As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.

Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.

Here are the basic facts:

It's 7.2" wide … Read more

The New York Times reported this weekend, in an article titled "Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press," that Amazon.com is on the verge of introducing a new larger-screen Kindle e-book reader.

A blog post from CNET's David Carnoy ("Amazon to introduce larger Kindle this week?") says that Amazon has scheduled a press event for Wednesday that may be the venue for this announcement.

The larger Kindle (which I think of as a "Kindle Pro," although I really have no idea what Amazon might call it) should be about … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

Last September, I wrote a piece about a new e-book reader under development at Plastic Logic (see "E-books: The flexible future").

At the time, the company was hoping to ship its still unnamed e-book reader in the first half of this year. I was really looking forward to it, since it provides a unique combination of two valuable features: a big screen and enough flexibility to tolerate a little bit of bending. (I worry about my Kindle getting crunched in my briefcase.)

Monday night, I was watching the local news from KGO-TV in San Francisco, and caught a … Read more

I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most … Read more

Much coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show is full of references to new Netbooks introduced at the show. But in fact, there were hardly any Netbooks at all, and those that did appear went almost unmentioned.

The truth is, the Netbook is dead, and good riddance. The concept of the Netbook was based on a tragic misunderstanding: the belief that tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide wanted a portable computer that was small, power-efficient, and (here's the misunderstanding) not good for much beyond accessing the Internet.

That's where the "Net" in "… Read more

I suppose most of the excitement from MacWorld Expo has died down by now, but I'd still like to talk a little about two new Mac laptops introduced at the show-- Apple's own 17" MacBook Pro, and Axiotron's Modbook Pro, a tablet computer made by repackaging the components from Apple's 15" MacBook Pro along with some new parts.

First, the Axiotron product. Externally, the ModBook Pro is radically different from the Apple notebook that provides most of its component parts.

In this publicity photo, the Modbook Pro's beveled edges are apparent. The shape … Read more

As reported by The Wall Street Journal this week, Amazon.com's e-book reader, the Kindle, is out of stock.

The Journal credits Oprah Winfrey, who recommended the Kindle on her show in October.

I saw this effect myself in the page views for old blog posts here--the daily view count for some of my old Kindle posts, especially my comparison of the Kindle with Sony's Reader, spiked the very next day, and it remains higher today than it was before that show aired.

Amazon's Web site reports delivery delays of 11 weeks to 13 weeks, which means … Read more

When Apple announced its new notebooks on Tuesday, it said the new machines would be in the company's retail stores the next day.

So I went to the Apple store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara, Calif., after work on Wednesday. I got there a few minutes after 6 p.m. and discovered that an Apple technician was in the process of replacing an old MacBook Pro with the first one of the new models.

I positioned myself authoritatively about a foot from the tech's left elbow, so when he was done, I was the … Read more