When Amazon created an iPhone app based on its popular e-reader device, the Kindle, it became clear that $10 books were as big or bigger than $400 readers in Amazon's business model. By allowing reading on other devices, Amazon has been able to make sales to customers who would never have bought a Kindle, and that's worked so well on the iPhone that other devices and book formats are now on the agenda.

According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company looks at the ebook business and the gadget business as separate. Expanding to new devices isn't going to keep gadget-hungry consumers from buying a Kindle if they were planning to do it anyway, and plenty of customers who would never buy a Kindle might still buy a few books for their own devices. As for file formats, the Kindle already reads PDFs, but Bezos said other formats could be supported in the future. This may be one of the results we're seeing from Amazon's acquistion of Stanza, which supported formats that the Kindle doesn't yet.

Updated: At first, I thought that recent release of the Kindle Source Code might have something to do with developing for other platforms, but it was actually only done to comply with the Gnu Public License. Because the Kindle was built on some open-source GPL-licensed components, Amazon had to release the parts of the code that were modifications of those components. It unfortunately has nothing to do with enabling developers on other platforms to build apps that work with Kindle books.

One of the selling points of the Palm Pre is that it can sync with iTunes just like an iPhone can, minus the ability to play old DRM-protected purchases from the Apple store. The thing is, that amazing iTunes support comes from a hacky workaround where the Pre passes itself off as Apple hardware when it's connected. It won't show up in iTunes as a "Palm Pre," it'll show up as an iPod.

What can Apple do about it, though? An escalating battle to break the hack could require Apple to release firmware updates, which is always annoying for users, or could be fixed on the software side with an iTunes update. The newest release of iTunes, 8.2, reportedly doesn't break Pre's syncing support.

What will the outcome be? Do you think we'll see a lawsuit, a firmware or iTunes-side fix from Apple, or something completely different?

I enjoyed my MSI Wind netbook while I had it, but there was one task that always gave it fits: running Flash-based anything. Games stuttered, YouTube clips were choppy, and the system's tiny fan spun like a tin can in a tornado.

Owners of newer netbooks featuring NVidia's upcoming Tegra system-on-a-chip or Broadcom's Crystal HD will be glad to hear that Adobe is teaming up with NVidia to produce a version of the Flash player tuned for netbooks and MIDs. The goal is to provide full h.264-powered HD video to more mobile devices.

Another result of the partnership: Flash will likely see significant performance gains on other NVidia chipsets as well. At last you'll be able to put your multi-GPU SLI configuration to good use while enjoying your favorite Time Wasters!

[ via ZDNet ]

That was fast! As soon as rumors started about a new, larger Kindle due from Amazon this week, the device appeared for pre-order on Amazon's front page. The Kindle DX has a 9.7" display that makes it suitable for reading PDFs and websites in their original layouts. As we predicted, Amazon is also pushing the DX as the ideal reader for newspapers and magazines.

The DX's screen orientation changes automatically, allowing you to turn it to widescreen for website viewing. At $489, it's quite a bit pricier than the regular Kindle, but its storage space is also more than twice that of the smaller device. No announcement on the textbook angle we were hearing about, but we'll wait and see what happens. We'll also wait and see what the DX does for newspaper readership. Can it boost the newspaper business in a way that the original Kindle couldn't, just by having a screen that might be big enough to do justice to newspaper layouts? Time will tell.

Rumors have been floating around this week about a new, large-screen version of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. The New York Times seemingly confirmed that the device is for real, and it could be released "as early as this week," according to their industry sources. The Times pieces focuses, not surprisingly, on the larger Kindle as a platform for newspapers and magazines, whose pages didn't quite translate to the current Kindle's smaller screen.

As much as a newspaper-friendly Kindle might matter to the future of print journalism there is some speculation about other important uses, like textbooks. Some websites are reporting that the new device will be tested at a handful of universities in the fall. It would be phenomenal not to carry around several pounds of reading material for classes, especially if the Kindle versions of the books cost less than the paper editions.

Linux advocates had a lot of fun recently taking shots at Windows 7 Starter version, which Microsoft has positioned as an option for low-cost netbooks.

What could Microsoft possibly offer in response to the "Starter is a comically bad attempt at an operating system" comments?

