A lot of the attention directed to the iPad has been about eReading and how it would fare in that market against the Kindle, nook, and Sony readers that already have advantages of market share and name-brand stores.

A major tent-pole in Apple’s plans for the iPad is the iBooks software and store. It’s available as a free download from iTunes (it doesn’t ship with the device).  iBooks comes with one free book, “Winnie-the-Pooh”. This freebie includes the original’s classic illustrations in color, which shows off the advantages of a color screen for an eReader. Up until now Kindles, nooks and Sonys have been a pretty monochromatic experience. iBooks gives a large single-page view in portrait orientation, or a two-page view that looks like an open book if it’s turned to landscape. The animated page turns are nice, but not really necessary.  iBooks also incorporates page numbers, which are calculated depending on type size and screen orientation, and gives a more book-like experience.

Left to right, Amazon Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Kindle DX.

I’ve heard people express concerns about having large investments in Kindle libraries and whether they would lose all that if they moved to the iPad, and its native reader and store.  The good news is the iPad is a great convergence device and that extends to eBooks. You won’t be reading your Kindle books through iBooks (incompatible file formats), but you can definitely read them in style on the iPad’s Kindle app. Amazon did a very nice large-screen redesign to the iPhone app, and you won’t have to buy anything again. If you’ve already got the Kindle for iPhone app, the iPad version will download as a free update.

The one place Kindle has a big advantage over iBooks (and any other eReader out there) is Whispersync. The ability to move seamlessly between devices while reading the same book is a great convenience. In fact, I called it my favorite technology of 2009 in a previous post, so the absence of a syncing system could definitely effect future decisions on whose eBooks I buy.

As of this writing, the Barnes and Noble eReader app had not been updated for the larger screen of the iPad. On some apps, that’s not so bad, and the 2x upscaling can be done without a usability problem. Unfortunately, for an eReader, the upscaling is deadly, producing text that’s nearly unreadable for any length of time. It can be run at its native size, but then you might as well be viewing it on an iPhone or Touch.

Given all this, my eReading strategy will be to continue to buy books from Amazon (with a much wider selection and generally lower prices), and reserve iBooks purchases for graphically intensive books that have been given a good treatment in the Apple-published versions.  I’ll do most of my reading on the iPad, with the iPhone Kindle app available for when I’m somewhere without the larger device. It means splitting my library between two apps, but they’ll be on the same device, so that seems pretty manageable.

Interested in astronomy? Have more disposable income than than the average small nation? Want to give the neighbors a scare they won’t soon forget? Then you might be in the market for a 50-inch Monster Dobsonian reflector telescope from Orion. Billed as the biggest amateur telescope in the world, this thing weighs in at about 900 pounds and when aimed straight up, the eyepiece (near the top of the ’scope) is 16 feet off the ground.  So you might want to get a ladder, as well.  Reflectors don’t have big lenses, relying instead on a large curved mirror at the base and a small mirror at the upper end of the telescope that sends gathered light into an eyepiece. So there are no big discs of glass in this monster, but there is one whopping huge curved mirror.  Before you buy this, hoping to read license plates on Mars, you should know that a telescope’s diameter affects light gathering ability, not magnification. Meaning this is a telescope you’d use to investigate extremely distant galaxies and dim deep sky objects like gas clouds that simply wouldn’t show up in the eyepiece of a smaller telescope.

Orion makes nice equipment.  I have a couple of (somewhat smaller) telescopes from them and have been very pleased by the quality. In the case of the 50-inch Monster Dobsonian, quality at such a unique size comes with a serious price tag: $123,000. You might want to build a backyard observatory to house it in, too.  And you should have time, as the telescope isn’t expected to ship for another year and a half. The Monster Dobsonian line also has telescopes at 36 and 40 inch sizes, if you’d rather not look like you’re showing off to the neighbors.

After that, one of the most immediately noticeable improvements of the iPhone 3G S is the smudge and fingerprint resistant glass, which really does work as advertised.  Fingerprints from a momentary contact like typing or pressing an on-screen button are much less apparent, and smudges that do occur when doing something like flicking between screens are much easier to clean off.

