The M-Edge team flagged me down today as I was passing their booth.They wanted to make sure I knew about their newest case offering. In the not too distant future they plan to offer customized cases. There’s only going to be 1 case offered, and only the iPad, Nook, K2, and K3 will have this option. Cost is expected to be $40 for the Nook and Kindles and $50 for the iPad. They’ll also offer some semi-custom designs from the designer Out of Print as well as other designers.
As you can see from the next photo, you can create a design for both the from and the back of your case.
Earlier today Freescale announced their 2011 list of Smart Mobile Device Pundits. This is a list of 20 gadget geeks, journalists, bloggers, and commentators who – well, basically this was a popularity contest. The Pundits who made the list got the most votes.
In order to thank and honor true industry pundits in the smart mobile devices category, we’ve gathered YOUR nominations and feedback in order to compile a list of the top 20 most revered commentators YOU plan to turn to in 2011 for the latest news and trends.
I’m on the list. Thank you, everyone, for voting for me. I appreciate your support. Other people on the list include:
I managed to miss this one yesterday. I actually passed through the Qualcomm booth twice and it wasn’t there either time.
This isn’t a product prototype, just a screen demo. I don’t know who shot the video, sorry.
In other news, Pocketbook will have a press conference at 11am today.They’ve been giving me the run around on exactly what they plan to announce, but it’s probably the new Mirasol ereader.
Pixel Qi is an exhibitor at CES this year, and I was finally able to see their screen first hand. (I’ve been wanting to see it for a couple years now.) They didn’t have a booth; instead they rented one of the small meeting rooms in the far end of South Hall.
It was incredibly crowded. If you’re wondering why there are no extensive galleries of photos showing their screen tech, that’s the reason. So this was the first time I’ve seen it, and I was surprised. Their screen looks like an LCD screen. That might sound funny, but I couldn’t tell the difference between a Pixel Qi and a normal LCD. In fact, I’ve used LCD screens that looked worse than Pixel Qi. So basically this means that if you got one of these screens you’ll get the benefit of a low power screen without losing any of the benefits of traditional LCD.
I could seriously see this replacing most LCD screens at some point in the future.
The biggest story at the PixelQi booth is production. When are we going to see these screens? According to Mary Lou Jepsen, production is ramping quite well on both the 7- and 10.1-inch screens and they are working on a higher resolution 1280 x 800-resolution 10.1-inch display and a 9.7-inch display for a partner. Why 9.7″? They say it’s because the iPad made that size popular. (But if you’re thinking about swapping an E-ink screen with Pixel Qi, sorry, the screen geometry is different.)
And there’s one piece of gossip I can share. I was talking with one of the Pixel Qi people about the perils of rushing a screen into production. If you’re wondering why they’re taking forever to get their screens on the market, there’s a reason. This is new technology and it takes time to get all the bugs out. Sipix came up, of course, as an example of why you shouldn’t rush.
So here’s the gossip. He’s heard that Sipix will be winding down production of the screens. I don’t know if this is true but given the problems of the current generation Sipix screen I think it’s a good idea.
I was walking through South Hall and I happened by this one company’s booth. They’re not offering an ereader but I like this idea and I thought it was worth a mention.
Datawind are a UK based that currently offers a 7″ and 9″ netbook under the Ubisurfer brand. They’re about to expand into the US market, and they expect to have the 9″ netbook with a Sprint data connection available in about a month.
The Ubisurfer 9 has 1GB Flash, a SDHC card slot, USB Host, Wifi, and either a 1X or 3G connection. Retail is expected to start at $199 and it’s already available in the UK. (If anyone in the UK has bought one I’d love to what you think.)
It runs Windows CE, which might be a concern. But it’s also going to ship with Softmaker office suite. This suite is a full office suite (unlike anything I’ve found on Android) and the fact the company even knew about it was a point in their favor. Software won’t be the shortcoming of this device.
I know free internet sound great, but when you look at the fine print this stops being such a great deal. You only get 30 free hours of web browsing a month.
On a related note, Datawind are planning to offer a pair of Android tablets (with the same data plan) in the near future. Retail is projected to be $249 for the 7″ tablet and $299 for the 10″. These babies will be running Android v2.2 on a Cortex A8 CPU with 1GB Flash, a SDHC card slot, Wifi.
One MobileRead user got frustrated with the lack of an official SDk from Pocketbook, so he did some digging and managed to put together his own.
