Back and Forth Forever

• Anyone know if there's a navicli getall like command for an HP EVA? SSSU is not very powerful. #

The XBMC project is on the verge of releasing the new version, 9.11, of their media player software. This version bolsters a new interface, improved hardware support, and a more streamlined installation method.  Though I’ve showed it to a number of people the installation on dedicated HTPC (Home Theater PC) hardware can seem daunting, though in all actuality the process is very simple, even for novices.  I’ll be going in to detail on how I have configured my setup to include gray area DVR functionality that stomps on commercial solutions.

Having used a number of canned DVR solutions from numerous cable companies in the past (Wide Open West, Comcast, and now AT&T) I’ve found that they’re all sluggish, unintuitive, and unreliable at best.  AT&T edges out Comcast and Wide Open West by a small margin with their U-Verse offering but with a little DIY effort and willingness to get your hands dirty you can build your own HTPC environment that can do everything your current DVR solution can and much more.

If you’re interested in a cheap elegant solution that allows you  to watch 1080p video and TV shows with all commercials pre-cut read on.  One thing to note, the downloading functionality might not be 100% legal in your country, so keep that in mind.

Read more..

The iPhone 3GS is out.  You want one.  You want one badly.  If you buy one, however, Apple and AT&T will take your soul and all your hard earned money.

Out of all my friends who own iPhones I think I’m the only one who is upgrading to the iPhone 3GS because everyone thinks it’s criminal for Apple and AT&T to charge you *gasp* full price for a new phone.

Let us take a step back and look at what really happened when you bought your iPhone 3G.  The iPhone 3G cost somewhere around $700 for the 16GB model at launch.  If you were coming to AT&T for the first time, or renewing your 24 month contract AT&T was nice enough to subsidize your purchase down to a more digestible price of $299.  AT&T doesn’t do this because they want to be your best friend.  It’s all business guys.  Over the course of 24 months they’ll make up the cost of their $401 investment.

Lets fast forward to present day.  You want the shiny new 32GB model.  It’s a snappier evolution of the iPhone you currently have, has more gigabytes of storage, more features, and improved battery life.  You put in all the pertinent information and get a purely evil message stating that you’ll have to pay full price for your phone upgrade.  You scream, you yell, you spew four letter words at both Apple and AT&T.

I’ll put this in perspective for you.  You bought an iPhone some time after launch day almost a year ago and renewed your contract by 24 months.  Like I said, you’re 12 months or less in to your 24 month contract.  AT&T is being nice to some people (me) and cutting us a small break, but no where near the advertised price.  Effectively at the 12 month mark they’ve realized half the investment they put in up front, and they’ll call the other half a loss and cut you a small break to earn your loyalty for another two years.

It’s story time kids!  I went sailing with my iPhone in my pocket about 9 months ago.  Some point between wading in to deeper waters and returning to the dock I realized that my phone was in my pocket and transformed in to an expensive paper weight.  After realizing my horrible mistake I hung my head in shame, scrounged up some cash and bought a non-subsidized iPhone 3G 16GB model at full price. I was 3 months in to my renewed contract and neither Apple and AT&T were at fault for my stupid mistake.

This is no different.  In no other industry can you expect to get a new piece of expensive hardware at 75% off list price.  If you want a new device, expect to pay full price for it.  If you can’t stomach the cost, then don’t.  Apple will have an iPhone Video, or iPhone 3GS x2 another 11 months from now.  I’m guessing it’ll be faster, have more hard drive space, better battery life, more features, smaller form factor, improved camera, true background application support, “One Last Thing”, and cost $800 unsubsidized through AT&T.  If you can’t wait to get your hands on a 3GS then by all means, pick one up on Friday.  Just remember you’ll be in the same boat another 12 months from now.

It has been almost a full week since I’ve had my MacBook Pro, and made the switch from Windows/Linux to OSX.  Some things are fantastic, others are quite mindboggling.  All in all it’s been a smooth transition, but not without bumps in the road.

