Author: way0utwest

The CES show this week had a few new e-reader concepts coming. I think this technology is due to explode, though only if someone tackles it in a way similar to how PCs were handled, not the iPod. The Kindle is still the king of this world, but I wonder for how long.

One of the very interesting readers is the Liquavista full color reader. I like the idea of color for magazines, though I’ve never been concerned about it for books. It’s compared here to the Sony reader.

As long as battery life doesn’t suffer too much, I think this is great. It means that I’m likely to consider this for magazines and other places where pictures matter.

Now this reader from Skiff is one that I am interested in. When I first heard about e-ink, this is what I had in mind. A more flexible, construction paper like membrane that would rewrite itself.

I just hope there is some durability here to drop this in a laptop bag or suitcase. If there is, then I might consider one of these.

I actually had pictured something like this enTourage reader, but with the flexibility of the Skiff for my ideal reader. Something that let me approach life like a newspaper, going from page to page, closing it when I wanted to. The Kindle with a case was like this, but the cover felt like a waste. If there was something there, it would be nice.

This reader, however, looks too bulky for me. That’s the wrong direction, in my mind, though if you could turn off half of this and save power, it starts to get interesting. Running Andriod, this is very interesting, especially if you can move those images from the e-reader to the laptop for color.

I’ve been reading a book with charts and graphs, and they don’t scale well on the iPhone. Even on the PC they’re hard to read inside the Kindle reader. The problem is that they need to get out of the Kindle environment and allow the reader to zoom in enough to use them. This would be critical for textbooks.

Overall it’s great to see new devices coming onto the market. The problem, in my mind, is that we are still too fragmented in terms of the “stores” and “networks” for these devices. I want to be able to buy the enTourage, or Skiff, and still buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I shouldn’t be locked into just one store, and I think this type of bundling, is ultimately what needs to be fixed. While iTunes exists for the iPod, I can easily load my Amazon MP3s or CDs into it as well.

I used to think that too much data was never a bad thing. That having more information out there is good. However I’m starting to wonder if moderation might be in order here.

I’ve been thinking of getting a spare laptop since Toshiba isn’t too concerned about getting mine fixed. So I’ve been looking at other ones, and I think that I settled on an Acer 1420P tablet. PDC attendees got them for free this fall, though they are supposed to go on sale soon here in the US. It’s a good deal from a developer that doesn’t need it, but I’m getting off track.

As I was trying to decide if I wanted this one, I ended up searching out some other ones, including a nice ASUS from Amazon that had a good price and long battery life. I went looking for reviews, but outside of those posted on Amazon’s site, what I found was a bunch of blogs.

And NONE of them had reviews. It appears that someone, or a bunch of someones, copied the specs from Amazon, either with the graphics or without, and then posted it as a blog, generating rankings that made them appear on the first and second page of results. I checked a dozen or so and none of them provided “information”, they just repeated what Amazon had shown.

I’m sure this is a way to gain some Adwords traffic, and it might make you some money. I guess if you’re a programmer and you get $50 a month from Google on something like this, or even some Amazon Affiliate money, it’s worth doing. After all, how long can it take to copy and paste stuff up there?

Especially when it’s free on so many blog sites.

I’ve had a couple similar experiences lately when researching things, and slowly it appears that there are places where the Internet isn’t useful because there is too much of this “speculation”  taking place and hiding information. I’m not willing to search through 12 pages of results to find another nugget of information that ought to be on the first page.

With so many affiliates and opportunists, it seems some days that we’re moving closer to Idiocracy than Star Trek.

I was hoping that 4 days in the mountains would be a nice time to recharge. Unfortunately, with my wife needing to work some of the time, Kyle coming back early for school, and me getting hurt, it seems that I didn’t get a lot of time up there. I barely feel like we got away, as opposed to some of our long weekends last year.

It’s important to recharge, and get away from work. I’ve balanced things pretty well over the last few years, working from home, but I’ve also not taken a lot of vacation. And I’ve found that taking a day here and there hasn’t helped since I still get caught in the grind of working more the day before and after. A little of that happened this time.

I think that I might take a note from some of the people I listen to on the radio, like Jim Rome, and shut things down for a week at a time this year. I’ll be picking out some low traffic times and then trying to take a whole week off here and there. We’ll see how that works out.

One nice thing about the condo we hit in the mountains. It didn’t have free wi-fi available, so I was offline most of the time. It didn’t make sense for me to fire up my netbook and check mail or anything and pay a fee each day, so I left it off until the last night. That was a nice chance to get away from the site for a few days.