enTourage eDGe. The First Combo E-reader Netbook Hits The Market.

Okay all you gadget-loving early adopters, the latest must-have tech gadget is finally taking pre-orders and is said to be shipping this week.

The enTourage eDGe is a new compact, portable, digital combination e-reader, notebook, mp3 and video player/recorder that lets you do all that the Kindle and iPad do, and then some.



Available in 5 colors, the device, with a horrible typographic treatment of the name*, is priced at $499.00 is taking pre-orders now and expected to start shipping this week.
*that capitalized DG in the word edge stands for Digital Generation.



The enTourage eDGe™ is the world’s first dualbook, combining the functions of an e-reader (complete with their online e-book store) , netbook, notepad, and audio/video recorder and player in one. It’s a comprehensive device that lets you read e-books, surf the Internet, take digital notes, send emails and instant messages, watch movies and listen to music anywhere, at any time.



Get books wirelessly, move files onto your enTourage eDGe™ using an SD card or a USB flash drive. Use the mini-USB port to move files back and forth from a Windows, Mac, or Linux-based PC. And with a netbook built in, you can forget the limitations of other e-readers, the enTourage eDGe™ does it all.

Netbook Functionality


The enTourage eDGe™ color touchscreen is a whole netbook, ready to play movies or MP3s, organize your books, notes, and pictures, or let you instant message your friends.

The screen is 1024 x 600 pixels, or 10.1 inches measured diagonally. You can view images from the e-book you're reading on the color display.

You can open a virtual keyboard and type instant messages or emails. The netbook includes an audio recorder to capture lectures for later playback or sharing.

It also has a video camera to record still images or movies as MP4s or 3GP files. You can plug in headphones or a microphone or use the built in speaker and recorder.



It has web browsing with built in WiFi®, audio/video record and playback, an email function and contacts list, a calculator, an alarm clock, and a library function to manage your books and files. The enTourage eDGe™ uses the Google® Android® OS, so you can add other applications you need (like Microsoft Office).




The netbook can be used in portrait or landscape mode, but you can also flip everything around 180 degrees. When you do that, the e-reader, where you keep your journals or take notes on books, will be on the right side, and the netbook will be on the left.



The enTourage eDGe™ only weighs about three pounds but can hold thousands of e-books in its built-in 3GB of usable memory. You can use an SD card or a USB flash drive to add to the storage, or move files to and from your MP3 player, your phone, your PC, even your camera.

Designed to let you go all day without recharging the battery, the lithium ion battery can last up to 16 hours of reading without recharging (note: that's 16 hours of reading. If you're using the LCD screen, the battery lasts about 6 hours) One of the big advantages of the enTourage eDGe™ is that the battery can be replaced if it's ever necessary.

5 Different Colors:


The enTourage eDGe™ comes complete with a Stylus, a Power adapter, a USB cable and a Quick Start Guide

Technical Specs:
•Dimensions: 8.25" x 10.75" by 1.0" (closed)
•Weight: approx. 3 lbs.
•Internal Memory: 4 GB (3 GB for user) up to 3000 books
•E-reader File Formats: ePub, PDF
•LCD Touchscreen Display Size: 1024 x 600 (10.1")
•E-paper Display Size: 9.7" e-Ink®(1200 x 825), 8 shades of gray
•E-paper Input: Wacom® Penabled®
•Operating System: Linux with Google® Android®
•Screen Rotation: 90 and 180 degrees
•Connectivity: WiFi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth capability
•Battery Life: 16+ hours utilizing the e-reader screen / up to 6 hours running the LCD screen
•Battery Type: Lithium-ion polymer
•External Memory: SD card slot, 2 USB ports
•Audio and Microphone Jack: 3.5 mm each. Includes internal microphone and speakers.
•Audio playback: MP3, WAV, 3GPP, MP4, AAC, OGG, M4A
•Video playback: 3GP, MP4, Adobe Flash Lite (H.264)
•Input: Stylus input on e-paper and touchscreen. Virtual keyboard. USB keyboard (optional)


Check out what Wired magazine's Gadget Lab has to say about it here.


Pre-order yours now here.
all images and information courtesy of enTourage eDGe

Apple. Experiencing a Power Surge.

Since Steve Jobs returned for a second stint at Apple 10 years ago, the company has come up with consumer hits such as the iPhone (above) and the iPod. However, there were a few duds too. Remember the Cube? and how about Apple tv?

Regardless, the stock has increased over the past year (see below).


Mr. Jobs, who returned for a second stint as chief executive in 1997 after being away for a dozen years, may announce that annual sales surpassed $20 billion for the first time in the company's 31-year history when he reports results for the year and fourth quarter on Oct. 22.

And if Steve Jobs instincts are correct, I say get out there and buy some Apple stock, if you weren't savvy enough to do so already.

Below is an article reprinted from today NY Times:
By JOHN MARKOFF
Publishedin the NY Times: October 22, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — It may have dropped the word “computer” from its name, but Apple is certainly selling plenty of Macs.

Driven in part by what analysts call a halo effect from the iPod and the iPhone, the market share of the company’s personal computers is surging.

Two research firms that track the computer market said last week that Apple would move into third place in the United States behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell on Monday, when it reports product shipments in the fiscal fourth quarter as part of its earnings announcement.

“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”

On Friday, Apple will start selling the new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which has a range of features that in some cases match those in Windows Vista and in others surpass them.

Mr. Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.

Above: The apple site has a live count-down until the release of the anxiously-awaited Leopard Operating System

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

That pace suggests that Apple will continue to move more quickly than Microsoft, which took almost seven years between the release of its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.

