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Quick Notes: iPad 3G launch, Kindle highlights, and more
April 30, 2010 | 2:40 pm
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By Chris Meadows
The iPad 3G comes out this afternoon, and CNet reports that Apple Stores are actually closing for an hour from 4 to 5 p.m. to prepare for the launch. If anyone picks one up, we’d like to hear from you!
PC World has a 6-page article comparing the iPad to “everything else”. E-book and magazine reading makes up a considerable part of that comparison. The article says that the iPad definitely has the advantage as an e-reader, but that magazine publishers have yet to “create products that take full advantage of the iPad’s display and interface.”
Remember the suggestions that Amazon could use demographic information from its Kindle to show us what readers are doing? Amazon actually has started doing some of that. Snarkmarket links to a collection of the most highlighted passages from Kindle e-books. Interesting stuff.
Erotica e-book publisher Circlet Press (don’t visit this site from work!) is hoping to raise $5,000 to issue a printed book, by selling e-books on CD-ROMs. For $50, one gets a CD-ROM contains 20 e-books, or for $100 27 e-books and a T-shirt. The e-books are provided in PDF and HTML formats (which presumably means they’re also DRM-free). The sale only lasts until May 15th.
E-book reader OEM Qsida says that its BenQ e-book reader sold 10,000 units in the second quarter, and it expects the figure to rise to 400,000 per year. Those are some pretty big expectations, given that even the Kindle supposedly only sold three million units last year.
John Scalzi reports that Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine is now accepting story submissions electronically: guidelines here, submission form here.
The WePad Android tablet from German manufacturer Neofonie has been shown off to German journalists. EnGadget has the details, complete with link to 25-minute video of the event.
Consumers in Europe and Canada can now, if they so desire, own a Joo Joo tablet. Fusion Garage promises a “robust software update” soon to fix a number of the problems that have so far been reported about the device. It is still unclear whether it could easily or satisfactorily be used to read e-books.
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Comments:
I imagine that BenQ’s projections are based mainly on expected sales in Taiwan and China. Other e-readers tend to be challenged by Chinese text. The Kindle might support Chinese, but how many e-books are available on amazon.cn?
Hmm… I didn’t “pick one up” – I pre-ordered and it showed up right before lunch thru the wonders of FedEx. (I waited 6 weeks for the thing) Does that count?
Random thoughts:
Not sure what to think of it yet. I’ve been going thru the apps I have on my iPhone and getting iPad specific versions of apps if they don’t support both.
Although the keyboard is the “same” as on the iPhone, I find myself pressing/tapping harder.
Using iTunes is a mixed blessing when loading pdf’s into ‘GoodReader’. You either load them file by file and then create folders for them manually or you can create the organizational structure you want on your PC/Mac and zip that up and GoodReader will unzip it once it’s copied over.
Not impressed with eReader on the iPad – either it feels awkward at its normal size or all the text is fuzzy at full screen. Really disappointed with that — though I knew it would be like that ahead of time. (Hopefully, at some point iPhone/touch apps will be able to “float” instead of be embedded in the middle of the screen – it’s a huge waste of screen real-estate.)
Dropping epub files on iTunes and syncing the iPad works great to get things into iBook (But the epub books from Baen don’t end up with illustrated covers)
Haven’t tried the 3G on it yet (I was more interested in the GPS ability that only came with the 3G model.). Wifi works okay.
I like reading on it better in portrait than landscape.
The screen is a fingerprint magnet… but that isn’t really noticeable when it’s on.
Yes! The ebooks Circlet Press sells are DRM free. Thanks for the shout out!
Chris, Consumer Reports picked one up right away and has done a story on probs with 3g iPad’s video streaming. It’s quite a tough article. I did a short piece from it and that has a link to the full one.
I am utterly frustrated with “autCORRECT” in Emails which can not be switched off and creates gibberish in most of my Emails. I’ll post a vid on Youtube shortly to portray how ridiculous it is. If you write in more than just one language, this is not the device for you.
I would like to download some German and French apps, but am not allowed to access non-US app stores. Since the store is the only way to get apps on this device, I basically am denied access to tons of apps I would like to load. This may also become a problem when traveling to Europe, as I have a feeling that then, I won’t have access to the US store. This device is awesome for surfing, but very frustrating for someone with a multicultural lifestyle.
Autocorrect can be disabled from the Settings -> Keyboard menu, can’t it?
Wow, thanks, Chris. i would have never thought to check under Keyboard setting, and neither did Customer Support when I called them the night I received my iPad! They basically told me that it can not be switched off. Period. Of course, I only wanted autocorrect in emails switched off, but I can live with it the way it is for now!
No problem. Oh, by the way, I’ve also seen a number of foreign-language apps in the app store (especially Japanese). It might just be a matter of searching to find them. (The app store’s search function really kinda sucks, though.)