Keyboard
The unibody MacBook Pro keyboard itself is wonderful.  They keys are quiet, responsive, and well spaced for a laptop keyboard.  Positioning of the keys is very nice and for most functions there’s very little learning curve from a traditional Windows keyboard.  The ambient light detector does a great job of lighting up the keyboard in low light conditions and doesn’t seem to impact battery life too much.

The downside of the keyboard isn’t the keyboard itself, it’s figuring out when to use fn, Control, Option/Alt, and Command/Clover.  Some extremely common keys like pageup, pagedown, home, and end aren’t anywhere to be found on the keyboard.  After a little Googling it turns out that command+arrow key fills these roles, but it isn’t very intuitive and I could see computer novices struggling to find this information and probably end up not using this function altogether.  There’s no backspace key, unless you use command+delete.  The function keys don’t actually do what you’d expect.  I’d expect function keys to be function keys first and Expose, volume up/down, brightness up/down second.

It took me a good few days to get the hang of when to use which key modifier, and I still trip up regurarly, even while writing this post.  I think once I get the hang of it I’ll be satisified though it still seems a bit more cumbersome then what I was used to.

Keyboard: 9/10
OSX Keyboard Nuances: 3/10

Touchpad
The touchpad is one area that the Pro really shines.  I never thought I’d rather use a touchpad then a mouse, until this laptop.  Historically I hated touchpads and would usually turn them off, in favor of the eraser thing on IBM laptops.  The biggest problem with touchpads was when you were typing and you’d wrest your palm on the pad you’d inadvertently click somewhere outside where you were typing.  There, apparently, is a sensor somewhere that knows whether your plam is wresting on the touchpad or you’re attempting to use it as intended.

Additionally, the mulit-touch functionality is fantastic.  Two fingers to scroll, three fingers to… do something I haven’t had to use yet, and four fingers down for Expose, up for Show desktop, left or right to switch between applications.  All in all, it’s amazingly useful and hasn’t made me want to use the Mighty Mouse I picked up along with my purchase.

Touchpad: 9.5/10

Display
I opted to pick up the 17″ glossy MacBook Pro for the extra screen real estate, higher resolution, and improved battery life which I’ll get to later.  The default resolution of 1920×1200 might be a little tight for some people but it looks very nice on the big display.  The auto lighting feature, same as the keyboard’s, works very well.  All in all, it’s a very nice display.  I can’t compare it to higher end Windows laptops but it is most definitely one of the better displays I’ve seen.

Display: 9/10

Battery Life
I was a bit skeptical at first when I read that Apple claims the 17″ MacBook Pro has 8 hours of battery life.  After putting it to the test, I can see why they’re able to make this claim.  On a full charge I’ve gotten about 5-1/2 hours out before the warning that my battery was about to expire.  During that time I downloaded a Windows 7 RC1 beta .iso, downloaded and installed VMWare Fusion, installed Windows 7 under Fusion, did a good deal of internet browsing and installing other applications.  Under “regular” use I can easily see getting 6-7 hours out of a single charge.  Very impressive indeed.  With judicious use of display brightness and light WiFi usage, I think 8 hours might be obtainable.  Will I ever see it?  Probably not.

The truly impressive thing about the battery life is how they can fit that much battery in the relatively thin form factor of the MBP.  There’s no extra battery pack hanging off the back of the device which is necessary to obtain 8 hours on most Dell laptops.  The battery indicator lights on the front-left side of the laptop do a good job of indicating charge when the lid is closed, and the applet next to the clock gives a good estimated time before you’ll be out of juice.

Also, the magnet power cable is pretty cool.  My dog pulled it lose once and instead of jerking my whole laptop across my desk, the power cable popped out without doing any damage.  There is a lawsuit in progress over the MagSafe power cord, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to sue over it.

Battery: 9/10

OSX
Where to begin?  I feel equally comfortable in Linux or Windows, and consider myself a power user on both operating systems to some degree but for this section I’ll try to highlight where novices and experts alike will struggle and strive with the switch.  Depending on how you use your computer currently, the switch to OSX could be extremely easy, or a serious pain in the butt for power users.  There’s a lot of unlearning what you’ve learned, and generally thinking about the operating system in a completely different fashion.  For Linux folks familiar with Gnome or to a lesser extend, KDE, the switch well be much less painful.  For Windows folks, I can’t say that OSX will be a breath of fresh air but depending on how deeply you use Windows the transition could vary widly.

