href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/kindle-dead-ipad/&service=bit.ly">“Uh-oh,” is the reaction we can imagine Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had when watching today’s unveiling of the eagerly awaited Apple iPad tablet. The new Apple device looks, at least upon first glance, like it will completely href="http://mashable.com/2009/09/12/apple-tablet-eats-kindle/">eat Amazon’s lunch. In fact, Steve Jobs even eulogized the Kindle in his unveiling.

“Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further,” he said while unveiling the iPad’s href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ibooks/">iBook e-reader software. But is the Kindle really dead? Amazon proudly proclaimed the Kindle as the number one selling product on Amazon.com, with a huge banner on their home page today. Can it really be all over so fast?

Here are four reasons why the Kindle is dead, and four more why it might still have some life left in it.

Why It’s Dead

1. iPad Starts at $499

Going into today’s announcement at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, most pundits predicted the Apple tablet would cost at least $600 and perhaps as much as $1,000. Steve Jobs dropped a major bombshell when he announced that the non-3G, 16GB base unit iPad would be priced at a very respectable $499.

In other words, just $10 more than the top end Kindle DX — a device with a comparatively measly 4GB storage capacity. A recent href="http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/100125_Kindle.shtml" target="_blank">University of Georgia study ( href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_apples_tablet_will_beat_out_kindle_as_a_news_r.php" target="_blank">via RWW) found that cost was a major factor when choosing an e-reader. “Nearly all respondents balked at the Kindle DX’s $489 price tag for reading a newspaper,” according to the survey.

While $489 might be too much for just an e-book reader, $10 more for a device that does a whole lot more may be worth it to a lot of people.

2. Just Reads Books

Out of the box the iPad has 140,000 apps available to it by virtue of the fact that it runs the iPhone OS. That means the iPad can do a ton of things the Kindle can’t — like play games, access social networks, display photos and videos, etc. In fact, because the iPad can run any iPhone app with no modification, that means even the href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000301301" target="_blank">Kindle for iPhone app will run on the iPad, giving iPad users instant access to Amazon’s library of Kindle-formatted books.

The iPad also has a built in web browser powered by Safari, which means that it can access millions of pages of web content in addition to books. The Kindle is limited to only the books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs that you can download to the device. (The Kindle does have a very basic, text-only web browser, but the web experience is very limited.)

Then again, the Kindle will soon href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/21/kindle-app-store/">offer apps of its own, making potentially it more attractive to those wanting more than “just an e-reader.”

3. iBooks Looks Sweet

Apple took a direct shot at the Kindle by href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ibooks/">launching iBooks, a digital bookshelf app with a number of high profile publishing partners. The early impressions of the iBooks app during Apple’s iPad unveiling were mainly positive — the reading and book management experience looks slick and the app integrates with iTunes.

If anyone can do for books what Apple did for music earlier this decade with the iPod and iTunes, it’s Apple. And the iBooks/iPad combination looks like it has the potential to be another game changer.

4. Kindle Lacks Color and Video

Sure a color display and video are mostly unnecessary if all you’re planning to do is read text, but just reading text isn’t what most people want. As bandwidth gets cheaper by the day, media consumption is shifting toward the visual. Even the New York Times application demoed today at the Apple iPad event included embedded video and full-color photos within articles, and last month’s href="http://mashable.com/2009/12/03/time-sports-illustrated-video/">vision of publishing’s tabletized future from Time Inc. put a premium on video.

Indeed, as the media landscape becomes more animated, the lack of video could be a nail in the coffin for Amazon’s current generation Kindle.

Why It’s Not

1. E-Ink Display is Gorgeous

Though the tablet now actually exists, it won’t be on sale for another couple of months, and it remains to be seen what the backlit IPS LCD screen on the iPad really looks like (early reports are that it looks great — at least, indoors in Apple’s controlled lighting environment), and whether it will be ideal for reading in all situations and for extended periods of time. What we do know already, however, is that E-Ink screen on the Amazon Kindle is beautiful to read — everywhere.

One of the biggest advantages the Kindle may still have over the iPad is that its screen is ideal for reading, and not just for reading, but reading indoors or outside in the sun, and for long periods of time. If the iPad’s screen really is just like a giant iPhone, as some href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-first-hands-on/" target="_blank">early reviews have said, then it may not be the best choice for a long, lazy day of reading at the beach.

2. Free 3G

The iPad starts at $499, but if you want data, the price starts going up rather quickly. 3G versions of the device come at a $130 premium (so the cheapest device with 3G is $629), and a data plan costs at least $14.99/month.

