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E-book reader – Amazon Kindle 2 review

E-Book readers are really a boon to avid readers. We can carry thousands of books even an entire library in our hand anywhere and we can read them at any time. It has wide display screen suitable for reading books. Many people don’t prefer PC/laptop for reading books as they are not comfortable and not good for eyes/health. EBook readers have overcome this problem. They are very slick and can be used as a book. It is not only a cool gadget but also eco-friendly one. It eliminates the usage of papers and thus saves million acres of trees and protects environment.

We can replace the college/school books/newspapers with e-book reader. School students can carry a single note book and an e-book reader to school, instead of carrying 5kg school bag. Doesn’t it sound great? Newspaper is the main culprit in polluting our environment.  Just think for a second, we buy and read the newspapers just for an hour and for that, we destroy thousand acres of trees.

These eBook readers have come up with an improved Newspaper Experience and we can quickly flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper.

Let’s look into the features of one of  popular eBook readers model:

Feature of Amazon Kindle 2:

Kindle 2 is very slick and has a width of pencil. It has 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi and uses 16-level gray scale display. We can zoom into images and photos to the full size of the kindle.

It is light weighted (289.17 gm) and 8″ x 5.3″ x 0.36″ in size.  It has 2GB internal memory (approximately 1.4GB available for user content). So you can store up to 1500 books in kindle 2. Kindle 2 has a text-to-Speech feature and it can read book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud for you. If you want to listen to your favorite book privately, then you can use headset.

Text to speech feature has option to select between male and female voice. It also has the option to adjust the speed of reading. We can adjust the text to 8 different font sizes.

Kindle 2 provide free internet access through its wireless network Whispernet for US users. International users (India and other countries) can access Wikipedia at free of cost. It has good coverage in India and very useful. Amazon site is also enabled for international users to buy, download and browse books

Its battery life is 4 days with wireless turned on and up to 2 weeks with wireless turned off.

Content Formats Supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively.

It supports PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP format through conversion only. Though we can read PDF files without conversion, we cannot use text to speech and text size adjustments in this version. To use this features, we have to convert them to kindle supported formats (unprotected MOBI, PRC).

We can use the mobipocket software for converting doc/html/PDF formats to unprotected MOBI, PRC format. You can download this software for free from the below link.

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/DownloadCreator.asp

Kindle has come up with built-in Dictionary with Instant Lookup – The New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions. In kindle2, searching options is enabled and we can search within a book, across the library, in the Kindle Store, or even the Web.

We can transfer MP3 files from computer to Kindle to play as background music while reading.

In India, it is available for Rs.14,000

Rating: 9/10.

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Nokia’s Dual Sim Phones – Nokia C1 , Nokia C2

Nokia has announced two dual sim phones targeted at the developing world, the Nokia C1 is a dual standby single active phone and Nokia C2 is Dual Active phone. With Nokia C1 at anytime you can receive calls from one of the sim’s but with C2 you can simultaneously receive calls on both the Sims.

With these two entry level phones, the dual sim market will be tough for chinese and regional players.Nokia C2 will available in grey, black, magenta, dark blue or white in the Q4 2010. The C1 will be available in Rblue, red, light grey and green colors in Q3 2010.

Nokia C2 is expected to be priced at 45 Euros or Rs 2500 or $60. The Nokia C1 will be available for 35 Euros or Rs 2000. With a price much below Samsung C5212 , Nokia also expects to bring down the prices of Dual Sim Phones from the likes of Samsung and LG. Nokia C2 is directly pitted against Samsung C5212.

For the current top Dual Sim Phones See this article

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Apple iPhone 4 – Raising the bar

Apple’s highly anticipated 4th Generation iPhone hasn’t failed its fans.Unlike the previous two releases this version does have some serious improvements over the previous iPhone 3G. But again these are nothing new in the smart phone world but new for the Apple world.

Multitasking :

Apple has launched Multitasking with a tag line “Multitasking done the right way ” but it looks more like an excuse for such a delayed addition of this vital feature. With the previous version of iPhone, even running a messenger application in the background was impossible.

iPhone 4 Front and Back

So after much debate and bashing from analysts Apple has finally introduced multitasking but it remains to be seen whether all applications will benefit from this feature or just a handful apps alone. Based on the limited preview Apple has chosen a “feel like multitasking approach” for some functions like games/mail etc where the state of the app is saved when going to background and retained back while returning to foreground. But other apps like GPS and Skype calls seem to be running in background.

Face Time :

Ok now this gets little more frivolous that media is giving so much hype to the video calling feature christened as Facetime, apart from normal video calling, iPhone 4 allows users to make video calls when connected to wifi like how they would do in yahoo messenger/google talk. But this feature works only with other iPhone 4 users on the other end.

Camera :

iPhone comes with a beefed up 5MP camera with LED flash, HD video recording ,HD Video editing and One touch focus this seems to be the most improved department after Multi tasking in iPhone.

Display :

Steve Job’s statement of better than human eye display (Retina display) has become controversial as many display engineers challenging his notion. But the fact is Apple iPhone 4 display pixel density is four times better than iPhone 3GS, so it does make a difference while zooming in on web pages and pictures. Also the glass is also an improved as per Apple, which is stronger more scratch and oil resistant. As per Apple “By developing pixels a mere 78 micrometers wide, Apple engineers were able to pack four times the number of pixels into the same 3.5-inch (diagonal) screen found on earlier iPhone models. Made from the same materials used in helicopters and high-speed trains, the Retina display glass is chemically strengthened to be harder, more scratch resistant, and more durable than ever. The glass also features an oil-resistant coating that helps keep the screen clean.”

Thinner and Heavier iPhone :

The iPhone 4 also sees a newly developed Alloy (variant of Stainless steel) forming the body of phone, which adds to thin and heavier attributes of iPhone 4. With this Apple claims the material is 4 times stronger than steel.

Apple A4 Processor is the new standard for iPhone and which according to Apple is the best processor suited for iPhone and handles multitasking better than the previous processors in the iPhone 3GS.

Overall iPhone 4 is definitely a much better deal than iPhone 3GS and a must upgrade. iPhone 4 will be available from June 24 th and preorders will be accepted in June 15. For countries like India it is expected to be launched at the end of 2010.