’t work right. The black Novel does ship with some apps like Facebook, email, browser, and file manager, but it lacks  important ones like Twitter, a RSS feed reader, and Youtube.

It does have a video player (same as on the US firmware), but it’s not very good. I don’t know if it’s a hardware, software, or drivers  issue, but the Novel can’t even play the sample video at 640×480 at 30fps. It’s no good as a video player.

Ebookstore

Someone seriously screwed up the ebookstore. It’s tied to the Kobo ebookstore (their mobile website), which is fine by me because I have a library of a few dozen free ebooks with Kobo. Unfortunately,  I can’t access the free ebooks from the Novel. This is a pass fail for me, and I’m dumbfounded that no one caught this.

And yes, I think I know the problem (hi folks from Kobo/Pandigital). The free ebooks I got from Kobo can be found under the "I’m reading" tab. I cannot see that tab in the Novel’s ebookstore, so I can’t download the ebooks.

Reading experience

This Novel may be tied to the Kobo ebookstore, but it uses the same reading app as on the US firmware. That’s not good becuase the integration between ebookstore and reading app sucks. There’s a jarring difference between the design of the ebookstore and that of the reading app. There’s also no way to open the reading app without first entering the ebookstore, selecting the "My library" tab, and then selecting a book you want to read. That’s a waste of time and I hate it.

The reading app itself is slightly different from the other firmware. Instead of swiped page turns, it has a couple small zones marked on the screen where you can tap and turn the page. I wish the zones were bigger, but I’m glad they’re there at all.

The Epub and PDF experience is much the same as on the other firmware.  As always, I wish there were more annotation options, but the options available are adequate.

Conclusion

The Novel with the CA firmware is an underpowered tablet with little app support and a poorly conceived UI design. It’s not a terrible tablet, but there are better options out there. Heck, Pandigital offer 2 better tablets.

Video

A new game from Mobigloo has just shown up in the Kindle Store. It’s that classic matching game, Mahjong Solitaire.

In Mahjong Solitaire, you match pairs of identical tiles in order to remove them from the board. Only free tiles can be matched. Tiles are considered free if they do not have other tiles to either the left or right of them, or on top of them. The objective of the game is to clear all the tiles from the board. The game ends when all tiles have been removed or when there are no more free tiles left to match.

This is another game that really won’t work without a mouse or touchscreen. A joystick just won’t cut it.