The Kindle, meanwhile, comes with free, worldwide 3G coverage baked in. It doesn’t do nearly as much as the iPad, but it will always be connected without requiring you to shell out a penny more. Because the smaller, 6″ version of the Kindle is priced at $259, and still comes with free, global 3G coverage, the Kindle definitely wins on price.

3. Huge Book Selection

Even though Apple announced an impressive list of launch partners, including Penguin, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillian and Hachette, it is unlikely that they’ll be able to match the Kindle’s selection right away. The Kindle currently offers 400,000 books, plus newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and recent moves to href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/20/amazon-bumps-kindle-royalty-cut/">entice new publishers with higher royalties should attract even more titles.

Of course, the iPad can run Amazon’s Kindle iPhone app, meaning it technically does offer the same number of books. Bottom line: the jury is still out on this one, but for now, the Kindle has a better selection of books — sort of.

4. Crazy Battery Life

The iPad’s battery life, according to Steve Jobs, is an impressive 10 hours, and it has an even more impressive one month of standby time. Still, it’s likely that getting the full 10 hours means doing things that negatively affect the experience (like lowering screen brightness, turning off WiFi, not playing video, etc.). The Kindle, on the other hand, can give you a full week of reading time with wireless on, and two weeks with wireless off.

If all you’re interested in is reading a book, the Kindle might be the better choice, allowing you to take a week-long vacation without bringing the charger. Your iPad might be dead by the time to step off the plane — or even before that, if you’re on a long flight with a few layovers or delays.

What do you think? Is the Kindle dead in its current form or is there still a market for e-readers? Sounds off in the comments.

Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/337639-Kindle-for-Iphone" target="_blank">Kindle for Iphone, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336952-Safari" target="_blank">Safari

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File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Sherpalo Ventures with Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron participating. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.

While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, Zumodrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a different twist-the service tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

It seems like we’re constantly hearing about promising battery technologies that could ultimately lead to longer battery life, more power, and smaller units, but as of yet, that big breakthrough hasn’t occurred. Maybe nanotechnology, which is the current hot topic in the battery innovations field, will prove to be different.

Right at this moment, a ton of research is being put into carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for a bunch of uses, including electronics and batteries. Researchers are drawn to CNTs because, according to them, carbon nanotubes are near perfect. That has paved the way for a professor and a UC San Diego graduate student to discover a breakthrough that involves introducing purposeful defects into CNT structures. By doing so, the ‘defective’ CNTs actually work better for the development of super capacitors, DailyTech reports.

"While batteries have large storage capacity, they take a long time to charge; while electrostatic capacitors can charge quickly but typically have limited capacity. However, super capacitors electrochemical capacitors incorporate the advantages of both," Professor Prabhakar Bandaru said.

The duo also discovered that other methods, such as bombarding CNTs with argon or hydrogen, could also increase or decrease the charge capacity. In the end, the two researchers believe that their discovery could ultimately lead to electronics that charge faster and last longer than what’s available today.

Image Credit: jacobsschool.ucsd.edu

It seems like we’re constantly hearing about promising battery technologies that could ultimately lead to longer battery life, more power, and smaller units, but as of yet, that big breakthrough hasn’t occurred. Maybe nanotechnology, which is the current hot topic in the battery innovations field, will prove to be different.

Right at this moment, a ton of research is being put into carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for a bunch of uses, including electronics and batteries. Researchers are drawn to CNTs because, according to them, carbon nanotubes are near perfect. That has paved the way for a professor and a UC San Diego graduate student to discover a breakthrough that involves introducing purposeful defects into CNT structures. By doing so, the ‘defective’ CNTs actually work better for the development of super capacitors, DailyTech reports.

"While batteries have large storage capacity, they take a long time to charge; while electrostatic capacitors can charge quickly but typically have limited capacity. However, super capacitors electrochemical capacitors incorporate the advantages of both," Professor Prabhakar Bandaru said.

The duo also discovered that other methods, such as bombarding CNTs with argon or hydrogen, could also increase or decrease the charge capacity. In the end, the two researchers believe that their discovery could ultimately lead to electronics that charge faster and last longer than what’s available today.

Image Credit: jacobsschool.ucsd.edu

The third generation of Creative’s Vado HD pocket camcorder improves on the last generation’s features with better low light video recording, manual exposure adjustment, and motion detection modes, but for some odd reason only a 4GB model will be available.

