Follow up to "Amazon and the Kindle"

This has to be the follow up to my last post. Two days after I published the post I found out that Barnes and Noble just released a New Nook. And it is a coloured touch screen android device. Exactly what I believe that Amazon should do even though I wondered in my previous post if it was not too late for such a product because of the crazy explosion of cheap, Chinese – made, android - based touch screen tablets.
The most interesting thing about the Nook Color though is the fact that Barnes and Noble deviated from using an Electronic ink display and instead opted for a 7 inch coloured LCD touch screen. At $249 and with wifi, the prize sounds right, but I have to wonder if this is not an attempt to get a colored ebook reader out before Amazon. Leaving e-ink to LCD means that the battery now empties out in a few hours instead of weeks, but it also means that this device can play video, making it into a kind of cheap iPad. Or should I say a device that tries to be an iPad and an ebook reader at the same time. Barnes and Noble is already talking about releasing an SDK.
This device also means that Barnes and Noble joins the list of manufacturers of ebook readers deviating from e-ink to coloured LCD along with the Sharper Image Literati Reader, Pandigital Novel, Entourage Edge, Cruz Reader and Augen’s the book.
With PC Magazine calling it the first excellent color ebook reader, this is certainly a one-up for Barnes and Noble. The question now is: What will Amazon answer with and how soon? Suddenly their devices are starting to look outdated.

The truth is while I think that the best way to read text only content such as novels might be a monochrome e-ink display with weeks of battery, lots of people out there will like to read comics, magazines and pdf in full color and will not mind if the battery of their device has to be charged daily. An app store and an ability to do more than just read is also a plus. Ultimately creating a device that will not be eclipsed by the competition is paramount. And I think it is time for Amazon to show what they have got next.

Amazon and the Kindle

In an earlier post (Dream Hardware Department), I opinioned that a good way forward for Amazon and its Kindles might be to do a touch screen Android powered version of the Kindle. This was before Amazon released its range of Kindle 3s: The Graphite range with improved E-ink screen, better contrast all in a smaller package.

Now I wonder if it might not be a little too late for that. This is because I have noticed an explosion of Chinese made, touch screen, Android powered devices which cost cheaper than the Kindle DX and cost at about the same range as the Kindle 3G. The most interesting part of this story is the fact that everywhere you turn, you see adverts of these devices on the web. And since they run Android, you can install the Kindle for Android on them and have a coloured reading device, which can also serve as a medium for other type of media consumption such as video and audio.

True this might be bulkier than the Kindle and the power consumption might not compete at a mere 5 – 7 hours to the Kindle’s weeks of battery, but when you are busy reading you tend to forget what ever limitations of your device and be immersed in the content. The mere fact that it can view colored content will make it suitable for comics and magazines giving it a huge edge on the Kindle. Touch screen functionality also gives them a kind of iPad coolness even if most of them are single touch and not multi-touch.

While I have yet to see any of these numerous devices with a sim card slot, this will make them even more powerful freeing them from the proximity limitations of wifi. And for a price as cheap as they come, (even though I wonder how they can be soo cheap, is this because of poor build or as a result of tons of possible patent infringement made in the production of these devices) they are winners any day.

For the end users I dare say it will continue to makes less sense to buy a Kindle when you have other devices offering better at cheaper rates. For Amazon though it looks like they will win no matter what. If they sell Kindles, its all good. If not, then I am sure they are happy as long as we all have Kindle apps on whatever devices we carry and we continue to buy books from the Amazon store.

Apple Versus Android

Lately I have been thinking about the possible future of tablet computing and not because I want to be a “teleprophet” but because I can’t help thinking that the current scenarios could just be history kinda repeating itself.
Apple created the home computer market with the release of Apple II in 1977 years ahead of the IBM computer. The IBM PC which was released in 1981 drove other personal computer architectures to extinction in the 80s excerpt for Apple. This off course started a shift in the computer market with the birth of the IBM clones which meant that by the 90s the IBM computer was far more popular than Apple and the top computer computers were all manufacturing the IBM clone, using Intel processors and running on Microsoft operating systems. This meant that the IBM computers could be cheaper than the Apple computers (there were more options to choose from).
Apple always claimed the superiority of its hardware but even Apple finally switched to the Intel processor in 2006 which for me was a surprise because Apple had released Power Mac G5 computers in 2003 claiming the advantage of 64 bit processors and at the time of the switch only AMD had desktop 64 bit processors ready. It was probably cheaper to go Intel than AMD.
Apple lost most of its market share in the personal computer market in the 1990s fighting against IBM clones running Microsoft operating systems. I can’t help but imagine that we are on course for something similar here. I think the only difference is that, this time around while PC vendors had to pay for the Microsoft operating systems, Apples’ competition is an open source OS, making it cheaper to get. Android will also develop faster, because of its open source nature. It is not managed nor controlled by a monopoly like Microsoft!
Maybe this is the reason that Apple iPhone is already been outsold by Android based phones. While Apple will continue to be cool and continue to make unique products and have the advantage of being first to create an App store and thus have more applications on the store, the increased sale of Android phones and devices will also be the increased creation of more Android based applications. Developers will start to recognize that it makes sense to also develop Android versions of their applications. With time the Android Marketplace potentially will grow beyond that of the Apple App store. Or will it? Only time will tell. But the future may just be Android.

