Kindle Update

Thanks to Mary Keough, over at IBM, for reading my post and correcting me on the weight of the Kindle Touch. I was thinking of the new $79 Kindle when I said six ounces. I weighed four devices this morning to make sure I got this right. Here is what I found.

I have to admit that I am vascillating a bit between the Kindle and the Kindel Touch. They are both very light and a pleasure to read on. The touch screen is nice, but the simple buttons on the Kindle create a certainty about your intentions. When I swipe, sometimes I go back a page to make sure I had not swiped two pages. With the Kindle, a click is always “a” click. All the Kindle devices are great, and I suspect the Fire will keep getting better with software updates and follow-on models.

Mary asked about the advertising and quetioned whether it is worth the extra $30 on the Kindle or $40 on the Touch to get the device “without special offers”. My opinion is that it is not worth the extra money. The special offers appear as a screen saver when you stop reading. They are totally unobtrusive. You can easily not even notice them. If you want to look more closely and are interested in something being offered, you can go for it. Speaking of reading, the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was really great (see Apple at Grand Central Terminal). I am now reading Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. I have read most of his books, and this one too is really good so far. 

 Other patrickWeb stories related to the Kindle

Tags: amazon, apple, fall of giants, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, isaacson, ken follett, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch, steve jobs

Kindle Fire – Part 2

On September 28, Amazon announced three new Kindles — a $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $199 Android-based color touch screen Kindle Fire tablet. Technology pundits have criticized the Kindle Fire’s touch screen and various aspects of the user interface (see Daily Report: Kindle Fire Attracts Critics, and Buyers – NYTimes.com). I have observed the shortcomings also, but I think the device has a market niche that will be well served — people who like to read books. At $199, it is less than half the cost of an iPad. Amazon will relentlessly promote the Fire on its site and is rumored to be nearly ready to provide software updates for better performance and improved user interface.

I remain a believer in purpose-built devices. The iPad is great for documents, weather, stocks, surfing the web, and reading books at the kitchen counter. The Kindle Fire is great for reading books. That is what it does best. It can also do most everything the iPad can, but not everything. I don’t see myself giving a slide presentation with a projector and the Fire. I don’t plan to put 40 gigtabytes of dropbox folders containing all my data on the Fire. The Fire is great for reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie. It is basically a media player. You can do many tablet computing tasks, but that is not what it is best at. The device I like the best for reading books is the new Kindle Touch. It weighs six ounces and has no moving parts. Turning pages and setting bookmarks is as easy as a touch. You can change the font size to the optimum and read comfortably for long periods of time wherever you may be — incuding outdoors in the sun, which you can do with an iPad. If I am at the kitchen counter and want to read for ten minutes, I launch the Kindle app on the iPad and it automatically takes me to wherever I left off on the Fire or iPhone or wherever I last read — a seamless experience. So many gadgets, so little time! I plan to donate the entry-model Kindle to the senior center.

Tags: amazon, apple, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch

iPhone 4S Bluetooth Advantage

I continue to believe that the iPhone 4S is much better than what some in the media panned. Peter Svensson at the Sidney Morning Herald did an excellent job of reporting about a little-noticed feature that makes the 4S unique among smartphones (See iPhone 4S first phone for low-power Bluetooth). The updated Bluetooth feature enables the iPhone 4S to communicate with a new class of wireless devices not previously in the mix — for example, watches and heart-rate monitors.

Bluetooth has been around since 1994. I use it to connect my iPhone to the audio and phone system in my car and to connect a keyboard to the iPad 2. What is new about the Bluetooth chip in the 4S is that it can support connecting to devices that use much less power than has been the case. The new ultra-low power chip uses so little power that it is found in devices that are powered by a “button cell” battery like what is found in watches and which can last for years.

The industry group behind Bluetooth said these small devices will be labeled “Bluetooth Smart.” Devices such as the iPhone 4S that support the new standard will be labeled “Bluetooth Smart Ready.”