They could announce the continued availability of Windows XP for netbook manufacturers for a full year after the release of Windows 7 - which exactly what they've done.

If what Acer said earlier turns out to be true, that means OEMs will be able to sell XP-powered machines until October 2010, and that decision is sure to have repercussions for Linux on netbooks.

After all, one of the key weaknesses of Starter Edition was the three application limit - something that can't be said about Windows XP.

Though it will still add a bit to the cost of a system, the amount has been pegged as low as $15. That's a negligible amount and one most consumers will be willing to absorb to have access to an operating system that is far more familiar to most than any Linux distribution.

The extension will give Microsoft an entire year to build public awareness of Windows 7 and showcase Starter Edition - or scrap it and offer better pricing on another more complete version. Either way, today's announcement could mean a continued rough road ahead for mainstream Linux.

[via PC World]

As much as I'd like it to not be the case, some of my customers still rely on clunky (but functional) DOS applications to manage their businesses. While their applications tend not to change, their hardware does - which invariably leads to problems.

Take printing , example. If your business is stuck with a DOS application and restricts you to a half dozen or so "supported" printers, you may think that you'll have to use that HP Laserjet IIp forever. DOS isn't all that fond of printing to USB printers.

Sure, you can hack a solution together by setting up a network share and mapping LPT1 to it, but it doesn't always work depending on your printer. MFCs are especially bad for this.

WinPrint provides a better solution. It's a free application that monitors DOS print jobs and forwards them to any Windows printer. Configuration is fairly simple, though you will likely need to play with margin settings a bit to get things looking picture-perfect. Once you've got things set up correctly, you won't have to worry about your trusty old parallel-only printer dying on you and leaving you in the lurch.

So you're in love with your Kindle, but you wish you had a way to view PDF or HTML files on it? A quick run through Auto Kindle, and they're painlessly converted to the reader's native .mobi format.

I haven't posted a screenshot of the app, because there's really not a lot to see. When you launch Auto Kindle, you'll be immediately asked to browse for a source file. Once you've done that, a prompt asks you to specify the location to save your newly converted file. A progress indicator appears, fills, then disappears, and your conversion is done.

Create a shortcut to the program on your desktop, and you can convert by dragging-and-dropping files onto it. Auto Kindle does a very good job of converting files, though you may notice a quirk or two.

Sure, there are online services that do this as well, and Amazon provides email conversions, but maybe you'd rather take care of things from the privacy of your own desktop.

Auto Kindle is a free download for Windows only.

In a victory for neo-Luddites the Author's Guild, Amazon has announced its intention to disable the speech to text function its new Kindle 2 ebook reader. Amazon announced its intention to selectively disable the device following criticism from the Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jnr. that the Kindle 2 would undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market.

In a statement released to the press, Amazon argued that the text-to-speech feature was legal, but said that it would give authors the right to decide whether or not to disable the feature for their books:

'Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given... nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat... Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.'

It's unclear if the Author's Guild plans to now campaign to receive royalties from all other text-to-speech programs, but its hollow victory is sure to be received poorly by the visually impaired and any other consumers who are forking out around $350 bucks for their new Kindle and want to actually use the legal functionality that it has been designed with.

Hopefully Amazon will flag up which cheapskate publishers have disabled the text to speech functionality of their books very clearly, so that Kindle users can be sure to vote with their wallets and boycott those responsible for this shameful decision.

[Via the New York Times]

Easeus Partition Manager is a great, free application for, well, managing hard drive partitions. I've written about it before, and I always keep the installer handy on my USB flash drive. Apart from creating, deleting, resizing, and formatting, you can also use Easeus to copy partitions or entire disks.

The free edition is great, but until 11:59pm today, you can get your hands the professional edtion for free as well, thanks to Easeus and MakeTechEasier. Professional Edition adds support for 64-bit Windows systems and the option to create a bootable CD or DVD.

Don't be too sad if you miss out - the free version runs just fine on 32-bit systems, and since EPM runs in Windows the lack of a boot CD won't be a problem unless something catastrophic occurs. I've used Easeus extensively and never had a single problem that wasn't my fault.

Head over to MTE for the download link and details.

