A new e-book reader called the Nook had its debut last week, and it may just give Amazon’s Kindle, the leading e-reader, a run for its money. The Nook is from Barnes & Noble. Some of its unique features include a full-color strip of book covers at the bottom of the display that allows you to pick a book to read.
The Nook also supports sharing e-books with friends, which Wired magazine says may be the feature that makes the device go viral.
The Nook will be sold in Barnes & Noble stores as well as online, meaning customers can use B&N’s free in-store Wi-Fi to demo the look and feel of the product before buying. On sale at the end of November, the Nook is available now for pre-order at $259 (which is very close in price to the Kindle-2).
The TwitterPeek is a new device that is an always-connected Twitter machine. This gadget is 100% dedicated to sending, receiving and searching Twitter posts. That’s all it does — it can’t even send or receive email. It’s from the makers of the Peek and the Peek Pronto, which are two email-only devices that can be used for email without monthly mobile contracts. Peek is advertising the TwitterPeek as the world’s first Twitter mobile device. The TwitterPeak is not yet available for sale but can be pre-ordered on Amazon.com. The pre-order price has been announced as $200, which includes the ability to Tweet for life without any additional charges for connectivity.
If style is important to you, then take a look at Brinell’s Purestorage classy line of external HDDs. These extremely portable external drives feature carbon, stainless steel, wood and leather enclosures and come with capacities from 160GB to 500GB. These portable drives have all the elegance of a beautiful wallet and all the ease of a USB device. Prices start at $280. For more details, see the Brinell website.
The Oakland Bay Bridge has been in the news because of the massive maintenance project which has been undertaken on the aging structure. While some bridges need to be built with functionality in mind, others can indulge in some design experimentation. The Rolling Bridge in London’s Grand Union Canal was designed by Heatherwick Studio to retract and roll into an octagon to allow boats to make use of the canal. This YouTube video shows how the bridge operates:
Digital photo frames are constantly evolving, and this new eStarling frame represents the next generation. The Touchscreen Connected Frame has the expected WiFi connectivity, large 10.2 inch display, 2GB of RAM and SD card slot. What’s not expected are the new social networking features, including support for photos from Facebook, Picasa and Flikr (with support for more services promised in the future). A video inbox can receive videos from mobile phones, or photos can be sent directly to the frames private gmail address! And there’s a touch screen to make navigation a breeze. All these features don’t come cheap. The frame is prices at $249.99. Learn more about it at the eStarling website.
At Intel’s developer conference earlier this month in San Francisco, President and CEO Paul Otellini announced plans to offer chips based on 22 nanometer technology by 2011. The 22nm chip will hold more than 2.9 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail. “We are moving ahead with development of our 22nm manufacturing technology and have built working chips that will pave the way for production of still more powerful and more capable processors,” said Otellini. Read more details in this Wired blog post – Intel Plans Even Tinier Circuits in 2011.
TomTom has announced that its GPS car kit for the iPhone will be available sometime in October. The TomTom already has an app for the iPhone that provides maps and routing capabilities, along with a restaurant finder. The TomTom iPhone app lets you access addresses in your iPhone contact list and then create a map to take you there. TomTom’s IQ Routes is also included; this unique technology uses historical travel data from millions of TomTom users to calculate the optimal route based on time and date.
Although the TomTom app is already available in the iTunes app store, the car kit will be sold separately and will provide performance gains and additional functionality.
The picture above shows the curvature of the earth taken from about 93,000 ft (or 18 miles) from the earth’s surface. This stunning picture was not the product of the latest space launch. It was taken with a Canon A470 camera from a weather balloon launched by two MIT students. The total cost of their setup was $148, a bit of a savings over NASA’s projects. The effort was christened Project Icarus, and full instructions for duplicating these spectacular results will soon be posted on the Project Icarus website.
Wired’s Gadget Lab recently ran a post about Panasonic’s EverLED lightbulb. Panasonic claims that this bulb will last for 19 years before it needs changing. The efficiency of these bulbs has been increased through better heat dissipation, which makes the bulb run cooler. The 6.0 watt bulb puts out as much light as a 60 watt incandescent could for 40,000 hours, which the Gadget Lab has calculated come to 19 years if the bulb is run for 5.5 hours a day. That means that if the bulb was in your baby’s bedroom, you wouldn’t have to change it until after he went away to college.
The EverLED is currently the world’s lightest bulb in terms of weight. It sells for $40 but is only available in Japan for now.
In a move that seems inevitable, the first Rock Band game controller that is priced at more than a real guitar was announced by Mad Catz. The Rock Band Wireless Wooden Fender Stratocaster is a full size replica of the original guitar and even uses some Fender parts for the non-functional tuning keys and bridge. The authentic wooden controller is actually assembled at a Fender manufacturing facility, further blurring the lines between real guitar and poser controller. The $300 price tag includes a Fender guitar strap and a headset socket for playing online. Find out more about it at the Rock Band Store.
