Smartphones are penetrating more and more widely these days, but there are still plenty of people out there with feature phones or other small-screened devices. And while there are cloud readers (such as Ibis Reader) and free e-book sites that work on smartphones and tablets, they tend to be media-intensive applications, requiring a decent amount of screen real-estate and memory. Enter ebook.Taggedzi.com, a cloud e-book site designed to work with small-screen devices that don’t have those sorts of specs—for example, basic feature phones. (Why do they call those “feature phones” when they really don’t have any?) The site acts...

Oregon school kids really seem to like iPod Touches (or should that be “iPods Touch”?). Two different, unrelated projects have come to light over the last few months using them to boost kids’ reading abilities. In the Canby School District, every third and fourth grade student has been issued an iPod Touch, which they use for reading and math exercises. Reports are that they do so quite well, too: In presentations, [district technology coordinator Joseph] Morelock has shown that several classrooms using the iPod touches generated better test scores than the district average. He...

It turns out that the Kindle is getting another retail outlet. Amazon issued a press release this morning announcing it was going to begin selling the 3G version of the device in AT&T’s retail stores nationwide. These stores currently sell feature phones, smartphones, and other devices that work with AT&T’s network, so it’s not too surprising they would decide to add the Kindle. (The 3G version, at least. The wifi-only version was not mentioned in the press release.) Though it’s a little ironic that, unlike every other product AT&T stores sell, the Kindle comes with free 3G for life rather...

xkcd has another great strip today that touches on e-books, pointing out that the march of technology may not have brought us what we expected, but it has brought us some amazing things nonetheless. Some of which involve e-books....

The Guardian has a report on ways teachers can use smartphones to improve the educational process. Apps such as Classdroid allow teachers to photograph, grade, and blog homework assignments quickly and easily. There are also anti-bullying apps, quiz and testing apps, and so forth. (It doesn’t mention e-books save for a way to keep Wikipedia on a smartphone, but they could be just as useful in that context.) The article doesn’t say much about student use of cell phones, which could have even greater implications for education and information access—assuming schools can come up with ways to encourage desirable...

In addition to looks back at the last year, this is the traditional time for looks ahead at the year to come, and Seth Weintraub has an interesting one in Fortune’s “Fortune Tech” blog. Weintraub predicts that, due to falling prices and improving networks, 2011 is going to be the year the smartphone (particularly the Android smartphone) really takes off, bypassing traditional computers as the way the majority of the world’s population accesses the Internet. In terms of price, Weintraub points to new and forthcoming chipsets from Broadcomm that should allow Android smartphones to retail for under $100, possibly...

In a follow-up to a story I mentioned several days ago, the New York Times has coverage of the new rules propositions for allowing electronic device use on the House floor. It seem these propositions will just formalize the way that people have already been using their devices—rules or not, Representatives and Senators are often seen furtively whipping out their gadgets to check messages. The new rules are not meant to allow let congressmen listen to music or play games, though undoubtedly some will find less serious uses for the devices. The intent, [Brendan...

Are the days of unlimited wireless data plans numbered? ReadWriteWeb reports on a speech by a wireless researcher who believes that they are. Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela, director of wirelss research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, notes that the more people use smartphones, the more data usage is going to go up. Only 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data, and as that usage grows, soon the cost of providing “unlimited” bandwidth data plans will surpass the revenue it brings in. Valenzuela believes that metered pricing is one possible answer, but there are also...

Audrey Watters of Read Write Web reports that the final version of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), centered around improving educational uses of technology, calls for making sure that educators and students have 24/7 Internet access and for implementing policies that “enable leveraging the technology that students already have.” As Watters points out, the most ubiquitous technology among students is cell phones—more than 75% of kids between 12 and 17 own them, and a lot of schools have policies regulating or banning their use. Cell phones’ drawbacks include that they could distract from learning, contribute to cyberbullying, pose...

Alexia Tsotsis has a post at TechCrunch pointing out that the phone call is “dead” (in the sense in which the term is used in the tech industry these days—meaning “on the decline”). The article itself is interesting enough, though it says much the same things as a piece I covered here already. But it seems to me that the “decline” or, perhaps, transmutation of the mobile industry might have some implications for “telereading”, too. E-books are just one aspect of telereading, after all. Other aspects include magazines, newspapers, blogs, and other textual Internet sources—and getting those in a...

The Guardian has an interesting report on the mixed blessings that smartphones bring to newspapers. A study by British telecom company Orange shows that a significant number of smartphone users (14%) read fewer newspapers, but almost as many (13%) read more newspaper content online. (Interestingly, 16% of those surveyed read fewer magazines, but none said they read more magazine content online.) These results highlight the problems that newspapers are facing as more consumers get used to reading digitally—the readers are migrating away from the more lucrative physical newspapers and toward the less-monetizable on-line world. And if the...

Pre Central reports on an interesting tip that has come in from an anonymous tipster concerning Palm’s next smartphone, codenamed “Mansion”. Whether this Mansion has many rooms, apparently none of them will be locked—because unlike the Pre, this device will not have any keys—making it the first Palm device without a hardware keypad since the company phased out the last of its original line of PDAs. Certainly, leaving out a keyboard might be a good way to lower the price on the already inexpensive Pre line. And Palm is no stranger to making devices without hardware keyboards,...