I’m sure quite a few of you have noticed that the new models – 602, 603, 902 and 903 – do not accept programs built for earlier models. The root cause appears to be a change of ABIs; the 15.1 SDK expects a /lib/ld-linux.so.2 loader but the one in the 903 is .so.3. That’s probably because of a switch to EABI. So I installed an EABI system in a qemu emulator, shoved in some headers from the old SDK and libraries from the 903, tweaked a makefile… and managed to build a program! You’ll find poterm runnable for the 903 at my machine, as well as the emulator system image in which it was built – probably usable to build other things as well. Don’t forget poterm.ini if you try poterm out!
Is anyone going to pursue this? I’d like to hear about any new apps you might make.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announced this morning that Qualcomm will indeed be investing $1b in a new production plant for the Mirasol screen.
Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2008 U.S. investment mission to the formation of American Qualcomm (Qualcomm) headquarters called, finally in the fierce competition, stand out to compete for the favor of Qualcomm company, select the investment of nearly one billion U.S. dollars to Taiwan to set up world’s first small and medium size Mirosal reflective display technology production plant. Department of Investment Services Division in the continued economic assistance, Qualcomm announced its decision based on the earlier Dragon base in the Hsinchu Science Park, construction of production, plant area of about 7 hectares and is estimated to create a large number of employment opportunities.
Here’s the interesting part. If this is the first Mirasol plant, then the screen isn’t in production yet. That’s not what the Mirasol pr people were saying a couple months ago.I wonder who made the mistake?
Damn. It looks like we’re at least a year away from this screen actually showing up on a retail shelf.
Update: PCWorld are reporting that this is the second plant, not the first. That does make more sense.
I just came across the slides for a presentation given by Julia Wolf, a senior researcher with FireEye. I only have the slides, unfortunately, but they are a fairly good technical summary of the basic details of PDF format and how it can be hacked.
From the summary:
PDFs are currently the greatest vector for drive-by (malware installing) attacks and targeted attacks on business and government. A/V technology is extraordinarily poor at detecting these. The PDF format itself is so diverse and vague, that an A/V would need to be 100% bug-compatible with the parser in the vulnerable PDF reader.
You can also do cool tricks like make a single PDF file that displays completely differently in several different readers.
If this presentation doesn’t scare you then trust me, it should.
slides (PDF)
27C3 Update: The video of the presentation has been uploaded to Youtube.
P.S. Note that the slides are a PDF and the presentation is on PDF hacking. I find that amusing, don’t you?
I just came across this video on Youtube. It was shot last week at 27C3, a security and hacking convention hosted by the Chaos Computer Club. The speaker is Jérémie Zimmermann. This was an one hour session on the current state of copyright enforcement. It’s a general summary of the growing encroachments on personal freedoms, and I think it’s worth watching. I’m still waiting for it to queue up, but what I’ve seen so far is interesting.
So CES is next week and I haven’t done any of the posts I did last December. Sorry about that; I honestly didn’t know that I could afford to go until the 23rd. I’m not going to go into the same level of detail as last year; there’s not enough time left and I’m too busy getting ready.
Last year I got invited to 4 parties; this year I don’t have any invites, at least, not any that interest me. I don’t think I’ve pissed off that many people (I’m good but not that good) so my guess is that no one had the budget this year.
On the upside I did get credentials for the Pepcom event Wednesday night. This isn’t a party; it’s a trade show run separately from CES. I’m really glad I’m going because I’ve seen the exhibitor list and I found a number of companies that won’t be exhibiting at CES. They’re only going to be at the Pepcom event.
News Coverage
I’ve touched bases with my competition and it turns out that neither TeleRead nor EbookNewser will be sending anyone.This is great because it means I won’t have any direct competition, but on the other hand there are far too many stories for me to cover on my own. I’m going to run myself into the ground again.
On the gripping hand, my list of booths to visit is only a third the size of last year’s. Even factoring in the many tablets I’m expecting to appear out of nowhere I’m still going to have fewer things to see.
Schedule
My flight leaves on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I will likely attend a couple of the press conferences. Last year I only went to the tail end of one press conference and that was only because Samsung had an ereader on hand. Wednesday night I will be at the Pepcom event.
I only have a tentative plan for Thursday and Friday. On Thursday I plan to work in South Hall and on Friday I’ll be in North and Hilton Halls. I’m leaving the weekend open in anticipation of something interesting happening.
Gear Bag
This year I’ll be carrying around my 9″ Novel tablet, paper, pens, and a camera. I was planning to go laptop free this year but I I’m just not comfortable with leaving it in a hotel room.
P.S. If you’re going to be at CES keep an eye out for me.
