The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

FBreader- Holding the 770

Update on ebook reading with the 770: Adam Wolf kindly alerted me to his page where you can clearly see what I am talking about in terms of the haptics involved with reading on the 770. Thanks Adam for taking those shots. This is where the size of the 770 clearly comes into play. Any thing larger and it would be too uncomfortable to hold like this. I'll say again too that the sharpness of the screen helps tremendously. One of the nice things about using the 770 is reading in low light situations. The bad thing is that you can't read outside.

It's been difficult for me to track down how you make a FBreader formatted book, but I have recently had some success in doing that. I'm working a post that explains the procedure. Unfortunately, it seems to require MS Word at this point, so if you don't have that application, and a PC to run it on, AFAIK, you are out of luck making them. More later.

InfoLinks for Google & Nokia Announcement

Is the new Nokia Internet Tablet device is coming out next Tuesday?

More news about the Google Talk & Nokia collaboration:

• SeattlePI

• CNN Money
• Daily Tech

Not any real new info- just that a new Tablet is coming out, with Google Talk as the VOIP software. The announcement is Tuesday- who knows if the device will be released at that point.

Speaking of good news- look at the stock price for Nokia over the last 6 months:

700 Ebooks and FBreader – Missing the Point

So I was fighting with FBreader for a long time, and not understanding why it was so great- until I realized a few basic things, which I'll pass along-- in case you haven't been using it for all your reading lately.

• Rotate the screen 90 deg
• Go full-screen
• Use the rocker button, which is now on the right-hand side to move a page at a time
• The Library and place keeper (remembers where you were between sessions) only seem to work with FBreader files
• Get the latest version, it fixes some bugs.

Once I had these things going, I've been reading almost non-stop on this thing. I had a week vacation and had all my reading on it- and the screen is so sharp you can read on it all day and not strain your eyes. I did bump up the font size one pixel.

And I'm not reading just the classics, i.e. Gutenberg. How can you read the good stuff? I'll talk about that in my next entry, which I'm working on: The Dark Underbelly of IRC and eBooks. Lets just say that "they are out there." Hint.

Google Trends and the 770

So Google trends is now live– with it you can compare all sorts of things, like how the UMPC (remember Origami?) could turn out to be just a flash in the pan as the reviews of the first devices (just the Samsung for now) are rolling in– and almost all of them are dismal.

This screen grab shows the searches for Nokia 770 vs the UMPC. Can you say flash in the pan?

This also shows that the 770 was getting some good press during the end of the year. I hope that the Internet Tablet 2006 OS will generate some more buzz and get the 770 back out and into people’s hands where it belongs. I hope this device won’t become the next Agenda.