Casio announced that it will introduce a Bluetooth Smart watch in December that will be able to link to a smartphone and alert the wearer to incoming emails and text messages by beeping and vibrating. Sony Ericsson had a watch five years ago that did the same thing, but it weighed nearly half a pound because of its big battery.

The possibilities in healthcare are exciting. Nordic Semiconductor, a Norwegian company, said that one of its Bluetooth Smart chips will be used in a belt that monitors heart rate and relays it to a smartphone. Other possibilities include glucose sensors for diabetics and sensors that can tell if a chronically ill person has fallen or had a significant change in posture. Home health monitoring is entering a phase of innovation that has the potential to improve quality of life and reduce the cost of healthcare. Stay tuned!

Kindle 456

There are quite a few stories here in patrickWeb about the Kindle and about Amazon (see the links to the left for indexes to both topics). I confess that I am a fan of both. I also love the iPad — but for different reasons. The media loves to write about arch rivals and head-to-head competitors. They want to speculate about whether Fire will win out over the iPad. I don’t see it that way. In fact I see them both as winners. There is not going to be one device that is best for all things for all people. That is the great thing about consumer technology — there is something for everyone. Some will be happy to have an iPad as their sole “computer” and use it for reading books, writing stories, doing their email, and shopping on the Web. Others will want more purpose-centric devices. If you read a lot of books, you will want a Kindle. If you like to read outdoors, forget about using an iPad. On Saturday I received the new $79 Kindle. (I ordered the Kindle Touch and a Fire also but they will not be available until November). The new Kindle is great. It has no keyboard and is therefore smaller. You can hold it in your hand and read to your heart’s content and never get a sore wrist. It weighs next to nothing. The e-ink makes the words clear as a bell indoors or outdoors. If there is something you need to type, it has an onscreen keyboard that lets you select with the cursor. If you are going to write a story, that would be no good but to enter the SSID of your home WiFi network to get started, it is no problem. The new Kindle is #4 for me. I sold the Kindle DX on eBay and handed down one to my wife who doesn’t care about having the very latest model like I do. When the Kindle Touch and Fire (Kindles 5 & 6) arrive, I plan to donate a Kindle or two to the local senior center. What will Fire be like? I can’t wait to try it, but I expect it will be great for consuming media and for shopping — probably better than the iPad. When it comes to syncing my board papers between Dropbox and Goodreader, I expect the iPad will continue as the preferred solution. I expect the apps for CNBC and Bloomberg financial reporting, aviation and healthcare apps and many other apps will continue to be best on the iPad. I don’t see a replacement for FaceTime with the grandchildren. The best news is that we have some competition for tablets. That may make Apple the first company to have a market value of a trillion dollars, or it may mean that there are enough differences in the preferences of billions of people in the world that there is room for at least a handful of very successful products and companies. My bet is on the latter.

iPad stories on patrickWeb
Kindle stories on patrickWeb

Tags: amazon, apple, book, books, dropbox, goodreader, ipad, Kindle

Back Pain

Back pain is something experienced by nine out of ten people in America at some point in their life and five out of ten experience back pain every year. Years ago, I found a very helpful book by Robin McKenzie called How to Treat Your Own Back. You can find the book and other related items at a site called OPTP. I have had three back surgeries and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the subject. I do 50 McKenzie back stretches every night and rarely encounter any back pain. I highly recommend the book but, of course, see your own doctor for advice. Another useful resource is the Back Pain Health Center at WebMD.

I am at the Demo conference in San Jose (more on this to come) and met Dr. Charles Wang, a young physician with an MBA who has a great vision for using mobile technology to address back pain. The concept is to use a stick-on sensor similar to a bandaid which you place on your back. The sensor can tell when you are following good posture or when you are slouching. The sensor sends data to your mobile phone and an app alerts you to your bad posture and keeps track of your habits. The theory is that looking at the data with your app will lead you to more healthy habits and less back pain. If you want to follow the startup’s progress, visit LumoBack.