Creative also claims that there has been some improvement to the audio recording quality, which was a weak point of the prior generations. Other feature additions include:

* Improved quality of video in low light or brightly lit conditions with manual exposure adjustments
* External stereo microphone support for better audio recording
* Headphone output for private listening
* Motion Detection Mode enables users to program the camera to begin recording as soon as motion is detected
* Out-of-the box Mac and PC compatibility
* Still Photo Capture Mode

The camcorder will be available mid-December for $180 (and in a whopping five colors). Since that gives you plenty of time to shop, check out our pocket camcorder comparison guide before making a buying decision. [Creative via epiZENter via Engadget]

It’s not an easy thing, conceptualizing bunches of data. Efforts at visualization range from the simple (elementary statistics), to the complex (Mark Lombardi’s Global Networks, for example). The clever jakes at Microsoft Live Labs have debuted their way of visually managing lots of data with Pivot.

According the Pivot web site: “Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.”

At its heart, Pivot is a database manager. It works on a “collection” of data that is tagged with an image. The image, reflective of its underlying data, is then manipulated using keywords and filters. Data can be stored locally or online, with the number of data points in complex arrangements limited only by available storage capacity. High resolution images within the dataset are manipulated using Seadragon, Microsoft Live Labs’ image manipulation software.

Manipulation is fairly fluid, but appears limited by the nature of the images used to represent data. While Microsoft Live Labs seeks to have data trolling to become more personal; to have people connect on an emotional level with their data, the wrong choice of representational images could well impair this desire. (The images they use in their Wikipedia example seem to bear this out–they are representational icons with little other meaning. What they collectively impart to a user, if anything, is pretty much up to the user.)

Further, Pivot relies on a pre-existing database structure and development of specific database entities for manipulation. The web may be wide open and wild, making it unmanageable, but it also doesn’t have boundaries restricting its information possibilities. Is taming it, which Pivot strives to do, or learning to cope with it the better approach?

Pivot is currently Windows 7 only. Aero must be enabled. Microsoft Live Labs also recommends a 2 Ghz 32-bit processor and 2 Gb of memory, but would really you rather have something a bit beefier. Pivot is available by invitation only. You can request an invitation code a the Pivot download site.

Pocket camcorders are a hot holiday gift, but due to their nearly identical feature sets, it can be tough to tell which is best—so I tested seven of these humble unitaskers to make your decision easier. You’re welcome.

Pocket camcorders (AKA mini cams or budget cams, or sometimes Flip cams after the pioneer of the category) are simple gadgets. They’ve got one job to do: Shoot watchable video, often for uploading to streaming video sites. They’re also very close to the end of their lifespan, with perhaps only a year or so left before smartphones make them obsolete, but right now they’re the easiest and cheapest way to take quick and dirty video. I tested seven of these diminutive camcorders, or more accurately six camcorders and one capable PMP, in five categories: Outdoor, indoor, low light, macro, and sound.

The criteria for judging fell mostly to smoothness of video during motion, image sharpness, noise, and color reproduction. Specs like storage capacity, screen size and battery life are mostly the same across the board, although overall, compared to last year, this crop of mini cams are faster and stronger, with beefed up memory and HD sensors. All save the iPod Nano take 720p video (or better) and add HDMI ports and more memory to accommodate the higher-quality footage. Yet I wasn’t really all that thrilled with any of the camcorders—the bar for these cams is so low you could trip over it, and several of them actually did. Battery life was disappointing across the board, as none could break two hours of filming. Anyway, on to the results!

Results

Choosing between the Kodak Zi8, Flip Mino HD and Flip Ultra HD is tricky. The Zi8 is unreliable, but when it’s good it’s unbelievably good; the Mino HD is diminutive, solid and stylish, but overpriced and with lousy touch controls; and the Ultra HD is a reliably good shooter with a low price and the best controls of all, but physically unappealing (read: fat as hell). In my opinion, you should never judge a book by its obese cover, so the champion is…the Flip Ultra HD!

Flip Ultra HD: First Place

Flip’s Ultra HD is the best overall choice. It’s one of the cheapest cams around (at $150, it’s $70 less than it’s younger brother, the Mino HD), but it tied for the highest score in our lineup, and it features nice tactile controls that I much prefer to the sleeker Mino HD’s touch-sensitive exercise in frustration. Unfortunately, the Dom DeLuise HD is upsettingly fat—about twice as thick as the Mino HD, but even that doesn’t really get across how truly large it feels in the hand. It’s not particularly heavy, but it is by a long shot the thickest pocket cam here. On the plus side, that girth hides a useful battery—Flip includes a rechargeable pack, but the John Candy HD can also use two AA batteries, which is great since pocket cams have generally abysmal battery life (usually about an hour, though of course they’re often rated for double or triple that). Replaceable, cheap batteries are really nice, but some will have to decide whether the William Howard Taft HD’s girth is worth that feature. Given its price, I think it is.