Many people, myself included, were a bit puzzled trying to get the new battery percentage indicator to show.  Thanks to TUAW for giving the simple instructions: It must be enabled by going to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Percentage and setting the slider to On.  For the last few weeks, I’ve been using an app called FreeMemory, a nifty little memory manager for the iPhone.  One of its side benefits has been a percentage display of remaining battery power.  It will be nice to have that on the face of the phone.

The digital compass can be a little touchy, and thrown off by electrical fields around it (like those generated by a notebook computer), but generally it looks like it will be useful for determining the basic direction you are facing. Direction can be delivered by either magnetic or true North.

The new camera takes predictably clearer pictures and the ability to tap an area  in your composition where you want to set focus is a very nice and easy to use feature.  The video function is straight forward, and allows trimming the beginning and end points of your video.  On playback, a scrubber line is displayed at the top of the frame; to enter Trim mode, just touch one end or the other of the scrubber, and drag it in to the point where you want the video to begin or end.

The changes from the iPhone 3G to the 3G S are not dramatic for the most part, but do make the phone more versatile and nicer to work with.  Now I can just hope that I don’t fill 32 GB as quickly as I did 16 GB.

Art on a refrigerator is a time-honored tradition.  Retro, even.  So why not bring a retro-tech flavor to your masterpieces, with the Magnetic Pixels set from Kikkerland.  Each set comes with 1400 magnetic colored squares in 16 colors, an organization tray, and a transparent grid overlay to help your vision become reality. Each square is 10 mm x 10 mm across and 2 mm thick.  The web site has a number of pixel art samples to help you get started, assuming you don’t have any old Atari game cartridges lying around for inspiration.  This is a very cool idea, but it makes me wonder – do you think we can convince them to do the same thing with ASCII characters?

via Joystiq

I guess I’m a bit of a control freak.  I’ve always admired the compact size of the iPod Shuffle, but have thought the inability to see a list of options and really control what music I’m going to be hearing was a deal killer.  I know, the serendipity of the shuffle experience is what it’s all about.  But, what if someone just wanted an incredibly tiny media player that still gave some degree of control?

Apple’s new iPod Shuffle, announced today, appears to give us control freaks some hope that we can have a tiny music player and still retain some command over listening choices (beyond choosing what’s loaded on the device).  The new Shuffle still lacks a screen, but compensates with the VoiceOver feature that will read the names of songs and playlists to the user, allowing you to select the playlist you’re thinking about, not just the one that comes up randomly.  The device is also smaller, measuring 1.8″ (45.2 mm) x .7″ (17.5 mm) x .3″ (7.8 mm), including the clip on the back.  Capacity is 4 GB and all controls are on the earphone cord (which, of course, means you’ll need to use the Apple earphones,  or an adapter).

Coordinating with this update, there’s been a new release of iTunes, version 8.1, which is required for syncing with the new Shuffle.  The new iTunes also promises faster performance with large libraries and a number of improvements.

If you’ve read GadgetyTech for a while, you’ve likely seen me talk about the Kindle, Amazon’s eBook reader.  I’ve had one since they were first introduced in November 2007 and I really love it.  For me the Kindle does for books what an iPod does for music and video: It enables me to take a large quantity of media with me, which enables choosing what I’m in the mood for later, rather than when I leave the house.  Today, Amazon announced version 2.0 of the Kindle.

Going into today, I really wasn’t sure I’d be getting a new one. I’ve seen the photos that have been floating around the web for a few months and the physical changes weren’t enough alone to hook me into upgrading.  But the total package swayed me.  Among the improvements: It’s about half as thick as the first version (.36 inches).  People will argue the relative merits of thinness, but when I’m stuffing this into a jacket pocket, less bulk is a plus. The new E-Ink display now serves up 16-levels of gray, making images look a lot better.  Battery life, which was already pretty good, is now 25% longer.  Storage capacity is seven times greater, about 1.4 GB available for user content (albeit at the loss of the original’s SD card slot).