Dream Hardware Department

With the explosions we have seen in the eBook reader and tablet scene and the explosion in the sales of the Apple iPad (3 Million in less than 90 days), I have been thinking with the many eBook readers and tablets being announced this year why not have a Microsoft tablet. Unfortunately Microsoft got the concept of the tablet wrong and has now pulled the plug on its Courier tablet. But let’s face it, with the release of the iPad Microsoft now has a chance to copy Apple like it has done in the past. To get into the eBook reader space why not makes a 9.7 inch Zune player! And then make it able to install light Windows applications. Imagine if I could install my VLC player or Win amp on the Zune and have other Windows applications. Then imagine this along with an app store!

On the other hand the Amazon Kindle is just way behind in terms of the current offerings and looses hands down when compared with the iPad excerpt off course with the fact that it has access to more books. I think the way forward for the Kindle will be to produce a colored touch screen version and license the Android operating system. I think this will empower the kindle; it will get an app store, an operating system that developers can develop for and media capabilities all in one sweep. This will at least give it a fighting chance against the iPad.

But then does Amazon want to compete? Amazon wants to sell books and Amazon just needs to have its Kindle app on Apple devices, on Android devices and the Blackberry OS and it will still sell books at maybe a cheaper rate then developing a hand held device. But I feel a company smart enough to develop a good enough tablet like the iPad and use the Android OS might be in place to reap the benefits similar to OEM manufacturers who make hardware and license the Windows operating system. Dell is already doing this with its Streak tablet and ICD with the Vega. Let’s face it: Android is here to stay. Statistics released in May shows Android phones outselling Apple phones in US for the first time (http://www.networkworld.com). So using Android might also be the start of a huge eco-system of Android powered devices that just might end up overcoming Apple and its devices. And competition in this space might just be good for the consumer ultimately.

How good are Current Laptops Graphically?

One of my most interesting past times, is running bench marks on computers and seeing what they get to score. Over the years my favourite bench mark application has been 3 D Mark 2001 SE (Ok call me archaic). This bench mark is really mostly a measure of the graphical performance of the computer. Well you would probably think that I should have moved to a more current version of the software but the truth is that I have seen so many low rate performances on that benchmark even from systems that I expected so much from that it just feels like a waste of time going to a more complex or complicated benchmark when a lot of systems still fall short of this tests.
In fact the highest scores I have ever had on these tests was an AlienWare Laptop running Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Direct X 9C, 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor with hyper threading, 1 GB of RAM, 128 MB Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 graphics accelerator on a PCI Express interface. This scored 9547 on the default test with a resolution of 1024x768 at 32 bit color and 11088 on the 800x600 at 16 bit color .Most other computers fall to less than half of these scores.
Over the years I have found out that the strength of a good score on this test is a very good graphics card and off course support for all of the 17 tests incorporated in the software. Most graphics cards fall short especially when it comes to the environment bump mapping, Pixel shader and the advanced pixel shader tests. I have had guys argue with me that this test is not a true test of a computer’s performance. Maybe true but let’s face it the graphical needs of a computer are still the heaviest needs on the performance of the computer at any time, just ask any hard core gamer.
This weekend I decided to run my first 3 D Mark benchmark on a Vista Capable computer. My original fear was that Vista might not support the software but it did. Truth is the software is not updated for Direct X 10 but then let’s face it, how many softwares, applications or graphics cards out there already support Direct X 10?
The culprit for my test was a HP Pavilion dv6000 running on Windows Vista Home Premium, With Intel Centrino Duo at 2.0Ghz, Mobile Intel 945GM/GU on a PCI Express interface,224 MB graphics memory, Direct X 10 and 2 GB RAM. The good part of the test was this system had no problems performing all 17 tests including the pixel shader tests I mentioned earlier. But I was disappointed with the final score of 4571 for the default settings 0f 1024x768 at 32 bit color and 5319 for the 800x600 at 16 bit color settings! This score is in the same range with a Sony Vaio I tested almost 2 years ago that scored 4606 and 5427, and that Sony Vaio was a Celeron M running at 1.73Ghz, 512MB RAM, Windows XP service pack 2 with Direct X 9C. One fact though is both ran on Intel graphics accelerators, so I am not really surprised. I do wonder if Vista played any part in the performance of the HP laptop. But it is obvious all this new processor, memory, graphics interface technologies does not nullify the need for an Nvidia or ATI graphics card to get the best results graphically.