Video quality is just fine, above average if not particularly impressive on every test, and it, like the Mino HD, is extremely user-friendly. Although that simplicity yields less flexibility and a barebones feature set compared to the Kodak Zi8, it’s a good distillation of the aims of pocket camcorders, and its 100% tactile controls are a welcome change from the Mino HD. If you’re not superficial, it’s a very smart buy.

Flip Mino HD: Second Place

Flip’s Mino HD is the best-looking and best-feeling camcorder I tried. Its aluminum body feels solid and expensive, which might be because it is—at $230, it’s the priciest camcorder I tested. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it sells the best, even though it’s not the greatest deal, because it looks (and is) simple, cute, and functional. I won’t rehash my review, except to say that I hate those goddamn touch buttons more and more every time I use the Mino HD. They’re incredibly sensitive and I guarantee that you will accidentally trigger the playback function more times than you can count.

Besides that, it’s totally serviceable: It did well on all of my tests, it’s thoughtfully designed and stupid-easy to use. But it’s definitely overpriced, and I have a hard time recommending it over its physically awkward yet substantially cheaper older brother, the Ultra HD, just for its looks.

Kodak Zi8: Third Place

Wider and taller than the Flip Ultra HD, though not nearly as fat, the Zi8 packs a 1080p sensor and the largest and best screen of the bunch. The controls are easy and tactile and aside from flimsy-feeling plastic covers over the ports (one of mine already fell off), the hardware is high-quality. The Zi8 snagged the bronze medal, because while its highs were higher than either of the Flips, its lows were lower—and given how focused and simple this type of gadget is, reliability is worth more than flashing moments of greatness.

The Zi8 absolutely rocked in two of my tests, outdoor and macro, with perfect color reproduction and excellent clarity, and it even takes pretty decent still photos (think point-and-shoot circa 2006 quality). But the conditions need to be just right to get the most out of this guy—I first tried it in 1080p mode (neither of the Flips can break 720p) and while picture quality was amazing, scenes with lots of motion were pretty jerky to the point of being distracting. But even in 720p, it was still head-and-shoulders above the competition—but only in outdoor and macro testing. In the indoor test it proved to have difficulty focusing on objects closer than 10 feet but farther than 2 feet away, and low light shooting was distinctly tinted red and a bit dark. It wasn’t unusable in any test (unlike the similarly uneven Creative Vado HD) and at $180 it’s fairly priced, so I’d still recommend it—but you and I are likely to be more forgiving of the Zi8’s flaws than, say, your mom, who just wants a camera that works pretty well all the time. For her, go for a Flip.

The Rest

The Creative Vado HD scored pretty high, only a point lower than the bronze medalist Kodak Zi8, but while its design is fairly middle-of-the-road (albeit nice and teeny), its abilities were all over the place. It was one of the worst in standard daytime shooting (it has a hard time with sunlight, a serious problem for a pocket cam) and macro, but was the best at indoor, and while its low light video was a little dark, it was the clearest and smoothest of the lot. It also, likely due to Creative’s background in stellar-sounding PMPs and sound cards, boasts excellent sound quality. At $150, it’s very fairly priced, but I can’t recommend a camcorder that mangles sunlight the way the Vado does.

Apple’s iPod Nano is the only “camcorder” in this roundup to peak at VGA resolution, and aside from a surprisingly strong macro performance, it shows. It turned vibrant colors dull and lifeless, washed out detail and made everything seem darker than it was. It can’t compete with the Zi8s and Flips of the world, but it’s still usable and incredibly priced at $150/$180 for 8GB/16GB—if you’ve got a Nano already, you probably won’t need a dedicated cam. Convergence killed the video star, I guess.

The JVC Picsio GC-FM1 sucked. It’s spectacularly ugly (think Ed Hardy-inspired) and cheap-feeling, with a confusing button layout (unforgivable in a pocket cam) and a high price ($200, or $178 at Amazon). Besides all that, it scored poorly in every one of our tests. Avoid.

And finally, the worst—Aiptek’s PenCam HD. I wanted to like it, I really did—it’s got a tongue-depressor-like design and came with a sweet tripod that attaches to a bicycle’s handlebars—but it bombed in almost every one of my tests. The 1.1-inch screen is nearly unusable and battery life barely topped 40 minutes, so it’s definitely the loser here.