Maybe one of the most intriguing new developments is the new feature called Whispersync, which provides a wireless sync of reading progress (bookmarking) of the same book across multiple Kindles registered to the same account. If you’ve got more than one Kindle around, that’s a nice feature, and one that seems to be speaking to current owners considering an upgrade.  One more bit about Whispersync – in the future it’s planned to work with “other mobile devices”.

A final cool feature, and the one that confirmed my upgrade decision is a text-to-speech capability that will read aloud anything on the Kindle, effectively making every Kindle eBook an audiobook.  The reading voice is certainly not going to be as smooth or well-acted as actual audiobook performances, but I’m looking forward to trying it out.

The Kindle 2 is $359 and is scheduled to ship February 24. Current owners were given the opportunity to place an order by midnight announcement day in order to get in the first shipping priority group.  That group also includes anyone who has ordered a Kindle and not had it ship yet, so whether everyone who orders today will get one on or about the 24th remains to be seen. As of mid-day today, I’ve been in the queue, so with luck, I’ll have the Kindle 2 in a couple of weeks. I’ll do a hands-on review then.

Hybrids are, of course, famous right now for their good mileage (compared to most other production cars).  But the drive system is only one part of the puzzle that leads to high mileage.  Have you ever wondered how important aerodynamics are?  As it turns out, very good design leading to minimal drag can have an amazing effect on mileage, even with a very traditional gas engine.

Mike Turner had a 1992 Honda Civic CX that he wanted to modify to get the best mileage possible.  Inspired by low-drag cars made in Germany in the 1930s, he developed a set of aerodynamic shrouds and fittings that attach to his car, dramatically reducing its wind resistance.  The modifications cost only $400 and the result is a car that can achieve 95 mpg at 65 mph.  Not impresed yet?  How about the fact that bugs no longer hit the windshield, instead being carried right over the top of the car.

The whole story, with details and many photos, is at Mike’s site, Aerocivic.

Via DVICE

A final turn around the Macworld Expo floor on Friday afternoon afforded me one last look at a few of the things I had missed up until then. It also gave me a chance to make a couple of last minute purchases, one of which I’ll be reviewing in depth in the next week or two.

When the show closed at 4:00 and scattered pockets of applause broke out around the floor, it was impossible not to drift over to the big area at the center of the South Hall, for a last look at what might be the last ever Apple exhibit at Macworld.  There was a sense of significance, as employees who’d worked the show hugged and promised to keep up with each other on iChat, and passersby stopped to take their last photos of the glowing Apple logos looming over rows of Mac demo machines.

People kept referring to this as “the last Macworld”, despite IDG’s repeated references to the 2010 show.  I believe the show next year will happen, but with Apple’s absence, it will obviously have a different feel.  I think the answer will lie in a more grass-roots Apple user community experience, with less corporate direction. Cali Lewis has suggested the SXSW model for future Macworlds and a lot of people have responded positively to that idea.  For a great number of the people who attend this show the real lure isn’t seeing what the companies have to sell (which can often be a little disappointing),  but connecting with friends, many of whom may have never met in the analog world.  Nothing there needs to change.  The parties and meetups will continue, revolving around a core whose shape remains uncertain.  No corporate cost-saving measure will end the spirit of Macworld, those moments, planned or not, when a group of friends fall into face-to-face discussion of electronic life.

A common question heard around Macworld is, “What’s the best thing you’ve seen so far?”  For me, that’s also the first thing I saw on the expo floor, the SMART Table by SMART Technologies.  This is basically a short table that employs a multi-touch input system similar to the Microsoft Surface table.  It’s aimed at (and scaled for) elementary-age kids and comes loaded with several specific applications that support different learning activities such as math or matching objects to locations.  The design of the table and software encourages collaborative learning and problem solving. For example, the math app will give a simple problem such as “30 – 5″. Students must then solve the problem and place an appropriate number of finger tips on the table to register their answer.  In this case three students will be required to place 25 finger tips on the screen.  When it senses the correct input, it congratulates students on their success.  The SMART Table stands 25 inches high and sports a 27-inch diagonal screen.  It is configurable by a teacher for a variety of lesson plans and learning activities.

Photo credit: Copyright 2001–2008 SMART Technologies ULC. All rights reserved.