So I had an interesting experience today. I was trying to find the FCC paperwork for the Pocket Edge, and I found a new way for somebody to hide their gadgets from public view. There are a number of ways to keep it secret. The most basic is that you can request that certain documents (photos, diagrams, etc) be kept form the public, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Amazon takes this a step further. Each time they send a Kindle through the FCC, they have created a separate fictitious Delaware corporation (and then had the pictures hidden). I’ve never actually found one of their dummy corporations before they announced a new Kindle, but I’m working on it.
The new trick I learned today is used by Foxconn. You probably know the name; they assemble electronics for everyone from Apple to Amazon to Entourage. What Foxconn does is so clever that I’m surprised more companies don’t copy them.
You see, in addition to assembling hardware Foxconn will also submit your device to the FCC on your behalf. Get this: they don’t submit the device. Instead they submit just the component that actively transmits (Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc). So even if you figure out which filing is for which device you’ll never actually see the gadget. All that will ever show up in the paperwork is the module.
Let me give you an example. I searched for the FCC paperwork for the Entourage Edge and this is what found. Check out the external photos.
When it comes to keeping secrets, this cannot be beat. I’m really surprised that Amazon aren’t doing it this way.
iPhoneArena got their hands on Verizon’s device schedule for the second half of 2010. Guess what was listed for November:
Sometime during the second or third week of November, Big Red is said to push the Launch button for the enTourage eDGe (a dual-screen ereader + tablet Android device), as well as an enTourage Pocket device.
I don’t have any details from Entourage yet, but I can confirm that Entourage took out a trademark for the term Pocket Edge back in May. (At least we know that it exists.) Also, so far as I can tell it hasn’t made it through the FCC yet.
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We have obtained some exclusive Verizon-related information from a trusty source that leads us to believe the carrier is gearing up for some quite intriguing launches later this year. There are many devices involved in this, with a bit of valuable info for each one. Still, keep in mind as you’re reading that these release dates are not 100% certain, since, you know… unpleasant stuff happens such as delays, change of plans, etc.
September:
To start with, in September we should see a global-ready World Edition of the Motorola DROID 2, which will come in the same black/blue color scheme available now, as well as white. Yep, you heard that right – the first global Android smartphone is on the way!
The other interesting September launch will present us with the youth-oriented Motorola Citrus WX445 Android phone, which will probably impress more with an affordable price tag than features.
We’ll also see a bunch of unpretending phones such as the LG Octane VN530 (touchscreen feature phone), LG VN270 (some kind of replacement to the Cosmos), Pantech Crux and ZTE Salute, both of which would be basic entry-level handsets looking for their place to call home in this smartphone-dominated world.
In addition, Verizon seems to be looking at extending its netbook lineup by adding the Dell Vostro V13 and HP Pavilion DM1-2010.
October:
Mid to late October is where it’s supposed to get exciting, with a possible launch of the RIM BlackBerry Storm 3 9570. Interestingly, our source mentioned that the Storm 3 will run BB OS 6, but will still feature a Sure Press touchscreen. That would be strange, given the Torch has made the move to the far more proven capacitive tech. The other surprise for BlackBerry fans will be the new Curve 3 9330.
Samsung Fascinate
The Samsung Fascinate, Verizon’s version of the Galaxy S, should debut at that time, according to our info. While we have reasons to believe our tipster, this is one detail we certainly hope to be wrong, as it is quite a delay compared to the other carriers' releases of the Galaxy S. Never mind that, along the Fascinate comes the mid-end Android-powered Samsung Continuum I400 and the low-end, but still Android-based and QWERTY-packing Samsung Gem I100. The latter sounds to us like the most affordable Android handset possible.
There’s more to be coming in October though, including the Motorola XT610. According to our info, this one will have screen similarly sized to the one of the DROID X, but the handset itself will feature less powerful specs (3.2 or 5MP camera and slower processor). On the other hand, it should be priced accordingly as a mid-range smartphone at $100-$130 on contract. We definitely like the idea of a more affordable 4.3-inch offering, but hope that its slower hardware won’t hamper the experience… too much.
Another possible October launch would be the Motorola A957, possibly named Sick. We sure expect this to be one “sick” handset, if you know what we mean. However, further info is still unavailable on it.
Our source indicates that we might see the Palm Pre 2 doing its thing at this time, however, every bit of info regarding this possible successor seems to be held pretty tightly right now.
Finally, the Casio Ravine should come to refresh the line of PTT rugged phones of the carrier.
November:
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As we venture later into the year, more and more exciting devices start to show up. Sometime during the second or third week of November, Big Red is said to push the Launch button for the enTourage eDGe (a dual-screen ereader + tablet Android device), as well as an enTourage Pocket device.