Here’s a giant gallery of all 28 videos I took.

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Don Nguyen assisted with this Battlemodo.

GeoCities may have been a relic from the 90s, but to many it was and still is an important online place for their user-created communities and memories.

The Yahoo-owned service officially shutdown earlier this week, but one determined and caffeinated individual set out to save GeoCities content, with help from friends, in just six days.

The project, dubbed ReoCities was an adventure to recover and restore GeoCities pages prior to the October 26th shutdown date set by Yahoo. While not everything has been recovered, there is a fairly substantial collection of cities, neighborhoods, and houses that have been saved, or are in the process of being restored.

You can read about the entire massive undertaking on the Reocities site. The detailed account describes how the project came to be, and how it evolved from just one fan’s desire to save the Silicon Valley area of GeoCities to a full on GeoCities restoration effort.

Here’s a brief excerpt from day two of the endeavor:

“The 10,000 directories per neighborhood scheme worked well for GeoCities: with only 721 such Neighborhoods, a maximum of 7 210 000 accounts could be stored. But because not all of those accounts exist, and because not all are interlinked, the scheme would fail miserably if used to back up geocities.com. All you would get is the top level directories, and even then, only those that are linked. A  Wikipedia article on GeoCities listed the top level directories (except for a few), so at least that gave me something to go on.

In a few minutes, on my backup machine, which has a fair bit of storage capacity, I had up and running a first script to randomly poke possible accounts to see if they were live. After a few minutes of 404s, the first accounts were hit, and fortunately, plenty of them were linking to other accounts. At this point, I was pulling about 10 Mb/s out of GeoCities. That may seem a lot, but if you take into account that there were only a few days left, it was a real problem.”

The story is not without rise and fall and a climax with issues around time constraints and technical errors. Ultimately though, ReoCities was born and it’s likely to make the diehard GeoCities fans, who adored their pages until the very end, incredibly happy. Color us impressed.

Image from opaisson on Flickr

Reviews: Flickr

Tags: geocities, reocities

Maybe not next year, or even the year after, but sometime in the not too distant future, mainstream storage duties are destined to make the jump from mechanical hard drives to flash-based SSDs, right? Not according to a new study published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. Not only are hard drives in it for the long haul, but the cost to storage ratio will shrink dramatically, the study suggests.

Some would argue it already has, but study authors Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie Mellon University predict that by the year 2020, a two-disk, 2.5-inch HDD with 14TB of storage capacity will run a mere $40. And if that weren’t enough to keep mechanical storage media relevant into the next decade and beyond, the duo also suggest that flash memory technology will run into technical roadblocks that will halt its continued scaling before 2020.

The predictions surprised even the study’s authors, who set out to examine 13 up-and-coming nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies and see if one of them had the potential to leapfrog HDDs on a cost-per-terabyte basis by 2020.

"We were surprised to find that the study indicated that, even in 2020, hard drives were likely to be considerably less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies," Kryder told PhysOrg.com. "It was also somewhat surprising to find that the technical potential of a technology was not necessarily well-correlated with where the industry was investing the most dollars; rather, industrial firms are tending to invest where they have they most know-how. This is not necessarily the wisest decision, but is quite understandable."

Before dismissing the findings as unlikely, it should be noted that Kryder previously served as CTO for Seagate, so he’s at least familiar with the storage sector. Nevertheless, do you see HDDs standing in the spotlight for another decade?

Image Credit: simbaint.com

 Sharp and TDK are doubling down on Blu-ray disc storage capacity, each introducing a prototype capable of storing up to 100GB of data, up from the current standard of 50GB.  The prototypes make use of a four-layer disc, up from the present maximum of two, and are capable of recording data at 72Mbps, again double the current level of 32Mbps.

While TDK hasn’t disclosed its underlying technology, Sharp’s advancements come from the substitution of dielectric film used for recording data on a Blu-ray disc with aluminum oxynitride. Sharp also makes use of a pulse operated blue-violet semiconductor laser with an optical output as high as 500mW. The laser’s oscillation wavelength of 405nm is capable of writing at 8x speed on three- and four-layered Blu-ray discs.

While the prototype technology holds promise it’s speculative at this point. The Blu-ray Disc Association, which sets the standards for Blu-ray discs, has specifications only for single- and dual-layer discs. Without an adjustment to the standards it doesn’t make economic sense for Sharp or TDK to move beyond the prototype stage. And even if they did the sad fact is current Blu-ray players aren’t able to handle anything over 50GB.

Image Credit: Blue-ray Disc Association