The Wired hands-on piece notes that the devices are built on Android, but use a different interface style than any other Android device. The interface is built around a grid-like scheme, with a sliding window that moves around over a desktop bigger than the whole screen can display at once.

Fusion Garage re-thought much of the tablet experience, all the way down to the controls for the music and video players. Instead of the traditional horizontal status bar showing where you are in a video (think YouTube), it’s a circle, with the play/pause button in the center. The volume slider also is curved, to the right of the circular video control. It looks nice, but it takes up a little more real estate than the conventional layout. When you’re playing music, the audio controls can be reached via a small icon in the upper right hand corner of the device.

The glitches Wired noticed had to do with the slowness of an interface based entirely on swiping with no physical buttons, and the web browser’s occasional habit of crashing. But since this was a demo unit, some glitchiness was to be expected. All in all, it’s a surprisingly positive review for a new device from the company whose first tablet effort was considered “bad JooJoo” all around.

However, the number of new tablet-owners who said they would not buy portable gaming devices, mp3 players, gaming consoles, and smartphones whas declined from 2010 to 2011. It’s not clear whether this decline is explained only by the numbers for laptops and e-readers rising.

Of course, the survey doesn’t take into account those people who don’t want a tablet but do want an e-reader—but still, signs suggest something might happen similar to the way the smartphone killed off the phoneless PDA ten years ago. Sooner or later, all our hand-held media devices might become multifunctional.

But actually, Abell explains, he likes e-books himself—he hasn’t bought anything in print since getting his iPad. Still, he sees five areas where e-books don’t quite live up to their print counterparts.

Some of these “problems” are more compelling than others:

1. An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
2. You can’t keep your books all in one place.
3. Notes in the margins help you think.
4. E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
5. E-books can’t be used for interior design.

Even Abell admits that the interior design gripe seems a bit shallow, and I have a hard time imagining too many book lovers who need reminders of unfinished books, but the other points he raises are ones we have mentioned before.

Unless you crack the DRM on every book you buy and load them all into Calibre, the way some readers do, sooner or later you are going to be faced with having bought e-books in more than one store, and being unable to access them all from one place can be annoyingly inconvenient. And although I have never been inclined to scribble margin notes in books I was reading—at least apart from college textbooks—some people make margin notes as a matter of course. And e-books can’t be passed on the way print books can, but we still pay significantly more than paperback price for new ones from the agency six.

Of course, these problems have been around for quite some time, and we don’t seem to be making much progress toward clearing them up. But the more people who complain about them, the more likely it is somebody will eventually do something about it. At least, that’s my hope.

Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete.

He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious.

As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do.

I tried the new feature out, and it is really neat to see my Google Reader Feed appear as my own personalized magazine. Given that I don’t know many of the people who are my Facebook friends, but I personally selected every newsfeed I want to read, this feels more like a personalized “me-gazine” than ever.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is going to supplant Reeder as my normal Google Reader reading method any time soon. As the screenshot demonstrates, I can only see a few stories at a time, from all my sources put together, flipping backward through time—and given that I have to scan through literally hundreds of headlines per day seeking bloggable nuggets, I just don’t have the time for pleasure browsing all of them like that.

Reeder lets me focus on single sources and go through and check all their articles off one at a time, and I do that starting the moment I wake up—I take the iPad into bed with me since I use Easy Relax Ultimate to help me sleep, and go through my Reeder feed before I even get out of bed in the morning.

Of course, for the average person, who doesn’t have to worry about digging for gold, this could be the best way yet to read Google Reader.

However, Robert Scoble notes that this still isn’t quite the version of Flipboard he is waiting for.

What version is that? The one that will filter through all of these social networks and use the technology they purchased when they acquired the Ellerdale Project to really find the good stuff out of the thousands of items that are aimed at me every day.

If Flipboard is coming out with something like that, sometime next year, it could make an already great thing even better.

On a related note, Wired has a spotlight on Flipboard, talking about what makes it such a great way to read content on the iPad.

One important area of consideration is the type, size, resolution, and dot pitch of screen, which can be important for readability. You should also consider wireless connections, because for media-rich applications it is important to be sure you have 802.11n and some tablets offer 3G connections but others do not.

Selection of apps is an area where the advantage is mostly Apple’s, but type of inputs and outputs is an area where it falls behind. Storage, speakers, and cameras round out the list.