Update: the site seems to be a tad overworked at present...be patient, and hopefully you'll get through soon!

After helping the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrest two people who thought it was a bright idea to steal a laptop from a heavily-surveilled store, I thought maybe I could provide some helpful pointers of things to avoid if you've decided you're going to perpetrate such an act.

Please note: this piece is intended as humor, not as advice. Don't be an idiot. Stealing is illegal, mmmkay?

Don't take pictures of yourself with the built-in webcam

While it's not concrete proof that you've had the stolen article in your posession, it's certainly not a wise move to snap a few grainy pics of yourself smiling at the camera. It at least tells police that yes, you did use the computer in question, and it's a good starting point for them to connect the dots.

According to Microsoft sources, over 25% of all Vista sales in Q4 2008 were 64-bit. Bargain basement prices on DDR2 memory modules played an important role. After all, getting the most out of the multiple gigs of dirt cheap ram in your system means running a 64-bit OS that knows how to handle it.

Several OEMs quietly shipped laptop and desktop models during the holiday season running Vista x64, much to the surprise of many retailers (and technicians like yours truly). Driver availability still remains a hurdle, but if Windows 7 can improve on Vista's good 64-bit base we should see a big move to 64-bit installs.

Windows 7 is expected to be Microsoft's last native 32-bit version - Server 2008 R2 has already moved to 64-bit only. Here's hoping hardware manufacturers and software publishers respond and start releasing native 64-bit versions of their applications.

I've seen a very good performance increase in Photoshop CS4 since making the switch and would love to be running more native apps.

Trouble is, they're not available yet for the most part. Here's hoping a little more time and a new OS can help change that.

[ via Daily Tech ]

There are 48.5 million Wii's out there, and Blockbuster may be positioning itself to deliver video on demand to them thanks to a newly-announced partnership with Sonic Solutions.

Sonic is the force behind the CinemaNow service, which is available on LG networked blu-ray players and other devices - like Nintendo's wildly popular gaming console.

With the "Everybody's Theatre" streaming anime service set to go live on WiiWare in Japan January 25th, the stage is certainly set for the Wii to gain some additional functionality.

As WiiBrew users already know, the two USB ports at the back work just fine for attaching external hard drives. The Wii has plenty of room for expansion, and it would certainly make sense for Nintendo to offer a service to compete with Netflix on the Xbox 360.

Personally, I'd love to be able to watch video on demand with my Wii. Since I'm in Canada, though, I won't hold my breath.

[ via BetaNews ]

This little gem managed to slip through the cracks, but now that you've all had a chance to get your hands on the Windows 7 beta iso, it's definitely worth sharing.

In November Long Zheng - all around smartypants and good guy - released a handy tutorial on turning the PDC hard drive that Windows 7 was being distributed on at the time into a bootable installer. As luck would have it, he discovered that the process works with any old drive.

It's a pretty simple procedure. Create an active partition on your USB drive if there's not one there already. Mount your Windows 7 iso with a utility like Daemon Tools Lite, and copy the complete contents of the "disc" onto your drive. That's it. Reboot and force your PC to boot to the USB device, and you should be ready to install.

You should be able to pull the same thing off with Vista as well by following the same steps.

We don't spend a lot of time covering hardware at Download Squad. But this story is just too cool to pass up. Foxit Software, the company behind one of our favorite PDF readers, plans to release an eBook reader that will take on the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. The Foxit eSlick is due out in January and it will sell for $229 at launch before settling in at $259. That's about a hundred bucks cheaper than the competition.

The eBook reader will weigh about 6 ounces and measure just .4 inches thick. It sports a 6 inch, 600 x 800 pixel display that should look a lot like the Amazon Kindle screen (since it's manufeacturer by the same copany). You'll be able to read PDFs and listen to MP3s. But there's no wireless connectivity which means you won't be able to automatically download books, blogs or newspapers without connecting the reader to a computer first. Foxit may offer wireless features on future models.

The eSlick will have 128MB of built in memory plus an SD card slot for expansion and it will ship with a 2GB card. The machine doesn't draw much power, which means you can flip 8,000 pages without recharging.

What do you think? Is the Foxit eSlick a welcome addition to the world of eBook readers? Or should Foxit stick to making software?

[via PC World]