Tags: apps, back pain, demo, lumoback, Mobile

The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia

The first time I visited Slovakia, it was part of the former Communist nation. At the border crossing there were soldiers with machine guns. They rifled through our luggage and put a large mirror under the car to see if were attempting to bring something bad into the country. The country joined the European Union in 2004 and today, according to Business Week,  it is considered to be a high-income advanced economy with one of the fastest growth rates in the European Union A Bloomberg Businessweek story a few days ago described how a Bratislava company is organizing a national pay wall and has signed up the country’s top publications (See Online Media: The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia – BusinessWeek). This seems like a really good idea to me. U.S. publishers should pay attention. I am not suggesting a national paywall, by any means. But how about a business publications paywall, or maybe one for news, or for sports? The publsihers are fighting with Apple, Amazon, and others trying to preserve their models of the past. (I was really pleased to see Netflix stand up to Starz and not cave to the old model). The Slovakia model has subscribers paying roughly $4 per month (or $40 per year) to gain access to nine different publications. Publishers want us to pay $5 per copy for each of their magazines. Not going to happen. How about $5 per month for access to Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Smart Money, and the Harvard Business Review? I think millions would go for it. Nobody will read all the content of all these publications. Some will read all of one of them, others will read a little of each. The publishers will have to face the music at some point (no pun intended) or they will be disintermediated completely. I pay for WSJ and BW because I read them both cover to cover, but I won’t pay for the New York Times. I read the key stories they publish through the NYT blogs. The NYT gets no money from me. However, if there was a news paywall and for $5 per month I could have access to all the major news sources I would consider it. The NYT would get a slice of the $5 based on how many pageviews they got out of the total for the paywall offering. Another way for the NYT to get money from me would be for them to include their business section as part of the business publication paywall. The Slovakians are onto a really good approach. It takes cooperation from competing entities but I don’t see anything other than greed standing in the way. A tech company in Bratislava called Piano set up the infrastructure and promised nine publishers that they would not have to make any capital investment. Piano’s chief executive officer said it took a year of meetings to persuade the nine publications to get on board. Piano takes a 30% commission and the 70% gets split among the nine publishers proportionate to readership. I don’t know how they handled mobile devices, but clearly they should be included as part of the offering. Publishers, network operators, and platform providers including Apple et al want a share of the pie. Whatever they can work out is fine but from a consumer point of view, I think most of us would agree that what we want is simple. Pay once and read anytime, anywhere, on anything for an affordable fee for substantial content.

Tags: bratislava, media, paywall, publishers, slovakia

Kindle Books Overtake Paperback Books

TechCrunch reported that Kindle Books Overtake Paperback Books To Become Amazon’s Most Popular Format. Last July Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Paperbacks have now also fallen behind with the Kindle selling 115 books for every 100 paperbacks. Hardcover books are now half of Kindle e-books, and there are now more than 800,000 e-books to choose from.

iPad stories on patrickWeb
Other gadget related stories on patrickWeb

Tags: amazon, books, ipad, Kindle

iPad 2 Launched

The iPad 2 announcement was mostly as expected. Ordering it at 7 AM this morning was also as expected — easy, fast, pleasant, enticing for extra goodies, followed by immediate and precise confirming communications from Apple. The order status shows: Ships: 5 – 7 business days and Delivers: Mar 22 – Mar 29. I ran into a friend at lunch who ordered around noon and his confirmation showed April 8, so that implies a large backlog already created. Not surprising. I have heard many people say that the iPad 2 will cause them to order because of the cameras for FaceTime. I agree with them — that is going to be a really great feature of the iPad 2. I can’t wait to see my grandchildren on it. Not a substitute for seeing them in person but a great experience in between visits. I read today that a manufacturer of private aircraft is including an iPad with each airplane that will include the POH (pilot operating handbook) and all documentation associated with the plane. This is just one of many thousands of ways that the tablet computer will integrate with our business and personal lives. Even if the price was the same, who would want to buy an airplane and get a PC included with all the documentation? Nobody. It would never be considered. There are many implications of tablets. One of them is that physical media is history — disks, tapes, diskettes, CDs, DVDs, USB memory sticks, external hard drives, etc. When you combine an iPad with Dropbox you have it all — a powerful computer connected to the Internet and a cloud computing repository that will sync all of your data between the iPad, the iPhone, your Mac, your PC, Windows, Linux, whatever. Although Bill Gates’ PC is moving toward history, he was right when he envisioned information at your fingertips!

