I'm very impressed by the Nook, Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader. It's clear B&N has studied Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle very carefully.
The Nook has almost all of the major features of both product lines, plus a few more, with few competitive disadvantages. B&N has also followed Amazon's lead on support services. The Nook has a very good online e-book store as well as applications to support e-book reading on Macs, Windows machines, and smartphones.
(Credit:
Barnes & Noble)
The Nook doesn't ship until the end of November, but here's what I found most significant from the announcement and the pages at nook.com:
Industrial design
I think the Nook is attractive and well-designed. It looks better than the Kindle 2, but not as good as Sony's Reader Touch Edition, which offers a larger screen in a smaller form factor. Also, Sony's forthcoming Reader Daily Edition is only slightly larger than the Nook, but offers a much larger screen.
Secondary color display
This feature surprised me. It seems expensive and insufficiently functional for what must be a significant added cost. The low resolution of this display (480 x 144, according to a CNET blog post) means it won't be useful for much beyond the basic user-interface features B&N has already described: book covers, menus, and a keyboard for note-taking. (Although I should note for the record that while B&N says "Its full-color touchscreen encourages you to bookmark, add notes, and highlight passages," I haven't found a photo on the company Web site depicting the virtual keyboard shown in some of the pre-release images. Perhaps that's one of the features still under development.)
By comparison, the secondary color screen built into the Alex e-book reader from Spring Design, shown in another recent CNET story, is large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it's also large enough to be very much in the way, leading to an awkward device. Spring Design and B&N need to make up their minds-- are they making e-book readers or something else?
... Read more
Uh-oh. It kind of worries us that these people are looking up the Donner Party in the middle of the woods. Let's hope they get a cell signal up there, too.
(Credit: WikiReader)Now, this is rather odd. Taiwan-based OpenMoko is out with WikiReader, a palm-size, touch-screen device that lets you tote 3 million text-only Wikipedia articles around offline. Given that we're in the smartphone age, we're not quite sure who would jump for this thing.
(Credit:
WikiReader)
Then again, there may be people with so-called dumb phones (or no phones at all) who get frequent, sudden urges to look up the Battle of Verdun or the history of the kilt while out and about.
We also tend to agree with Thomas Meyerhoffer, a former Apple designer known for his unique surfboards. He designed the WikiReader and thinks the gadget could prove a handy learning tool for kids.
"Because it's offline and offers parental controls, the whole experience happens within the device," he said. "I can give this to my 9-year-old, and I know he's only going to get content that is fine for him to read."
The WikiReader--which launched Tuesday and is available for $99 at the WikiReader Web site and Amazon--runs on two AAA batteries that the company says will last for months due to the gadget's lack of a backlight.
Articles (in English only for now) are stored on a microSD card. Updates for the device are provided quarterly and can be downloaded for free from the WikiReader Web site. A yearly subscription plan for updated microSD cards is also available for $29.
OpenMoko, you may recall, hit major snags earlier this year in the development of its open-source FreeRunner smartphone.
This is the last time we let Wilson choose the show title. Good news--The 404 Wikipedia page is BACK! Edit away, but please don't redirect the page. Today we talk about a fake bus stop in Germany, a "green" iPhone app, the iPhone 4G prototype, the "World of Warcraft" movie, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia.
That's right folks, our Wikipedia page is back up, and we're praying it's permanent this time! Big ups to our buddy Darth Paxton for helping us out, so go ahead and edit it all you like (we can't edit it ourselves) with inside jokes, characters, guests, etc., but please don't edit the redirections, those need to stay in place. Whoo! We're notable!!!
Also, do not attempt to adjust your monitor, the photo to the left is indeed our first look at Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia. With those two swords in his hands and that red sash around his waist, he looks more like a chef at a Chinese restaurant than the video game hero.
Speaking of bad video game movies, we're afraid to see what Sam Raimi has in store for the "World of Warcraft" movie adaptation, although it'd be pretty funny to just have a half an hour of peons mining and chopping wood.