Above: Vista, Microsoft's more visual interface and operating system that debuted last year.

Vista has had mixed reviews, and corporate sales have been slow so far. Mr. Jobs declined to comment on Microsoft’s troubles with Vista, beyond noting that he thought Leopard was a better value. While there are multiple editions of Vista with different features at different prices, the top being the Ultimate edition, Apple has set a single price of $129 for Leopard.

With Leopard, Mr. Jobs joked, “everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.”

Microsoft has said that it will release an update, or service pack, for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. But it has also said that it intends to offer a service pack for Windows XP in the first half of the year. That, analysts said, could further delay adoption of Vista as computer users wait to see how XP will be improved.

Microsoft has also hinted that its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, would not arrive until 2010. At Apple’s current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then.

Apple has not been flawless in its execution. Early this year, it delayed the introduction of Leopard for four months. Mr. Jobs attributed this at the time to the company’s need to move programming development resources to an iPhone version of the OS X operating system.

Several analysts said they thought that Leopard would have only an indirect effect on Macintosh sales.

As for Vista, it has clearly not pushed up demand for new PCs as much as computer makers hoped. Last week, the research firm Gartner said PC shipments in the United States grew only 4.7 percent in the third quarter, below its projection of 6.7 percent.

That contrasted sharply with Apple’s projected results for the quarter. Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 percent share of the domestic market.

Apple has outpaced its rivals in the United States, particularly in the shift to portable computers. While this is the first year that laptops have made up more than 50 percent of computer sales in this country, Mr. Jobs said that two-thirds of Apple machines sold in the United States are now laptops.

Apple has also outperformed rivals in terms of market share by revenue, because its machines are generally more expensive.

According to Charles Wolf, who tracks the personal computer market in his industry newsletter Wolf Bytes, Apple’s share of home PC revenue in the United States has jumped in the last four quarters. In the second quarter, for example, the Macintosh captured a 15.8 percent share, almost double its share of the number of units sold.

He added that Apple had a significant opportunity now in terms of visitors to its stores. Apple is now reporting 100 million annual visitors, and Mr. Wolf estimated that 60 million to 70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to Macs.

Above: A typical in-mall apple store

Although Apple may be able to grow briskly by taking Windows customers from Microsoft, the two companies face a similar problem: the industry is maturing and there have been no obvious radical innovations to jump-start growth.

Indeed, many of the new features in the Leopard operating system version are incremental improvements. But Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.

“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.

He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.

In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.

Above: Apple's iphone

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.

“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”

GEEK Shorthand for the rest of us

The Next Generation of Online Shorthand
By DAVID POGUE of the New York Times.

By now, everybody, I hope, knows what LOL stands for. Most people probably recognize IMHO, BRB, and AFK. (If you don't know these, you can always Google* them.)

Online shorthand like this arose, of course, because it's so hard to type full English words on a cellphone's number keypad. And it's tedious to type the same common phrases over and over again in chat rooms or instant messages.

The problem with these online abbreviations, however, is that they're absolutely ancient; entire generations of teenagers have learned and outgrown LOL and OMG. The world desperately needs a new set of acronyms more relevant to today's online chat participants.

So here, with my compliments, are a few proposals: an updated list of online acronyms.

(In hopes to keep the list relevant to the youthful target audience, I invited my more recent summer interns, Zach Brass and Bart Stein, to write a few. Their suggestions, along with some from my occasional research assistant Emma Story, appear here along with mine. Thanks, dudes!)

* GI -- Google it

* MOP -- Mac or PC?

* FCAO -- five conversations at once

* IIOYT -- is it on YouTube?

* DYFH -- did you Facebook him/her?

* BIOI -- buy it on iTunes

* CMOS -- call me on Skype

* GGNUDP -- gotta go, no unlimited data plan

* WLF -- with the lady friend

* JUOC -- jacked up on caffeine

* 12OF -- twelve-o'clock flasher (refers to someone less than competent with technology, to the extent that every appliance in the house flashes "12:00")

* SML -- send me the link

* RHB -- read his/her blog

* MBLO -- much better-looking online

* KYST -- knew you'd say that

* NBL -- no battery left

* CTTC -- can't talk, teacher's coming

* TWD -- typing while driving

* CMT (CMF, CMM, CMB) -- check my Twitter (Facebook, Myspace, blog)

* CYE (CYF, CYM, CYB)--check your email (Facebook, Myspace, blog)

And a few just for iPhone owners:

* SPLETS -- send pics later; Edge too slow

* CSVUI -- can't send video, using iPhone

* BPWMI -- boss playing with my iPhone

* SIK -- sorry, iPhone keyboard

* OOM -- out of messages (for iPhone users who haven't upgraded their AT&T "200 messages a month" plan)

Finally, it occurred to me: Why should the convenience of online shorthand be the province of teenagers and twentysomethings? There ought to be a list that we, their parents and employers, can use, too. And now there is:

* WIWYA -- when I was your age

* YKT – you kids today

* CRRE -- conversation required; remove earbuds

* WDO? -- what are you doing online?

* NIWYM -- no idea what you mean

* NCK -- not a chance, kid

* B2W -- back to work

* AYD? -- are you drunk?

* LODH -- log off, do homework

* DYMK? -- does your mother know?

* IGAT -- I've got abbreviations, too

* IMHO = In My Humble Opinion; BRB = Be Right Back; AFK = Away From Keyboard

Test Your Broadband Speed

I found this convenenient and free utility today.
An online test of your broadband speed, uploading and downloading.
It's still in Beta, so the results may not be totally accurate.

Just go here and take the test!

Today's results for my Mac G5 2.25gHz below: