E-books come of age

Database News - Wednesday December 12, 2007

COMPUTER CURRENTS

E-books come of age

The Kindle e-book from Amazon suggests the technology is almost ready for the mainstream

JAMES HEIN

Has e-book technology finally come of age? I have been looking at the new Kindle from Amazon, which sold out in 5.5 hours after it was released. I have been waiting a long time for a decent e-book and while this does not fit into my ideal "open up and see two pages" model, it is getting very close to what I am looking for.

The Kindle supports Microsoft Word, html, txt, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, prc and mobi files as well as an experimental version of PDF files (which may have some formatting issues for complex layouts). The really amazing thing about the unit is that it comes with a universal power adaptor, something that is typically rare for any product made in the US. The unit also supports SD cards for extra storage.

The US model is wireless delivery or via an email account. There is also a USB connector to enable you to copy books to the unit from your PC after, say, downloading the latest US best-seller for $10. Audio books are also supported.

Battery life is approximately 30 hours depending on how much you use the wireless connectivity and the unit recharges in a couple of hours.

A black and white "e-ink" technology ensures that the text and greyscale pictures are readable. There is also adjustable text size for those who are getting a little older and even a built in dictionary. Search and annotations are also supported for you to be able to add your own comments. Weight is just over ten ounces or a few hundred grams.

Now for the cons.

The unit costs $400 and each book you download from Amazon is $9.95. While I can buy the latest paperbacks locally for about $7, a title this price also includes hard backs, which is not bad at all as far as pricing goes.

The 30-hour battery life could be a little better and you are advised only to use Amazon batteries. There is no backlighting so reading in the dark presents the same problems a regular book does - you need some light.

The biggest problem is that we are unlikely to see any units here in Thailand and if we do the wireless features would be of no value unless there was also a distribution system here, while the pricing would be a lot higher. Nevertheless I would love to have one to test for a while.

Buying a PC

As a run up to the buying season you might want to compare what you can get overseas with what you can get here as you look around. So what does your money get you when buying a PC? As usual I will use as my benchmark Gateway in the US and a figure of $2,000.

Let's start with an Intel 2 Quad Processor Q6600, which translates as a 4 CPU 2.40GHz supporting 1066MHz FSB and with 8MB of cache. Add 3 GB of 667MHz Dual-Channel DDR2 SDRAM, 1TB 7200rpm Serial ATA II/300 hard drive w/ 16MB and a 24in widescreen HD LCD display. Supported by an ATI Radeon X1950 CrossFire solution w/512MB GDDR4 memory DVI w/HDCP, and VGA - but sorry no HDMI. You do get a Creative SoundBlaster X-FI XtremeAudio PCI-E card and 9-in-1 memory card reader, but only 2.1 speakers and sadly the Home Premium version of Vista.

The same money will get you a notebook as a tablet PC with Intel Core 2 Duo ULV Processor U7500 running at 1.06GHz, 533MHz FSB with 2MB L2 Cache and 2 GB of SDRAM, Biometric Fingerprint Reader, Bluetooth Wireless Networking a 12.1 inch display supporting 1280 x 800 max. resolution, USB, VGA, IEEE and a 160GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive, 6-in-1 media card reader a DVD-Writer combo drive, two high capacity lithium batteries.

Or, for the same money, the same basic features but with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor T5600 running at 1.83GHz, 667MHz FSB and 2MB L2 Cache, a 17 inch screen supporting up to 1920 x 1200. One is the lightweight model, the other is the PC replacement model. With some exceptions you should be able to get a similar PC locally for the same basic money - about 66,000 baht - but you will probably end up with a smaller monitor, less hard drive space and less memory.

Industry news

There are already some examples of movie stars holding iPhones upside down in what is being called the "Jesus mode inversion syndrome." An episode of the new Bionic Woman series has Charlie Sheen doing this. I can just see hordes of Apple fans watching every TV show very closely from now on.

So how are your favourite social networking sites doing as far as downtime stats for the year? Pingdom, an Internet monitoring company, tested the availability of the top 12 larger ones over a one month period and found that the clear winner was Yahoo 360! - with zero downtime. Next came Facebook and MySpace, which tied together at 10 minutes. Microsoft's Window's Live Spaces came in dead last with three hours outage.

While I like the idea of the motion sensitive controller that comes with the Wii, some of the accessories are a little lame. Consider the new Lightsabre from play.com. It is essentially a plastic tube with 22 LEDs that the Wii controller fits into. You wave it around and the motion is duplicated in a game. This will cost you around 1,000 baht if you could get one here. It might be more attractive if it made that cool Star Wars sound, but it doesn't.

Samsung Electronics is planning to invest $2.21 billion to expand its 8th-generation liquid crystal display line. This will be independent of its deal with Sony. That means a lot more LCDs to hit the markets in the near future, hopefully at less expensive prices. This also means that Samsung makes LCDs for Sony, so if you are considering getting one you might as well get the cheaper Samsung units instead.

MySpace is not only for the most ridiculous thing you did on your holidays. Go to http://www.myspace.com/californiadmv and check out the "how to drive" videos. It looks like a programmer designed it, and layout and navigation is very poor, but it does show that at least one US government department is trying to embrace newer technologies.

I was looking at a recent Galaxy Poll from Australia that claimed over 60 percent of office workers are confused by the functionality of their office printers. The biggest issue seemed to be the functions available they could be using and weren't. From personal observation I know one problem people have is how to clear a paper jam and making sure all the pathways have been cleared.

Consider quality as an issue. Go to File then Print in any application and click on Properties. Click on the tabs until you see resolution and/or quality. If the quality is set to Draft this will be the lowest setting. Change this to normal or high quality for a better print. Under "resolution," you will typically see at least two listed - say 300 or 600, 600 or 1200 and so on. The higher one will give you the best quality. By changing these settings you also influence speed.

Now that you know where these settings are you can also experiment with colour, pages per side, scaling and any other options that your particular printer may support.

Email: jamesh@inet.co.th

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