E Ink and Phillips have announced a breakthrough in electronic ink technology: a 10.1 inch flexible e-ink tablet with a resolution of 100 dots per inch (comparable to standard newspaper). This is another step towards a prctical electronic newspaper. Electronic ink is an ideal display medium for books, newspapers and magazines as it needs to be powered only to change and is a purely reflective mechanism that needs no backlighting and is as sharp as ink on white paper.
The full text of the release is here…
Flexible electronic ink paper
How the video iPod will change the world
The importance of the video iPod is more far ranging than the product itself and transcends it, just like the effect of the original iPod on the music industry and even culturally in how we listen and relate to music. In the olden days we used to sit down and listen to albums in our living rooms on systems carefully tuned for sound quality. Now we listen to music in any sequence we want and mostly in shufle over some crappy headphones delivering 128kb limited sound. But the iPod has empowered us by untethering our music and allowing for serendipitous access to our deep libraries and not what we just bought last week. The video iPod also legitimizes in one fell swoop the act of paying for video and not getting a physical copy of it.. Delivery of DRM protected video content from all those myriad of startups is now suddenly legitimate.
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ABC Series Offered on Apple’s New Video iPod
Now that the suspense is over and we know that it is not THE video iPod that was much awaited, but a video enabled iPod nonetheless, there are sure to be content deal announcements and this is the first one I have seen. AdWeek is reporting that ABC will be offering at least five series, including the popular Desperate Housewives and Lost for download via iTunes. Now this may seem like a good idea at first, BUT,
- They will be charging $1.99 per show.
- The resolution of the video will be a quarter of a standard definition video screen (320×240) to match the resolution of the video-enabled iPod
- You will not be able to burn it to DVD or CD without going through an analog and redigitize cycle
The problem is that they are competing with full NTSC resolution bittorrents that people can download at will from the web, Sure, you have to know what to do to get the torrents and it is illegal but that does not seem to stop eDonkey and the rest of the Napster heirs on the music front. No word on whether they will have advertising on the downloaded video…Read more here..
Apple to release video iPods, dual core G5s?
UPDATE:ThinkSecret is once more saying that video iPod capabilities will be announce tomorrow at the Apple event though they think it will be new iPods with larger capacities but the same screen size. Apple is of course, still completely tightlipped about this so we will just have to wait to see what His Steveness is going to announce. If it is only the Madonna Nano There will be a lot of very disappointed Mac fanatics…
Invitations to a private Apple event slated for October 112h rumor mills are abuzz with talk about video iPods as well as a new version of iTunes that would allow the store to sell video content. iTunes already manages video podcasts. The video iPod may in fact be the entree that Apple needs to become the center of a home entertainment system/set-top box, you can just see the Griffin iTuner for video right?
It also seems that they will finally release machines with the new dual core PowerPC chip as the supply of G5s seems to be drying up everywhere.
Update:BBC unintentionally outs video iPod
The link is gone by now but engadget has a mention of the BBC faux pas here…
Motorola to sell ads for your idle cell phone screen
With apologies to Slashdot, from the You-can-run-but-you-can’t-hide department: Motorola has developed a system called Screen 3 that allows cellular carriers to push content to idle cell phone screens over their always on Internet connection. One of the first models to support this is the V551. And to think that John Dvorak was having a cow about too much advertising in the movie theater…
XM2go review roundup
PC Magazine (via Engadget) has been nice enough to round up three popular XM2go devices and stack them up against each other. As you know XM2go is TiVo for your XM receiver which allows you to store XM audio content so you can listen even if you are in the cellar counting your bottles of Chateau d’Yquem. Their conclusion? They are big and power hungry as befits a first generation product. Me, I am waiting for christmas when I can get a combined XM/MP3 players to be fueled by the XM Napster alliance (more on this here). These new products may send radio stations to reconsider the heavy investment needed to do HD radio and just start an advertising supported podcast.