If you have any Borders gift cards laying around, now would be a good time to spend them.
I just got off the phone with a Borders PR rep. She read me the official statement about Borders' current financial crisis. I’m going to quote it in its entirety because this one is scary. If I were a Borders vendor this statement would probably give me a panic attack. (Please pardon the transcription errors.)
In response to media inquiries, Borders Group Inc. today stated that, as the company previously reported, it is in discussions regarding the potential refinancing of its existing senior credit facilities. As part of this potential refinancing, Borders has determined that it is necessary to restructure its vendor financing arrangements and is delaying payments to certain of its vendors.
Borders has notified these vendors and will be working with them to restructure their arrangements with the company. Borders stated that there can be no assurance that it will be successful in refinancing its senior credit facilities or restructuring its vendor financing arrangements. As the company previously reported, the absence of the refinancing could cause the company to violate the terms of its existing credit agreements in the first calendar quarter of 2011 and the company could experience a liquidity shortfall.
I’m sorry, but if you’re not paying vendors and you’re worried about making loan payments then you’re experiencing a liquidity shortfall right now.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve heard reports that their servers were running slow on the day after Christmas.
Anyway, Overdrive have posted some traffic stats for Christmas weekend. This was the first time ever tjat ebook traffic surpassed audiobook.
To show you what happened in one month, we’ve compared usage from Nov. 26-28 (around US Thanksgiving) to Dec. 25-27 (around Christmas).
eBook checkouts increased a staggering 93%
Visits to ‘Virtual Branch’ websites were up 60%
Pageviews were up nearly 70%
Needless to say, Christmas and the days following were the three biggest for library downloads ever. As a whole, 2010 was even more impressive. We’ll have the full stats for 2010 coming next week, so stay tuned.
This is an update to my post from earlier this week. Now that I’ve worked out how to do it I thought this was worth a repost.
I found a post on MobileRead the other day where someone demonstrated that he had managed to visit Wikipedia on his Kobo Wifi. I’ve tried it and I don’t think this is very useful. But I wanted to share the news anyway. Hopefully some more experienced hackers can work out the bugs. First be sure to save a backup copy of any file you plan to change.
What you need to do is look on your Kobo wifi in the .kobo/kobo directory for the conf file. Open it (it’s a text file) and change all the website names to whatever start page you want. When you pick the URL, be sure to add a '?' to the end. You’ll need the question mark to because the Kobo will add /home.html to your link and the question mark tells the browser to ignore it.
I would suggest that you pick the mobile Google homepage or that you find a way to make a homepage full of links. You might also decide to point the browser at the mobile version of one of the free ebook sites. If I were going to use this feature a lot, I’d probably have Feedbooks as my home page.
Given that you have to enter text with the d-pad I don’t think this will be a very useful feature. Also, navigating around a page moves the cursor from one link to the next. This can take forever.
P.S. With a little refinement Kinstant could support the Kobo wifi. But I think it needs more customization first.
I just got word over twitter that Amazon have enable ebook lending for the Kindle. Here’s the summary from the help page, and you can find out ore from Amazon.
Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle — Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Not all books are lendable — it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending. The lender will not be able to read the book during the loan period.
There’s a story going around today about B&N and the trademarks they’ve filed with the USPTO. All the gadget blogs are focusing on the Nook2 trademark and it looks like everyone has missed the big story.
A few weeks ago B&N filed for a trademark for the term "Nooksellers" and that is the big story. Did you know that the license terms for Pubit include a line about affiliate sellers? That was very curious at the time because B&N didn’t have any. Now we can see that they’re planning to.
I wonder if the Google eBookstore was what finally made up their minds?
Speaking of affiliated sellers, Amazon have had them for the longest time. So really it’s Google and B&N that are playing catch up.
UPDATE: A friend pointed out on Twitter that B&N already have an affiliate program through Google. Problem is, it sucks. That makes me even more certain about what the term Nooksellers means.
BTW, I don’t care about the Nook2 trademark because I already knew about it. B&N filed a trademark for Nook 2 (note the space) back in June, which is when I guessed that B&N were planning to call the next Nook by that name. The new trademark is a footnote, not a revelation. I’m also not amazed by NookKids, Nookcolor, Nook Wifi, or any other term that’s already shown up in use by B&N.
P.S. To be fair, the original source did notice the term but they didn’t realize what it meant.They only discussed it in terms of the description attached to the filing, which doesn’t jibe with the connotation of the word NookSellers. The word sounds like bookseller, which to me suggests an affiliate program.
