Gizmodo has a list of “10 gadgets you’d be a fool to buy right now” (that it reprinted from Laptop Mag but thankfully de-slideshow-ified)—devices that are soon to be replaced by something better. Weirdly enough, you can read e-books on all but one of them—including, naturally, e-readers. (Amazon is expected to launch new e-readers within just a few months.) The others include iPhones, Sprint phones, Windows phones, and Blackberries, as well as Windows and Android tablets. Ultrabooks and Macbook Pros are also due for refreshes, and smart TVs—the one device that doesn’t read e-books—aren’t a smart purchase with upcoming...

Wired’s Threat Level blog has some coverage of the latest hearing in the current round of U.S. Copyright Office DMCA exemption hearings. Topics argued today included the iPhone jailbreaking exception, cracking CSS on DVDs, cracking the protections on video game consoles, Prospects look poor for cracking video game consoles (sadly for PlayStation hacker George Hotz), but good for the jailbreaking exemption. Apple, which argued last time around that jailbreaking would destroy its business model and open cell phone towers to sabotage, was nowhere to be found at this meeting after its business model turned out to remain notably...

Here’s a TechCrunch piece about an interesting new feature that the News.me iPhone newsreading app has just added. The app uses the iPhone’s GPS to know when the user is at his home, and then starts downloading news content in the background whenever he leaves that location. A lot of news apps and sources won’t work when not connected to wifi, but this function will give people on the go something to read while in transit. The article wasn’t very specific about how the downloading function works, but I would assume it uses low-bandwidth mainly-text versions to load...

A few days ago, I was contacted by Chih-Chin Sun of Flygrip, an iPhone/e-reader handgrip accessory made by a company that began selling its products in February of this year. Ms. Sun had read my post about seeking a one-handed e-reading solution for my mother, who had her right arm amputated on New Year’s Eve, and wanted to send my mother and me each one of the Flygrip devices gratis—for my Mom to try out, and for me to review. She noted that the device already had a number of quite satisfied one-handed (and two-handed) users. After looking at...

TechCrunch has a piece on Scribd, the document-sharing platform with 100 million registered users and 90 million monthly active users. The piece focuses on the iOS news aggregation app, Float, that Scribd developed and almost sold to Yahoo for between $2 and $8 million before Yahoo decided to walk away in February. Float had gotten off to a good start, with up to 200 news partners and good ratings at the app store. However, it soon ran up against some stiff competition: “When we originally launched Float, Scribd wanted it to be Instapaper and Read...

Last week, Mass Effect 3 came out. And it’s been eating into my doing-other-stuff time ever since. But Mass Effect 3 isn’t just interesting as a video game, and as the conclusion to a trilogy of stories I’ve been following for years. I find it interesting in its overall implications for electronic media and storytelling—including electronic literature. Mass Effect 3 was built from the ground up to interact with other media. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other game that has gone quite so far into linking itself across multiple platforms. Apart from...

Readability’s latest attempt to stay relevant hits the iPad and iPhone on March 1. That’s when a free Readability iOS app launches. As with its predecessors Instapaper and Read-It-Later, the app promises to allow users to tag articles they would like to reformat in a web browser, then sync them to the iOS app and read them with a nice, simple interface. There is a one-minute trailer for the app up on Readability’s iOS app page, and it looks reasonably nifty in terms of simplicity of interface, adjustability of font and so on, and I’m sure some people will...

AppCraver is carrying a press release from app publisher Nosy Crow, announcing that its Cinderella iOS appbook has won Digital Book World’s Publishing Innovation Award for Best Juvenile App: “The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can...

TechCrunch has an article looking at an iOS hacking project that has the potential to be rather interesting. Whited00r is a custom version of OS 3.1.3, hacked to include features such as app folders and multitasking from later versions of the OS. It’s meant for older-generation iPhones and iPod Touches. Of course, it’s a jailbreak, which means losing access to some official Apple stuff such as the App Store and notifications. It looks like it might be fun to try out, but I don’t think it will fix one of my biggest annoyances with having a 1st-generation iPod...

On ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick has a piece on the rise of robotic manufacturing and what it might mean for online educational tools. It cites iPhone/iPad manufacturer FoxConn’s plan to improve working conditions by building 1 million new robot workers over the next 3 to 5 years, increasing the number it currently has by 100 times (that’s 10,000 percent). Human workers, FoxConn says, “will move up the value chain.” (Apparently hiring more “mature” workers didn’t work out.) The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

A couple of popular British novel series, one for children and one decidedly not, are coming to e-books, The Bookseller reported last week. The children’s series is Paddington Bear, the adventures of a small, talking bear named for the London railway station where he was found. The series already has a £3.99 (US $6.23) multimedia iPad/iPhone app, which among other things will let parents record video readings of the story, and children take photos of themselves “with” Paddington to send to family and friends. HCB said the digital adaptation had been done "carefully" to...