The article does not directly mention e-book apps, though that could be assumed to fall under the area of OS and apps in general. And with the biggest companies (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) coming out with reader apps for both platforms, it may be that this is a difference that makes no difference. But it seems to me there are quite a few more iPad-compatible e-reader apps in general than there are for Android yet.

Unlike e-books, magazines tend to need a lot of pictures and graphic design elements. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture that was the same file size as a thousand words would be pretty low-resolution stuff. The slick, graphical nature of these publications is the very thing that makes a magazine a magazine.

If they’re sold through Apple’s app store, of course, bandwidth is not a concern, since Apple eats those costs itself. But a lot of publishers are fed up with Apple’s controlling ways and are seeking other marketplaces—and those marketplaces come with bandwidth charges. When most iPad magazines range from 80 to 250 megabytes, with Wired’s weighing in at 500 megabytes per issue, those can be some pretty hefty fees.

Of course, bandwidth costs will go down over time, and the ability to target media-rich advertising may go a long way toward offsetting those costs, but for the moment many of these apps are starting to look an awful lot like white elephants.

McKell learned from research in forums that others were having similar (pardon the pun) issues caused by magazine apps, and decided to experiment with deleting the Wired magazine app which was storing 3GB of back issues, to see if it had any effect. To his surprise, without the Wired app his iPad backup only took half an hour.

Several other magazine apps have been mentioned as well, so it is not specific to Wired or Zinio, but is a common problem amongst apps that use large files to store their data. This is different from apps that have lots of data in very small files. I still have lots of data in my other apps (8.8GB to be exact) and a large amount of that is divided up between games that are large apps and file storage apps like Good Reader, but the smaller files stored in those apps are not causing the same problems.

McKell pledges to continue his research and update the article if anything changes after iOS 4.2 is available.

So we can add to the article I posted yesterday yet another reason that iPad magazine apps are not thrilling iPad users. Wonder if iOS 4.2 will bring any improvements?

Part of the problem is the high per-issue cost of such apps, with no way to buy discounted subscriptions yet. But a larger part of it is that the apps simply aren’t put together in the way that readers would like to experience them.

"These apps suffer from a product design problem," said Khoi Vinh, a former lead designer at NYTimes.com. "They are designed around the wrong product vision, one that doesn’t realize people won’t read content in this way over the long haul."

For example, Wired’s magazine app weighs in at over 500 megabytes (The complete Wallace and Gromit iPad game I downloaded over the weekend was only about 300!) and suffered from a lack of quality control in terms of functionality. Another problem is the lack of social-network connection, the ability to use the Internet to broaden the experience from just the article’s content.

Publishers would be wise to take their cues from Flipboard, a publication built specifically for the iPad. Read an article on Flipboard and you’ll see the social commentary around it, a far cry from the solitary interface of most publisher apps. The empty experience of publisher apps shows up in the stats. According to app analytics company Flurry, media iPad apps average less than two minutes per session.

It remains to be seen whether Apple’s planned “iNewsstand” will make any difference to the way electronic magazines and newspapers are consumed on the iPad.

I had hoped it would be talking about books in some particular new format that was especially easy to read on Apple devices. However, I was more than a little disappointed: by “free” it seems to mean “public domain”, and by “actually readable” it seems to mean “that I like”. (Also, it drops an F-bomb. Why?)

The titles the article lists include:

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
• A Princess of Mars
• Frankenstein
• Gulliver’s Travels
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

And it doesn’t even link to where they can be found on Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks, or other purveyors of public domain e-books. It doesn’t even suggest how to find them. It just…lists and blurbs the titles. Nothing else. Not terribly useful to someone who actually wants to find those titles. (And for that matter, these titles can be downloaded and read on any e-book reader, not just “iPods and iPads”.)

Furthermore, by those criteria, there are plenty of free e-books out there that are absolutely “readable”. There are dozens or hundreds of public domain titles that deserve a look—certainly more than six. (The Prisoner of Zenda. Jules Verne. The Arsène Lupin novels. Etc.) And there are some great recent free books on Baen’s Free Library, the Baen CD repository at Fifth Imperium, Cory Doctorow’s website, and others.

This article reads like someone had to come up with something on the spur of the moment to fill a post quota. Nice try, Tony, but better luck next time.