Screaming Video

Ok the truth is that I Couldn’t think of any other title for this entry other than “screaming video”. Now before you start to wonder what I’m talking about or if this is a typo I just might go ahead and explain myself.
The other day I setup a small home network between two computers to share resources, an internet connection and a printer. Someone then asked me if there was a way a video played on one of the computers could be watched on another and then I remembered Video Lan Chat or the VLC player (www.videolan.org). So I decided to setup up video streaming on that network making use of VLC player. Well the truth is I have been using the VLC player for more than 3 years because it is really a silver bullet for video formats as it can play almost all kinds of video format straight out of the box. So if you do not want to install a codec pack and yet want to have access to different video formats, VLC was a very good key. Now when I think back I wonder why I had never tried the streaming video functions that come with it.
So I got online and checked out what people where doing with it and was so shocked. It was so simple to setup that it took less than 10 clicks on the System I used as the server and the system I sent the video to. And it supports almost all kinds of video formats, operating systems, and also is available on hand held devices! Let’s not forget its support for DVDs, TV tuner card, Satellite TV, digital TV and even video encoder cards. It even has a web interface which meant that I could control the server from virtually any computer on the network. I could create playlists remotely, control volume, make my video full screen or not, pause and so much more. The experience has been such a rewarding one that all I have been doing on that network has been streaming video.
VLC is so flexible that you could stream on a windows server and pick it up on a Mac or Linux client or in any other possible arrangements you could draw up from those options.
And not only can it be used on a LAN it can also be used on the internet. So really the possibilities are endless. And all this from a very light weight application that is really friendly to use and packed with more than enough codecs? I tell you streaming video the VLC way is such a very smart and cool way that it screams!

Media Player Heaven

Most Media players always offer something unique. I suppose the idea is to lure us to them and make us make them the media player of choice. The features they offer include support for different file formats, skins, visualizations, play lists, support for portable players, access to the Internet, media browsers, online stores and as much as Im sure i don't even know about.
For me, my media player of choice is really the Apple itunes, now this is a funny choice because it supports mp3, aac, m4a but refuses to support the wma format (Microsoft's propriety format) and must first convert wma to m4a before it can add it to its playlists. And can you blame Apple considering that the wma format was the creation of their "enemy" Microsoft who on its own took advantage of the fact that its own Media player came bundled with the Windows operating system and for years refused to support the encoding of mp3 files, a format the rest of the world was happy about, but only supported mp3 playback!
Since I own an ipod it also means that I actually need the itunes player because it is what I use to synchronise music and my play lists from itunes to my ipod.
The truth is though, sometimes it is the little attention to detail in the design of these softwares that keep us hooked. True the itunes has really cool visualizations, feels different from any other media player I know and is just "Apple cool". But can you imagine while playing with my play lists the other day I found out that settings like "repeat" and "play all" where play list specific. Thus if I set a play list to "repeat" after playing, the setting stayed with only that play list and I could set other play lists to play once for example or whatever preference I have for that play list. Imagine configuring my play lists to play exactly how I want it and the player stores those settings! Off course the next thing I did was start my Windows Media Player 11 and tried the same thing and off course Im sure you don't need a witch-doctor to know there was no such thing in WMPlayer. Not to take the spark out of Windows Media Player 11 nor to start a battle of comparisons. But for me this little attention to design detail is what makes me stick with a particular software regardless. Even if I have to use other players from time to time to play other kinds of files it might not support. True I may not always want to hear a play list the same way, but sometimes how I choose to hear the play list is an integral part of the play list too.