Tags: apple, cloud computing, dropbox, facetime, gates, ipad, ipad 2, pc, tablet

iPad 2

The iPad 2 announcement was mostly as expected–thinner, lighter, faster, two cameras built in, and a gyroscope! A new dual-core processor, branded the A5, is included and promises significantly faster performance. The positive surprise is that all the new features come with the same great battery life as the first iPad, and an innovative new magnetic cover with a choice of two materials and ten colors that helps keep the glass clean and doubles as a stand to elevate the iPad for typing. The only disappointment was that an upgrade to the brilliant retina display of the iPhone 4 was not included.

The new iPad comes in various models based on storage size and networking preference. As far as storage goes, I always recommend getting the maximum available for two reasons. First is that the shift toward more video in our lives requires a lot more storage. Secondly, assuming you want to get an iPad 3 as soon as it comes along, you can get more value on eBay for your prior device with the larger storage capacity. As for network options, if you want WiFi only, the iPad will work in most places but not everywhere. If you want it to work more ubiquitously, you can select a 3G model which will work with your favorite network operator– either AT&T or Verizon. Too bad there is not more competition in the network operator space as neither of these giants is great. The good news with them is that you do not need to commit to a contract. It is pay as you go. If WiFi is available where you are, then that is what you use–automatically. If there is no WiFi then the cellular connection kicks in. The cost is $15 per month for 250 megabytes of data from AT&T and $20 per month for a gigabyte from Verizon. There are significant differences between the two operators as far as what happens when you use more than your initial limit. I have found 250 to be adequate to get email in out-of-WiFi-range and to use the web moderately. If you plan to stream Pandora music or Netflix movies you will use up the 250MB in a hurry. For very heavy use of 3G, the Verizon offering looks better. I plan to stay with AT&T.

There are going to be many thousands of apps spurned by the iPad2 that will take advantage of the faster processor, the gyroscope, and the two cameras. I think the built-in FaceTime app is mot significant because of how easy it makes it to connect with friends and family. It will work with another iPad 2 or with an iPhone 4. If you have grandchildren, you need FaceTime! I view FaceTime as profound. We have a remodeling project going on right now more than 100 miles from our primary home. The builder has an iPhone 4 and can call not just to ask about a bathroom fixture but to show us the wall and point his finger at where we want something installed. He marks the wall with an X while we are looking at it. If you have an injury and need your doctor to look at it, the iPhone is the perfect way to show him or her. There are issues of scheduling time with the doctor and the doctor getting reimbursed for time spent with you on FaceTime but I am confident these issues will be worked out. FaceTime can extend our lives into other places and other’s lives into our space — if any of us so chooses to do so. As for the other apps, I can’t wait to try the new GarageBand for iPad 2.

If you haven’t watched the keynote where Steve Jobs introduces the iPad2, I found it an enjoyable 63 minutes. He is justifiably proud of this latest Apple innovation. I don’t know where the limit is, but at the current price of Apple stock, the company has a market capitalization of 1.5 times GE, IBM, or Microsoft and is catching up to Exxon, the world’s most valuable company.

Tags: apple, facetime, garageband, ipad, ipad 2, jobs, WiFi

SIIA Conference – Buzz on the Panels

John Blossom took pictures and notes at the SIIA Conference last week. He did a really good job at it! If you want to get more insight to what some really smart panelists had to say, you can get it at John’s Buzz. He covered two panels.
Jim Kollegger’s panel
CEO Outlook: Winning the Platform Wars – Betting on the Next Digital Wave

John Patrick’s panel
Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target


Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, Jim Kollegger, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi