Amazon Kindle Hands-On

Yesterday, I had a chance to play with the Amazon Kindle, a connected eBook that is generating a lot of buzz. Here are my impressions:

Rapidrepair has an interesting photo gallery that shows the inside of the Amazon Kindle. They also show the step-by-step instruction to take yours apart, but of course, you’ll do it at your own risk Rapid Repair Photo gallery.

Designer Tom Kenworthy has come up with a Sustainable Flash Memory Card Holder that is made from recycled vending cups - can you believe that? A single holder requires seven plastic cups to construct, and best of all is, you will help reduce the amount of waste in our environment while holding the plethora of memory cards that are currently floating around the market. I guess it all depends on your creativity on how you want it to look like.

Building over the success of USB and USB 2.0, a new set of detailed specifications for a “USB 3.0” will be available in January. Here are the highlights:

As if a 46" full HD LCD TV sitting down in your living room isn’t enough to impress friends, there is now a TV from Hyundai that offers all that and more - specifically support for 3D digital broadcasting that will be due in Japan from December onwards. There is no word on pricing for this full HD 3D LCD TV, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it won’t be easy on your pockets. Any takers for this TV? So far, 3D TVs that I’ve seen so far aren’t suitable for long term viewing as it is easy to get all giddy after a short while of viewing. Hopefully, things will change for the better with this new 3D LCD TV.

And in a smaller form factor to boot! The designers took the original and thanks to the power of miniaturization, managed to squeeze it into a much smaller size. Unfortunately, you will lose all semblance of its big brother’s USB hub functionality. Instead, pressing the big red button in the middle will invoke an explosion sound for kicks. This cellphone charm has been slapped with a rather ridiculous €19 price tag. I suppose you’re paying for the novelty factor more than anything else.

The Potty Watch from Potty Time is one interesting device to help young parents potty train their kids without going potty themselves. This fun and flexible timer is worn by the toddler, and it will play music as well as flash lights every 30, 60 or 90 minutes and then resets itself automatically. Whenever these lights flash, that’s the signal for when they ought to spend some time away from whatever they’re doing at the moment (drooling at a mobile, or just throwing things around the house) and head towards the potty. This fun learning environment will probably make kids love their potties all the more. The Potty Time Watch will come in blue, green and pink colors, retailing for $9.99 each.

Mention supercar and you probably have the image of an exotic beast that guzzles up fuel like there’s no tomorrow. Not so with the Swedish Koenigsegg CCXR, as this beast is capable of running on just E85 ethanol fuel alone. Unfortunately, the car comes with a sticker price of $2.3 million, putting this out of reach for most folks. I strongly believe if you can afford such a car, surely the question of expensive fuel won’t matter to you? Still, here are some specs to get your pulse racing (I’m sure its stunning looks had already done so) - a 4.7 liter V8 engine that cranks out 1,018 horsepower, hitting 62 mph from standing still in just 2.9 seconds with a maximum speed of 250 mph.

HP aims to green its operations further by installing a new roof-top SPV system at the HP facility in San Diego California. This system will boast a 1 Megawatt capacity, placing it roughly 63% of the recently installed Google system. 5,000 solar-power panels have been installed, and these will cover 10% of the energy consumed by the facility, helping HP save up to $750,000 in power costs acrss 15 years. Now that amount might not be much for a company that makes millions upon millions, but any step that helps preserve our earth for the next generation gets a thumbs-up in my books.

Find all the sources, and discover more consumer electronics news and reviews at Ubergizmo.com.

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This week, Atelier reviews what is trendy on the web magazine of our great expert contributor Ubergizmo.com, dedicated to consumer electronics news and reviews.

Panasonic has released a new eye scanner known as the BM-ET200 that boasts voice activation (it bellows out commands like "Stand up straight!") while identifying a user in just 0.3 seconds. The BM-ET200 can be modified to handle more than 10,000 user records, and is tipped to retail for approximately $2,500 when released in the US next year. The authentication process is pretty simple - the scanner fires a laser into the eye (up to 20" away), while the user aligns the eye with the camera by directly focusing on a green light. Don’t worry, it won’t leave you blind although it does sound painful in theory. Guess bigwig corporation could certainly make do with one of these.

Story posted on: October 17, 2007

The EU has decided to allow cellphone calls to be made while you’re in the air, ten thousands of feet above the ground courtesy of a new technology that does not run the risk of interference with aircraft systems. This reservation of space for the required airwaves has already been recommended to the EU countries’ governments before the system can be fully rolled out. On-board phone calls will be redirected to a satellite, and subsequently transmitted to the carrier’s network, resulting in a sky-high price that is on par with your current lofty position. There are limitations to this system though as such phone calls are forbidden whenever the plane is less than 3,000 meters in height.

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(Credit Photo: Matthew Johnson)

That’s it: I started playing with the multi-touch screen and the motion sensor that rotates automatically the display when you turn the iPod 90°. I am pretty sure that the iPhone is the only phone on earth with 4 buttons: lock/unlock, mute/unmute, Sound Up/Down and the home button, just below the screen. This button is actually the “Home” button: anytime you push it, the interface goes to the home screen. The good thing is that it doesn’t shut down the application you are running. Thus, when you are writing an email, if you need to go online, a simple “touches” (should I say click?) on the “Safari” button and you end up browsing the web for information. You can then easily come back to your email without loosing the message you started to type!

There are 4 devices in one iPhone, they are represented in a small dock at the bottom of the screen:

On the home screen you can also access 12 widgets:

Once you’re done with this, and perhaps because it costs $500 at least, you start wondering what you would expect Apple adding to your iPhone :

Julien Genestoux for Atelier

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Whether for free or for a fee, Wi-Fi is becoming more pervasive. In hotel rooms and campgrounds, airport waiting rooms and city buses, computer users can connect to the Internet at will.

In the Bay Area, Internet users just got some good news from AC Transit. On 78 buses crisscrossing the area, laptops should become a common sight. AC Transit hopes to attract new riders who want to be productive during their commute. The $340,000 grant from the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency covers two years of access fees. After that, the fares from new riders should continue paying for access.

Train commuters on the Caltrain line from Gilroy to San Francisco and on the Capitol Corridor from Auburn to San Jose have already been able to connect wirelessly through experiments that have been going on for years. Google employees can also work on the bus ride to campus. The 32 company buses cover 230 miles of freeways from Concord to Santa Cruz and offer wireless Internet access to employees who say the bus improves their quality of life and makes them feel better about leaving their car at home.

Many coffeehouses advertise free Wi-Fi as a way to attract clients who are as addicted to their Internet connexion as they are to their morning cup of coffee. Starbucks has chosen the fee-based route with a $10 a day connexion over T-Mobile. Regardless, it is possible to do business from a coffee shop about anywhere in the country.

Hotels quickly discovered that business and pleasure guests alike put an Internet connexion on the top of their wish list. Most hotels now offer some kind of solution, whether free or not. But according to HotelChatter, the situation reached an impasse in 2007. “Instead of finding more and more hotels offering free Wi-Fi, we are finding more restrictions are being added to free hotel Wi-Fi. For instance, you can get free Wi-Fi in the lobby, but in-rooms it’s Ethernet and it starts at $9.95. Or you can get free Wi-Fi in your rooms but you need to belong to a hotel’s loyalty program or be assigned a code with a special password,” wrote HotelChatter in its annual look at hotels with the best and worst Wi-Fi.

As far as wiring a whole city, compliments go to Google. Again. Since August of last year, the Mountain View company has provided free Internet access to city dwellers and visitors. “The U.S are behind in terms of access options and speed. We want to show entrepreneurs that it is technically possible and not very expensive to build such a network,” Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, told me at the time. He explained that some Internet providers were suing cities trying to offer an alternative network for unfair competition and that he hoped Mountain View’s very public example would discourage this practice.

In San Francisco, plans to provide both free Internet wireless access and a more sophisticated paying system are being delayed by long city procedures. But promoters swear the service is coming soon. Other cities including Philadelphia and Portland are getting used to laptops popping up on city parks and benches.

European start-up Fon is coming to the US. “Foneros”, as its customers are called, use a special router that lets them turn their private connexion into a Wi-Fi hotspot available to other “foneros” for free. In exchange, they can hop on someone else’s connexion when they travel the world. In the U.S., Fon just signed a deal with Time Warner Cable. Even people who are not Fon customers can access the Internet for few dollars, less than the $10 charged by Starbucks and T-Mobile.

Roaming computer users should add this site to their favorites. Unless, they prefer this one which lets them find a Wi-Fi hotspot near them.

On a personal note, I should mention that I wrote and sent this article from my public library whose wireless network has become a lifesaver whenever my Comcast connexion is on the lame. What would I do without free public wireless connexion?

Isabelle Boucq for Atelier

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