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Article Recap for the Week ending Apr 17, 2009

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, Computers, Gaming & Toys, Gizmo of the Day, Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet, Software / By /

We started off the week by reporting that Amazon’s Kindle Store has surpassed over 260,000 books with an exponential growth rate – at least that’s not a reason not to own one.

We took a look at the available VHS to DVD converters and other analog to digital converters (both hardware and software solutions).

We featured a bunch of Google-related news. The latest offering from Gmail Labs is a tiny addition but welcome one – insert images directly into email. Next are the many uses of Google Latitude and last is the news that Google and universal were partnering up on a music video website called Vevo.

Rounding up, we pleasantly discovered that Facebook is
not only attracting younger members. Rock Band fan? Nowhere to put your instruments? Then take a look at the ‘Rock Box’ Rock Band storage box.

Sony eBook Store gets a 500k title boost from Google

Books, Music and Movies / By /

Sony announced today that they have, with Google’s contribution, added over half a million (500,000) free public domain books to their library for their eReaders. This collection consist of books whose copyright has expired, so most of these titles will have been published prior to 1932.

This brings the total number of titles in the Sony eBook Store to over 600,000 easily surpassing the 250,000 titles that the Kindle Store has.

While many see this as Google teaming up with Sony to compete with Amazon in the eReader field, I think Google probably saw this as an easy decision, choosing to go with the vendor that supported the e-book standard, EPUB. Kindle does not natively support EPUB, although it has a conversion tool that ships with the reader.

Kindle 2 e-reader announced by Amazon

1 Comment / Books, Music and Movies, Gizmo of the Day, Portable / By /

Amazon announced version 2 of the Kindle today, which will ship on February 24, 2009. Kindle 2 has a slew of improvements over the first Kindle such as:

  • Just over 1/3″ thick
  • Light: 10.2 oz (less than a paperback)
  • 3G wireless (and Amazon pays for the wireless bill!)
  • Improved e-ink display: 16 shades of gray & easier to read in sunlight without glare
  • Greater storage: hold over 1500 books
  • Text-to-speech – books to audio
  • 25% longer battery life
  • Built-in Dictionary

You can pre-order your Kindle 2 right now. You may remember that the 1st Kindle was in such high demand that many people simply did not get theirs. Their orders will be automatically converted to Kindle 2s without any action or additional costs on their part.

Review: GoodSync – Backup and Sync Tool

Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Recommended, Reviews, Software / By /

Almost 3 years ago, Gizmos for Geeks reviewed GoodSync with the intent of using it to backup important data from a user’s desktop computer to USB thumb drives. Fast forward to today where hard drives have grown tremendously in size and so has data storage and you have an even tougher backup issue. For those of us who also perform a lot of work out of our own homes, backing up data is crucial and backing it up to offsite locations is just as important. I’ve personally decided to test using Amazon’s S3 service to backup my computer’s data and GoodSync has been recently updated to include S3 support. We put the latest version of GoodSync through its paces and in particular, focused on its S3 support.

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Amazon Video on Demand

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet / By /

Amazon has updated their Amazon Unbox program. It’s now called Amazon Video on Demand and offers for a fee on-demand streaming of 40,000 TV shows and movies over the Net. You don’t need to purchase a subscription, but can view what you’d like ad-free, whenever you’d like for a small fee. Also, if you have a Sony Bravia TV with Internet Link, you can also use Amazon VoD.

The Amzn VoD service works on Macs and Windows boxes in your usual Web browser suspects. No HD yet, but it’s in the cards. The coolest part of this service – start watching on one machine and pick it up later on a different machine!

Rentals typically last 24 hours, and cost around $4 for a movie, $2 for a tv show. Purchases are somewhere between $10 and $15 each.

Gimme!

Amazon’s Emmy Event

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, Gizmo of the Day / By /

In anticipation of the 2008 Primetime Emmy Awards show (Sep 21), Amazon.com has built a special page highlighting all of the nominees and naturally links to buy the DVDs of those shows.

Hop over and browse the list of shows that you may not have been watching, but turned out to be better than you imagined they would be. Buy the DVDs and catch up before the new season is over!

Review: PricePirates price comparison software

1 Comment / Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet, Reviews, Software / By /

PricePirates is a piece of Windows freeware that lets you compare prices in eBay auctions ( you can select what country), Amazon.com and Shopping.com. Each of those product sources show up in different tabs in the software and automatically populated once you switch to a tab. There is also a tab with a Web search (although I don’t know why you would bother with this when there are much better search engines out there).

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