My wife and I are staying in Bolivia for a year, in the city of Cochabamba. In order not to have to drag along suitcases full of books we both have an ereader. But for the rest the theme of ‘ebooks’ is something that isn’t alive here in Bolivia. On the Mobileread forum I have seen someone from Bolivia and a couple of people from Argentina but that’s about it. But last Saturday I was surprised to read an article about ebooks in one of the local newspapers.
The article was about the Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro) in Bogotá, Colombia. Although Bolivia and Colombia are rather far away from each other, many people confuse the two. Maybe because they are both involved in coca? But I had never heard about this book fair. In my country (Holland) the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse) is of course well known, and so is BEA (Book Expo America) in New York. But this fair in Bogotá is the most important book fair in Latin America. Is is held from August 11-23. This year the themes of the fair are the 200th anniversary of Colombia’s independence and the digital book.
The paper describes an interview with Patricia Arancibia, manager of international content for the Digital Group of Barnes & Noble. I suppose she is South American herself as she graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, but now she is living and working in New York. She considers it a challenge to provide Latin American customers with digital content. In the first place she is talking then about the Hispanics in the USA (18% of the population) who cannot get many ebooks in Spanish. She calls upon the American publishers to serve the Hispanic market with the new technology. Moreover she said that ebooks are simpler to sell because they don’t have to pass customs. Apparently she doesn’t take geographic restrictions into account or maybe there aren’t any for Spanish books. If that is so, then please keep it that way. But I think that Spanish publishers will not be happy when American publishers will infiltrate in their market. They just have started a platform for ebooks. And furthermore she mentions that ebooks are cheaper than paper books. But this is not always the case. There are several discussions on various forums, for example Mobileread and Teleread about the high prices of ebooks.
Regarding prices I think it will be tough to find a good level for South America. The standard of living here is much lower than in the western world. Books are often sold in a local edition that is much cheaper. And expensive books like text books are often just copied. A few days ago I was in a copy shop near the university and they had some text books just on the shelf. En in the streets they sell copies of CDs and DVDs. With regard to ebooks this will become tough I think.
She also refers to the fear of publishers for the new medium, but she says that during the 3 days she visited the fair, she noticed that publishers are receptive. The article also says that 15% of the main Latin American publishers had ebooks in their collection in 2009.
And we haven’t mentioned prices of ereaders yet; those also will have to go down to make them attractive. They are not yet sold here and importing them for example when you buy from Amazon can be quite expensive.
Argentina
Two weeks ago I read a post by Octavio Kulesz, CEO of a young digital publishing company, about the status of ebooks and ereaders in Argentina. This country is more prosperous than Bolivia but they are recovering from a deep economic crisis. For the publishers it is a booming market. He also writes about the difficulties to get digital content and ereaders, about the problems for older publishers to change. But the Argentinean Book Chamber (a government institution) did a research program for digital publishing last year. But he complains that nevertheless nothing is happening in the publishing world.
He notices that, contrary to the publishers, authors and customers are adopting the digital age, for example young authors and poets are offering work online. he expects that the old publishers will not be able to bring along the necessary changes but that the young publishers will have to do it. His own publishing company works with POD and cheap digital issues, although they are mainly text books. But this looks suspiciously similar to the situation in the Netherlands.
The article about the Bogotá Book Fair can be found on the site of Opinión. The English translation by Google Translate is remarkably good but the following corrections will have to be made:
guests dress ? gala guest; iPac ? iPad (error in the original); he ? she.
have to go through customs ? do not have to go through customs.
leading publishers of electronic books in Latin America had their catalogs ? leading publishers in Latin America had electronic books in their catalogs.
Digma, makers of the Digma 500, have announced the q100, a new 9.7″ ereader that should be available this fall. As you can see from the picture it’s a Kindle DX clone, and that’s actually a first for me.
Here are the specs:
9.7″, 16 level grascale screen
FM Radio
microSDHC card slot (32GB supported)
accelerometer
MP3 player
ebook support: FB2 / TXT / ZIP / RAR / DJVU / PDF / EPUB / HTML / RTF / CHM
If you don’t think of WordPress.com as digital publishing, that’s okay. I didn’t realize until Sunday that I really should have covered this. IMO, Teleread and MediaBistro (MobileContent) also should have reported on this story.
So what happened last week was that WordPress.com deleted the cutline blog theme and replaced it with coraline, a very similar looking theme. BTW, I’m using the cutline theme right now (just in case you were curious about what it looks like). Note that they didn’t just hide the theme; they deleted it without adequate warning.
A number of people were using the cutline theme, so deleting it screwed up quite a few blogs. When you switch themes the sidebar widgets are removed and have to be replaced manually. Naturally this pissed people off. One person affected was Mike Cane; that’s how I first learned of this.
