Gadget Man

Another weekend is here.

Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or so the play on word's goes. I remember going to see Billy Connolly and he said he was getting older - and that his sister had just retired! To him it felt like they were only playing hide and seek the week before!  Where does the time go...

So what have I been up to, well I have just purchased a Kindle. No, it's not me in a posh accent talking about a candle. The Kindle - is an electronic book reader. I love to read, I seem to spend most of my spare time either reading or writing something or other. Now, with the the Kindle I can surf the various canal blogs from the boat for free.

Electronic book readers are not a new technology. They have been around in one form or another for some time. Just as Apple's iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, Amazon wasn't the first company on the block to release an e-book reader; NuvoMedia's RocketBook and the early Sony Readers both beat the Kindle to market. But it's hard to argue that the online retailer's Kindle isn't the iPod of the e-book reader market. The Kindle has helped usher the e-book reader from gadget curiosity to a burgeoning mass market device.

What is special about the Kindle is that thousands of books come free of charge. The Kindle has a 3G connection to Whispernet so books can be downloaded for free. Amazon's newest Kindle is the best ebook-reading device on the market. It's better than the Apple iPad, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the various Sony readers, and certainly better than any smartphone.

Kindle is available as a software and as a hardware platform developed by Amazon for the rendering and displaying of e-books or electronic books and other digital media. There are four different hardware devices, known as "Kindle", "Kindle 2", a third generation device simply called the "Kindle" and "Kindle DX" I have the Third generation Kindle which is the latest hardware device with 3G support for use in 100 countries

Amazon released the Kindle for PC application free of charge, allowing users to read Kindle books on a Windows PC. Amazon later released a version for the Macintosh. Versions for mobile devices running on operating systems from Research in Motion, Apple and Google are also available free of charge. None of these alternate versions can currently read newspapers, magazines, or blogs, the way they are readable on the Kindle device itself.

With over 670,000 titles, the Kindle store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including 107 of 111 books currently found on the New York Times Best Seller list. However, over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright books are available to read on Kindle, including titles such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island. With the Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read English newspapers, magazines, books and even your favourite canal blog out loud to you. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free.

I must write something specific about the boat soon or visitors will begin to think the blog has changed... now there is a thought.... Making a change to the blogs direction.... mmmmm!


 

Later.....