Posts Tagged: ‘kindle’

Tech News Briefs

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TechStuff

Lots of stuff going on today, so here are some highlights:

Nintendo dropped the price of the Wii to $199 in the United States. John P. Falcone wrote in CNET’s Crave blog about the change, which comes hot on the heels of Sony’s cut in the Playstation 3′s price to $299, and a little farther back, Microsoft’s cut in the 120GB hard drive version of the Xbox 360. I’m guessing that will help push the three consoles through the holiday season, but I’m also thinking sales will remain slow, based on what I’ve heard.

Andrew Nusca wrote at ZDNet that Microsoft‘s acquisition of Danger has yielded two Sharp-manufactured phones, the Turtle and the Pure. These are part of the so-called Pink Project. The pictures look a little like Danger’s Sidekick devices. A few days ago, Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet said Pink Project phones will use a version of Windows Mobile 7 and will be able to use the Zune music store.

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Google likes books. This much we knew. Otherwise it wouldn’t be working so hard on its digitization project — and ruffling many feathers along with way with regard to copyright issues and questions of who controls the material. But Google’s moving from the already-published (and mostly out-of-print) to the not-yet-published.

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Fujitsu announced this morning that it ‘s selling a color e-book reader — I’m sorry, they call it a “color epaper mobile terminal” — named the “FLEPia.” I would guess it’s pronounced the way you’d think it’s pronounced.

It’s been a long time coming. Fujitsu first announced the FLEPia nearly two years ago, in April 2007. According to a Fujitsu press release, the FLEPia will have an 8-inch color electronic paper screen capable of displaying 260,000 colors in high definition. It’ll also support Bluetooth and wireless technology. Color, huh? Expect to see the words “Kindle killer” in a lot of headlines. If the battery lasts as long as Fujitsu said it will — 40 hours — that’ll certainly help the company take on the reigning e-book champ. Then again, Amazon.com claims the Kindle will allow you to read for four days straight, even with the wireless network on.

And the FLEPia won’t let you wirelessly connect to the Amazon.com Kindle Store. Despite granting access to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Sony Reader fans are still contacting Sony for their e-books. Fujitsu said the FLEPia can access Papyless, Japan’s largest e-book retailer.

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I found this article in The New York Times as I was eating breakfast this morning and when I got to work I had to take a look for myself. Amazon.com has released an application called Kindle for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

When you launch the application, you land on the main screen, where you can begin reading your books. At the top right, there’s a button called Get Books — press it and you find out that your options for buying books are to purchase them on your computer and upload them to your iPod. Or you can buy them using Safari on the iPhone or iPod. It’s pretty simple.

The software also supports Amazon.com’s Whispersync function, so if you’ve bought books from Amazon.com before, you can read them on your iPod or iPhone.

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