A quick disclaimer: there are two stories in today's rundown that some might deem offensive, but although they're both a little dark, the beauty of The 404 is being able to find a lighthearted (and sometimes tasteless) joke in everything! For example, here's a funny story about a fake bus stop in a clinic that's designed to keep its Alzheimer's patients from escaping. Sounds awful, right? I agree--maybe all the money they spent on building this "net" could have been used to pay more nurses and doctors to determine the reason why the patients are trying desperately to escape in the first place!
Anyway, that's the first story. You'll have to listen to the full episode, which also includes news about an eBay auction for an original Sony PlayStation signed by Michael Jackson and a very "green friendly" iPhone app
EPISODE 387
Download today's podcast
Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video
... Read more
(Credit:
Wilson Tang/CNET)
We then talk with Dan about various stories from around the Internet, including one out of Dublin, in which a student's fake Wikipedia edit actually wound up in newspapers as legitimate! This leads us into a a discussion of proposed legislation that would make it basically illegal to slander someone online. Isn't that what the Internet was created for?
All this and more, plus Calls from the Public on today's show! Also, make sure to check out Blogs With Balls if you're interested in the just-as-nerdy sports blogosphere.
Sorry to those looking for today's video stream--a few technically difficulties prevented us from uploading the video. We've got everything figured out and tomorrow we'll be back up on CNET TV!
Leave us a voicemail 866-404-CNET or e-mail us at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com!
EPISODE 337
Download today's podcast | Subscribe in iTunes audio | Subscribe in RSS Audio| Subscribe in RSS Video
... Read more
There's been a lot of tension between Buzz Out Loud and The 404 for the last couple of months, but today, it's all on! We're sick and tired of the "Bore Out Loud" stealing our women (*ahem* Natali Del Conte) and our joke show titles. We've never been as crass as to have "urine" in one of our show titles. We got pretty bad, though, with having "tickling the Bonch." But we really did tickle CNET editor Bonnie Cha that day.
Don't make Wilson open a can of whoop-@$$ on you, Merritt. Tong is the only one stopping us at this point.
(Credit: Jeff Bakalar and Justin Yu/CNET)It's official! We. Are. The. Four. Oh. Four: High-tech, low-brow. That's right. That's the winner to our tagline contest. Also, here are the winners to our Justin Yu photo caption contest (in order) for a copy of Wheelman for the Xbox 360:
- What, the Hubble Telescope is down?! Don't worry, just tell me what you wanna look at.
- The 404's Justin Yu was taken into custody shortly after molesting a lumberjack, a 90-year-old woman, and robbing a Radioshack in Chinatown last evening. Luckily, there was no evidence of d*cktopping at any of these crime scenes.
- All the single printers, all the single printers!
In today's episode, we've got proof that gamers who play action-oriented video games have better vision than non-gamers. A man dies after trying to get healthier with the Wii Fit. Chinese people are spying on your pr0n collection and the NSA. Let's hope the Conflicker doesn't end the Interweb before they find too much dirt. The Pirate Bay joins Facebook. And finally, Encarta dies a slow, painful death after being stabbed by Wikipedia.
EPISODE 310
Download today's podcast | Subscribe in iTunes | Subscribe in RSS
... Read more
Tomorrow may be the day OS X Leopard makes its way out to the unwashed masses, but we were lucky enough to get our hands on a (legal) copy of the operating system earlier this morning directly from the mother ship in Cupertino. Besides the snazzy new look and feel, the big things we wanted to get our hands on were all the Web features we've been drooling over. We picked four that we think people are actually going to use, including Web Clips, RSS feed reading in the new Mail app, Web search history in Spotlight, and Wikipedia as a part of the Dictionary application.
Just narrowly missing the cut was the GPS feature in preview, which we think is cool, but definitely not quite mainstream until more cameras get GPS integration. In perfect conditions, assuming your photo has GPS bearings in its metadata, you'll be able to see where it is on a Google Map, which we wrote about earlier this week.
Enjoy the video, and if you're picking up a copy of Leopard for yourself, be sure to check these new features out. For more Leopard News, visit CNET's Leopard page.
- prev
- 1
- next