Whether accidentally or intentionally, the study uses the same term for the younger generation that Nick Bilton does in his book I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works, calling them “digital natives”. And these digital natives tend to be more untrustworthy of authority, addicted to reading off of screens whereby they can absorb as much data as fast as they can, and intrigued by the challenge of finding information and outsmarting the establishments older generations take for granted.

Newspapers, Mutter writes, are faced with the problem of figuring out how to reach out to this younger generation while not compromising the values that make them important to older generations. It doesn’t look like an easy task.

Meanwhile, Wired has interviewed Bilton about I Live in the Future. During the interview, Bilton points out another interesting generational difference.

When Facebook debuted to the public in 2006, youth flocked to it to create an online persona and keep track of their friends, while many adults thought the social networking site was just another fad and that sharing their lives online was weird, perhaps even dangerous.

That divide has closed quite a bit in four years, but now that Aaron Sorkin has turned Facebook’s seedy origins into the box-office smash The Social Network, there’s a similar divide in the reaction to the movie: 18- to 34-year-olds like Facebook even more, while the site’s reputation fell among adults over 50.

Of course, younger generations having different values from their parents is not exactly new. But it’s interesting to see the digital direction this latest generation gap is taking, and to consider the effect it will have on e-reading in years to come.

Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy says, is that the Adobe app can’t paginate HTML—it just presents it in one long scrollable sheet, which she feels is suboptimal for reading a 10,000-word article.

McCarthy expects a version of Adobe’s software that supports HTML pagination to be available before too long, but even so the magazine doesn’t appear likely to shrink too much. And unless Apple and magazine publishers are able to iron out some kind of compromise, don’t look for subscription prices to be available either.

iPad magazine apps are pretty much a non-starter for me. I certainly don’t see any point spending too much money for a too big app that I can’t do as much with as I could a web version, and fixing the size issue will only change one of those problems.

Kurzweil has responded that the app was still undergoing improvements and a revised version will be released next month. An iOS 4 version is still in private beta. Carmody also mentions the controversy over Blio’s use of Feedbooks feeds without permission, and the fact that the Toshiba Blio store only has a little over half the titles of the main Blio store for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. (Even the main store only has 11,000 titles—considerably fewer than Amazon or Barnes & Noble have to offer.)

But Blio isn’t the only e-reading experience that Wired has found disappointing lately. Terrence Russell from Wired reviews the Sony PRS-350 touchscreen e-book reader, giving it a 6 out of 10. Though Russell finds a number of things to like about the device’s interface, he points out that the $180 device is overpriced by about $50 compared to the capabilities of other e-readers on the market.

Stories like these remind me that Amazon has captured such a large chunk of the market not just  through pricing e-books under $9.99, but also by packing an amazing number of features into a small, easy-to-use, and relatively cheap package. The Kindle really has become the yardstick by which all other e-book readers are measured—and most of them don’t seem to measure up.

Earlier this year, Apple’s refusal to allow the use of third-party development platforms to create iOS applications touched off a minor furor (and an FTC investigation). Among other things, this meant that Wired Magazine would have to create an entirely separate version of its tablet magazine app for the iPad, instead of being able to create one version in a Flash-based Adobe development environment and export it for multiple platforms including the iPad.

Today, Apple has changed its mind—and its iOS Developer Program license.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Businessweek reports that Adobe’s stock has jumped 11% in morning trading since the announcement. It will be interesting to see if Wired will drop the separate development process for its iPad edition, and whether the changes will be noticeable from a user interface point of view.

But another part of Apple’s announcement might, in the long term, be even more meaningful:

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

App developers have long been after Apple to add more openness and transparency to its somewhat arbitrary-seeming application review process, given that the current system makes it hard to know ahead of time what unguessed-at pitfalls might render all of a developer’s hard work pointless. This announcement suggests that Apple is finally getting around to it, though of course time will tell just how open the process will really become. As Gizmodo points out, even if the rules are all out in the open, it doesn’t help much if their enforcement is still arbitrary.

Sjöberg thinks this is a great idea, but why stop there? He proposes some similar restrictions in the name of saving newspapers, mapmakers, and travel agents. (The newspaper one involves parakeets.)

Related:

• DMCA exemptions that might have been
• Augmented reality and ‘saving’ print media