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POPS10 Most Brilliant Gadgets Of 2008 Popular Mechanics announced its picks for the 2008 Breakthrough Awards awards in what the publication called The 10 Most Brilliant Gadets of the Year. Here's the list of international winners; you may be surprised at the gadgets on the list.
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POPSThe Future of Reading The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet
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POPSElectronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues. Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
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POPSSome E-Books Are More Equal Than Others As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
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POPSLibrary~The Beta Version Okay, I know I'm not the only one saving up for a Kindle, but a totally bookless library? I don't think I could do it.
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POPS Why Obama's Spreading Panic And Fear 
Only by keeping us in a state of panic can he induce us to vote for trillion-dollar deficits and spending packages that send our national debt soaring. And then there is the matter of blame. The deeper the mess goes — and the further down his rhetoric drives it — the more imperative it becomes to lay off the blame on Bush. But the jig will be up soon. The crash of the stock market in the days since he took power (indeed, from the moment he won the election) can increasingly be attributed to his own failure to lead us in the right direction, his failed policies in addressing the recession and his own spreading of panic and fear. The market collapse makes it evident that it is Obama who is the problem, where he should, instead, be the solution. Instead of being a firewall, reassuring Main Street even as Wall Street crashed, he has become a conduit of panic, spreading the mood of desperation from the stock exchange floor to kitchen tables across the world.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said. Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned. Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish. An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slat
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POPSTalking about Kindle 2.0 Already? A day after Amazon's new reader is released, and Brad Stone at the New York Times is already making "helpful" suggestions about what the next version should include. Sounds like an attitude of tech entitlement. But the fact that folks are already talking about the next version also points out just how many flaws are in the current Kindle, and also how important this area is for personal tech.
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POPSThe iPod of e-Readers? Hmm. Not sure about this one. Form factor not very inventive and I've heard Kindle's iPhone app is quite adequate for filling in the gaps when you have short chunks of time to read for a few minutes. I give them credit for going after a fast growing niche, but they've got their work cut out for them IMO.
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POPSAre e-books the new newspapers? Trend Monitor was writing about newspapers being circulated using what was then called "data broadcasting". We brought out our own 'ebook' at the time designed to work with floppy disk. With wireless distribution, this could finally become the next big technology given the enormous financial and environmental cost of paper newspapers, journals, magazines and books. The way a subscription model would work is that publishers would (jojntly or singly) lease ebooks to customers as part of the subscription, so they would not have to pay upfront costs.
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POPSApple building a Kindle clone? I hope if this is true Amazon and Apple find some way to co-exist -- it would be terrible to have some publishers work with Apple and some with Amazon. Both stores should have the same books, in the same format -- let the companies compete on the hardware front.
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POPSApple killing Micro-USB standard? Apple makes lots of money selling charger cords, converters and docks, so they're resistant to adopting Micro-USB. But this could come back to bite them; come 2012, if the iPhone is the only device with a proprietary charger, don't you think that's going to turn off consumers?
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POPSKindle - eBook for the Future To be honest, I own the Kindle so my comments are biased. I also am a gadget nut and have owned previous incarnations of ebooks in the past (Rocket Reader). The Kindle, in my opinion, is a definite winner. The always accessible store. Fast downloads without a computer. Readable screen. Easy operation. Bookmarks, annotations, and highlighting. It has everything I was looking for in an electronic book reader. IMO, the Sony doesn't compare. Content alone makes it a winner. Sony has access to 20,000 titles. Kindle to over 80,000.
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