What’s interesting about this (besides the damage that WordPress.com did to their professional reputation) was why they deleted the theme.The stated reason was that that theme was old and design had moved on. This is BS; cutline had been updated only a couple weeks ago.This appears to be a semi-official statement from a WordPress.com rep (scroll down):
When we first added the Cutline theme to WordPress.com it was free software. That means the users of that theme had the freedom to use, share, and modify that theme as they wished—as long as they passed those freedoms on when they shared it. That freedom let us bring the Cutline theme here to WordPress.com and it’s the same freedom that’s made WordPress so popular.
Free software is something we believe is important: to use and promote.
Cutline was sold a few years ago and had a more restrictive license placed on it. The original author of the Cutline theme has gone on to produce other themes with more restrictive licenses. Using Cutline has been seen as a promotion of that work and that’s not something we want to do–so, we made something better: Coraline! The state of the art in themes has advanced quite a bit since Cutline and we’re happy to make the switch.
So WordPress.com developed a professional disagreement with the theme’s designer and decided to respond by screwing over their customers. Classy.
P.S. This kind of shit is why I went with a private hosting company for this blog.
The Laser EB-101 is based on a 5″ LCD screen, and it has 2GB Flash and a microSDHC card slot. It’s available now for $149.95 AUD.
Details are sparse, so I don’t know much. But I think I recognize the menu shown on the screen. It looks a lot like other Gajah ereaders I’ve shown you in the past. If I’m right, then we can probably guess that this doesn’t have any DRM support.
BTW, I found something in the product description that’s going to cause a lot of trouble down the road:
The Laser EB101 E-Book reader accomodates ALL formats of E-book including DRM managed content which is legitamately purchased from on line stores such as Amazon. (if you’re considering an E-Book reader, you should check the licensing and compatibility with DRM fies. The EB101 is fully licensed and fully compatible meaning more books, more videos, more music, more pictures and more use.
It looks to me like they have support for Kindle DRM. Since I know that’s impossible, I have to wonder if they are misleading people intentionally, or was this phrasing an accident.
There’s a story in today’s LATimes that says just that. But I have a problem. A close reading of the LATimes article does not indicate that the have a new source. For all we know they might be working off the Wall Street Journal rumors we read last week.
Here’s an excerpt:
News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch is embarking on an ambitious plan for a new national digital newspaper to be distributed exclusively as paid content for tablet computers such as Apple Inc.’s iPad and mobile phones.
The initiative, which would directly compete with the New York Times, USA Today and other national publications, is the latest attempt by a major media organization to harness sexy new devices to reach readers who increasingly consume their news on the go. The development underscores how the iPad is transforming the reading habits of consumers much like the iPod changed how people listen to music.
On the other hand, I really do think he’s going to follow through on this. But I also think it’s going to fate as the tech bubble or multimedia CD-ROMs.
It looks like the Digitmes story I brought you a few days ago might be wrong. PCWorld are reporting that the Asus eeeTablet will be out in October for $300.
Asustek Computer plans to launch its long awaited Eee Tablet with an 8-inch LCD touchscreen in October for around US$300, though prices vary by market.
…
The Eee Tablet will run a Linux OS, but not Google’s Android mobile operating system, which has long been the rumor. The Linux distribution on board was developed by Asustek, said Jerry Shen, CEO of Asustek, speaking with reporters after the conference.
He said the Eee Tablet name may also be changed to Eee Note. Asustek does not want people to confuse the product with tablet PCs.
The Eee Tablet has three key functions aimed at school students: the ereader, note taking and Internet browsing.
Asustek added writing software to the Eee Tablet so users can take notes with a stylus on the touchscreen, and onboard software digitizes those notes. The company also included a 2-megapixel camera to the device so students can take pictures of a teacher’s whiteboard instead of having to write so much. It also includes a digital audio recorder to record lectures.
That’s a relief. I was wondering what drugs they were on. There’s no way the eeeTablet could survive at $600. Even $300 is a stretch. By the time October rolls around we’ll see several decent competitors in that price range.
Also, I for one kept getting the eeeTablet confused with the eeePad. That was not a good name choice.
You might recall from when I announced the Smartbook Surfer (a 7″ Android tablet) that I thought the Surfer looked a lot like the Augen Gentouch78 tablet. I just found an unboxing photo that confirmed my suspicion.
If you look at the image you’ll see that the back of the Surfer looks exactly the same as that of the Gentouch78. And if you click here, you 'll see more pictures of the Surfer being unboxed. Note that the ports and slots are all in the same place on each tablet.
This beauty just popped up in the FCC database today. This is the first Huawei ereader that I’ve seen. I can’t find a spec sheet, but I have gleaned a few details from the photos and the user manual. It’s based on a 6″ E-ink touch screen, and has Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, a microSDHC card slot (32GB supported), and a SIM card slot.
