Technologizer

5Words for April 17th, 2009

Friday, April 17, 2009

I want a million followers! Pirate Bay: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Annoy Amazon, lose Kindle books. Report: Best Buy plans downloads. Voting on Facebook policies begins. Slim new Sidekick does Twitter. Office 2010 gets public beta. Kutcher’s a Twitter follower millionaire. This e-paper display does color.

Another New E-Book Platform? Please, No, Stop It!

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

18 Comments

TheStreet.com is reporting that book-retailing behemoth Barnes & Noble may be hatching a plan to build an e-book device of its own, possibly partnering with Sprint to deliver books wirelessly. I don’t know if there’s anything to the rumor, but it would be stunning if B&N wasn’t formulating some sort of strategy for dealing with [...]

Kindle Voice Function Adds Accessiblity

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

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The fracas between the Authors’s Guild and Amazon over the Kindle 2 e-book reader’s text-to-speech feature has prompted advocates for the blind and reading-disabled to remind the guild that blind people use technology too. In a protest outside of the guild’s Manhattan office today, demonstrators urged the guild to cease its campaign to remove text-to-speech from [...]

Kindle for iPhone: Disappointing. Yet Still Amazing.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

25 Comments

First the bad news: In multiple ways, Amazon.com’s new Kindle reader for the iPhone and iPhone Touch falls short of being the ultimate iPhone e-book application. It fails to replicate all the major features of a $359 Kindle device. It’s on the rudimentary side in certain areas. I found one or two instances of issues [...]

The Author’s Guild is Wrong About the Kindle. And That’s Okay. They’re the Authors.

Friday, February 27, 2009

8 Comments

When it comes to thorny matters of intellectual property, my instinct is often to follow a philosophy which, as far as I can tell, almost nobody else shares. It’s a sort of creators’-rights libertarianism which you might call Let the People Who Create Stuff Make Their Own Damn Mistakes. (Possible alternative moniker: Reverse Lessigism.) The [...]

5Words for February 27th, 2009

Friday, February 27, 2009

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Me, I’m mournin’ Computer Shopper: Asus preps ultra-thin netebook. Newsday’s site wants your money. Apple kills Emoji (er, Emoji?). Amazon Kindle 3 Rumors. Already? JPG Magazine will return soon. “Vista-Capable” lawyers fight on. Google is Tweeting. Very successfully. Hearst plans Kindle for magazines. Japan stops BlackBerry Bold sales. No surprise: identity theft up. Pirate Bay wife gets flowers. PC makers’ Windows 7 opinions. Finally, Windows/Android phone virtualization!

Amazon’s Kindle 2: The Technologizer Review

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

12 Comments

A really good idea with some clever touches and multiple obvious flaws. That was the critical consensus on Amazon.com’s original Kindle e-book reader when it debuted in November of 2007–here’s my review–and it left the kingpin of online retailers with a pretty obvious to-do list for the second-generation Kindle. That new and improved model–the $359 Kindle [...]

5Words for February 11th, 2009

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

3 Comments

Howdy–here’s what’s going on: Twenty thousand iPhone apps? Wow. For-pay Android apps imminent. Remember BeOs? Haiku clones it. Windows Mobile Firefox movin’ along. New BlackBerry Curve arriving soon. Ahoy! Treasure found in Google Earth. Book authors hate talking Kindle. Zuckerberg college buddies paid fortune. Canadian bookseller launches Kindle rival. No more Windows 7 downloads. Microsoft ships four security patches.

Hey, Let’s Design the Kindle 3!

Monday, February 9, 2009

14 Comments

Now that we know the official scoop on Amazon.com’s Kindle 2, it’s time to begin gabbing in earnest about what we’d like to see in the Kindle 3 which is surely a year to fifteen months off. And given that the Kindle 2 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, why not start think about a more [...]

More Thoughts on Kindle 2

Monday, February 9, 2009

6 Comments

I haven’t laid eyes (or hands) on Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-book reader in person yet, but all evidence suggests that it’s pretty much the device Amazon should have built in the first place. As useful, innovative, and interesting as the first Kindle was–here’s my review from November 2007–it was kind of chunky, kind of [...]

Amazon’s Kindle 2.0 Event

Monday, February 9, 2009

4 Comments

I’m 3000 miles away from Amazon’s Kindle event this morning at the Morgan Library in New York, so I’ll learn what’s transpiring by reading coverage elsewhere on the Web. More specifically,, I’m checking out live coverage at Gizmodo and Engadget. More thoughts as the official details are revealed (until then, check out these alleged spy [...]

5Words for 2/09/09

Monday, February 9, 2009

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Happy Monday morning, Technologizer pals: Is Amazon’s newest a King-le? iPhone could become a Kindle. Two e-book events happnening today. Triple-core chips from AMD. The Dalai Lama joins Twitter. Hey, Woz is going dancing. Some Apple Stores ban Facebook. Amazon’s cheapo BlackBerry Storm deal. Digital TV boxes getting scarce. Microsoft preps new phone services. Judge hands Psystar a victory.

Analyst: Kindle will become Billion Dollar Product

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

5 Comments

Amazon.com has cause to celebrate before it unveils Kindle 2.0 next Monday. Using Apple’s iPod as its model, Citigroup predicts that the Kindle, what it calls the, iPod of the book world,” will become a $1.2 billion dollar business by 2010. Analyst Mark Mahaney estimates that Amazon sold over 500,000 of the e-book readers last year [...]

Oprah Gives Kindle the Thumbs Up

Friday, October 24, 2008

2 Comments

If Howard Stern is the “King of all Media” (at least he tells himself that), then Oprah Winfrey should rightfully be considered the Queen. Amazon must be tickled pink that the iconic talk show host has given its Kindle a ringing endorsement, which came as part of her show on Friday. Winfrey says the device “was [...]

You Know, What I Really Want is a Sony Kindle

Friday, October 3, 2008

11 Comments

Sony, which is among many other things the other big company besides Amazon that’s in the e-book game, has announced a new model: the Reader Digital Book PRS-700BC. Available in mid-November, it will sell for $399 and sports two significant features: a touchscreen that lets you turn the page by swiping and sidelighting that illuminates [...]

Plastic Logic’s Reader: Electronic Paper That’s the Size of a Piece of Paper

Monday, September 8, 2008

6 Comments

The first morning of demos here at DEMO has begun, and the second product unveiling of the day looks potentially cool: A company called Plastic Logic previewed an e-book reader that uses electronic paper technology similar to that of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader–but in a larger, thinner form factor with a full touchscreen. Plastic [...]