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Refurb iPhone from Apple for $399: E-book reader, too, for some?
August 22, 2007 | 10:04 am
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By David Rothman
Apple is “making refurbished iPhones available at its online store for $399 for the 4-gigabyte model, which sells for $499 at full retail, and $499 for the 8-gigabyte model, which retails for $599,” according to the New York Times. Go here.
See our earlier items on the iPhone as an e-book machine. Close to half of TeleBlog readers either own iPhones phones or planing to buy them, if a small poll is representative. Anyone have additional buying tips? Or further thoughts on e-book programs for the iPhone?
Related: Google News roundup on e-books and the iPhone, as well as sci-fi author Paul Levinson‘s mostly favorable thoughts on the iPhone and digital books in general.
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Comments:
Also note that AppleCare is available for the refurbished units at $69, so you can extend you warranty to two years.
I haven’t found any really practical solution to ebook reading on the machine. The only one I can recommend so far is FileMark Maker from Insanely Great News. It embeds the entire book into a url which can be opened in Safari. The problem is that if you loose your place there are no bookmarks, so you may have to scroll through a couple hundred pages to continue reading. Here is the url:
http://www.insanelygreattees.com/news/?p=51
I posted a little list on Palm Addict of things I didn’t like about my iPhone. Here are the major points in case any of them are deal breakers for our readers:
1. Reception – the iPhone is not as sensitive as my Treo or other phones. In areas where they get only 1 signal bar the iPhone will report No Service
2. Speakerphone – it isn’t loud enough. The Treo is much louder.
3. Typing – Treo typing is much faster. iPhone typing is OK, but I wouldn’t keep the iPhone if heavy typing was necessary.
4. Ring tones – they aren’t loud enough
5. Mute – there is a nice button, like the Treo, to mute the phone, but no indication of the silenced state on the display. It’s easy to forget that you have silenced the phone.
6. Two hands – it is not really possible to use the phone one-handed. Answering the phone, and other functions, mostly take two hands
7. Repeating events – in the calendar you can do repeating events, but can’t do a repeating event such as “every Thursday” or “first Tuesday of the month”.
8. Third party programs – can’t use them and so far the web-based programs are not a practical solution
9. Weather – built-in weather program doesn’t provide enough detail
I posted a video a while back showing the iPhone and FileMark Maker in action:
http://wowio.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/iphone-and-ebooks-the-video/
Aside from the bookmarking issue that Paul already mentioned, the other major constraint I ran into was FileMark Maker’s file size limit. It seemed to handle smaller files of 1 meg or so without any trouble, but larger files caused crashes on either FileMark Maker or iPhone Safari.