I don’t know anything about the ebook format support, but I do know that the T62W has an ebookstore on the device with subscription content. There are screen
I also don’t know the OS, but get this. One of the external pictures shows an Android menu, and one of the dis-assembly photos shows Windows CE 6.0. Which one will they ship, I wonder?
via FCC
Update: I found an ebookstore in Poland that might be the one shown on the device:
E-books will become a major reading mode and the reasonable price should be about CNY 500 each, said Zhou Hongli, the chief copyright officer of Shanda Literature Corp. (SDL), the literature business unit of leading Chinese interactive entertainment media company Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. (NASDAQ: SNDA | PowerRating), recently.
They must have made a mistake somehow. 500 CNY is about $73 USD. As much as the agency 5 might love the price point, it makes no sense for the price of an ebook. Perhaps the Shanda spokesman was saying that would be a good price for an ebook _reader_. I don’t know.
Slashgear followed up on the Mirasol story that I reported on earlier yesterday. Here’s what Chris reported being told by Jim Cathey, VP of business development for Qualcomm’s MEMS division:
According to Cathey, despite what Mollenkopf’s comments implied, the mirasol fabs are up and running, and samples are out with the company’s OEM partners. The confusion, he suggested, was down to volumes: Mollenkopf was “thinking in billions” which, as a new technology, mirasol isn’t yet reaching. However, Qualcomm are on track to make their first shipments before the end of the year, and Cathey expects commercial products to arrive in Q1 2011.
What’s rather interesting about that last sentence is that it can be 100% true and not contradict the info we got from ZDnet. The screen is not in production yet. We know that because they’re still sending out samples, which are by definition something you do before production begins.
Here’s another thing. We were supposed to see a device this year. Now we won’t see it until next year. Why? I would guess production delays.
So there’s another Epub activism session going on right now on Twitter, and it inspired this rant. I have a number of points about format, Kindle vs Epub, etc that I want to get off my chest.
Why Kindle will Win
The Kindle format has Amazon behind it. Epub has a committee. When you match a savvy, innovative tech company with a being that has 100 mouths and no brain, who do you think will win?
Epub vs Kindle – Which is better
The Epub advocates like to talk about how much you can do with Epub that you can’t do on the Kindle. This is somewhat true. On scale of 1 to 10 (with Epub being a 10) the Kindle format would rate about a 7.
But if you expand that scale so it reflects all the things you can do with web content, then you have scores of 7 and 10 on a scale of 1 to 50. When you think about all the stuff you can’t do with Epub it suddenly becomes a lot less impressive.
One format must win
Why should one digital format win when no single paper format has done so? There are bunches of standard book sizes in paper. Why should digital be any different? It’s like you’re saying that graphic novels can replace cookbooks, or MMPB can replace reference manuals. Or to give a digital example, CBR & CBZ aren’t going away. They work just fine for comics.
And besides, a single digital format which could do everything would be a "jack of all trades but a master of none". I’d rather stick with the more specialized formats.
Epub as a standard
(I just read this over on Mike Cane’s tumblr blog.) Which Epub standard are you talking about? There are 3 commercially available epub standards: Sony, B&N, and Apple. It’s not one format; DRM has made sure of that.
The NYTimes are speculating on why Amazon have announced job opening for things like: Supply Chain Project Program Manager, Hardware Engineer and RF Systems Engineer.
Some of the people hired for these positions will most likely work on the next versions of the Kindle, possibly integrating touch screens or even creating a color version of the device. But there’s also a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs.
According to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans, who declined to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly about Amazon’s internal workings and unannounced products, Lab 126 has been looking into building other gadgets that it could sell to consumers.
Yes, and no. Yes they are developing new gadgets and no they are not trying to get into the gadget market. If there’s one thing Amazon have made clear by their actions, it’s that they sell the Kindle (and turn a profit on it) in order to have a platform to sell ebooks. If Amazon really wanted to sell other devices then they could have done so any time during the 5 years that Lab126 have been open.
But, I would bet that Amazon have looked at devices that would support their MP3 store and UnBox video store. They’ve never developed them because there was no need. PMPs and MP3 players are well developed markets.
On Friday, Boston Public Library became the first OverDrive library partner to add more than 15,000 public domain eBooks from Project Gutenberg to its ‘Virtual Branch’ website—at no cost to the library. This featured collection, currently in beta, enables users to discover and download thousands of DRM-free EPUB eBooks without holds, waitlists, or authentication.
That’s great, but I’m looking forward to when Overdrive add other sources. Assuming Overdrive did it right, it shouldn’t take any more effort to add, for example, Feedbooks.
Let me tell you why it’s easy. Have you ever used Aldiko or Stanza? Did you notice how you can access the Feedbooks, Fictionwise, Gutenberg, or a bunch of other sites form inside the app? You can that because the app and the sites all follow the OPDS standard.