From my initial impression OSX seems to be a big black box of sorts.  It works, but I can’t quite figure out how or why certain things work the way they do.  There’s some great features, and the default set of applications is extremely robust, but if it wasn’t for a bit of prior knowledge of the operating system, some things would surely drive me crazy in a hurry.

OSX “Free Apps”
First off, OSX comes with an interesting and not entirely useful set of applications out of the box.  Everything you expect to be there is included with the default installation of OSX 10.5.x: E-mail application, calendars, contacts, music player, notepad, web browser, etc.  Apple also thought it’d be fun to include some gimicky applications to help their “We have this application and you have to buy it for Windows” mantra.  iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand are the three that really stick out as gimicky applications.  Not only can you find free, and in some cases better, versions for Windows, Linux, and OSX but they don’t necessarily bring any benefit to in my estimation 90% of regular computer users.

iPhoto is the best of the three, but isn’t groundbreakingly better then Picasa, a free application from Google.  For a very solid photo management application I’d recommend Adobe’s Lightroom over both anyways.  iMovie seems like a decent piece of movie editing software, but free and OpenSource VirtualDub does a decent job at filling the gap.  I’m sure there’s a good number of other free video editing software out there as well.  GarageBand is an interesting free addition to OSX.  GarageBand is one part audio recording software, and one part instrument video lessons.  My girlfriend, Laurane, and I spent a few hours playing with it — and it is pretty cool — but aside from that I can’t say that including GarageBand is a killer app by any means.  In summation I’d prefer that Apple left these out and reduced the overall cost of the operating system by a few $100.  They’re nice to have, but I can’t see any other reason for their inclusion but to offer things Window’s doesn’t.

Bells and Whistles
Some features like Expose and Spaces you don’t think you need until you have them available to you.  For those of you that aren’t familiar with either Expose is a key (F3) or touchpad gesture that will show you all windows currently open spaced out on the screen, and Spaces is a virtual window manager that allows you to move applications to different virtual monitors.  I use Spaces for work/email, web browsing, and Twitter / IM applications.  It might seem cumbersome at first but it really is handy after you’re familiar with it.  For Linux folks one cool thing about Spaces over other VWMs is the ability to see all VWMs and to drag windows from one to another.  It’s hard to explain if you haven’t used it.  Another cool feature is “hot corners”.  By moving your mouse to any of the four corners of the screen you can set specific actions.  I use one for Expose, one for Spaces, and one to activate the screensaver.

This may be considered a “power user” feature by some, but in Windows by hitting the start menu and typing the first few characters of an application you’ll be taken directly to that application within the Start Menu, and not have to browse through until you find your application.  In OSX, unless you drag the application to the dock bar You have to click on the hard drive -> Applications -> Application name.  This issue can be resolved by installing Quicksilver, otherwise loading applications can be a bit combersome out of the box.

Everything Else
OSX is pretty.  Everything has a smooth feeling to it, and for the most part — it just works.  I’m sure after a few months of getting the hang of the shortcuts and nuances I’ll feel more at home.  With VMWare Fusion installed I’ll still have access to all my Windows applications, and I may throw Ubuntu on Boot Camp, but for now I’m going to give OSX a shot and see if I can make the most of this altogether expensive experiment.

OSX Overall – 7/10

In Conclusion…
I’m not sold yet.  The things that work well, work very well.  My biggest gripe this far is the keyboard layout and having to relearn everything I became so used to with windows and Linux.  Small things like the Terminal.app not behaving how I’m used to with gnome-terminal, or keyboard shortcuts not working the way they’re “supposed to”.  I’d expect the average person switching from Windows to be very happy on OSX.  I can’t see anything, so far, that I’m truly missing from Windows.  I gave up on Windows gaming quite a while ago, and even then apparently VMWare Fusion works quite well for gaming (but can it play Crysis???).  I’d recommend people that are looking to buy a laptop to give a MacBook a serious look.  While it may not be the most affordable solution the build quality sets the bar and the ease of use will be a welcome change for most people.  Also, Apple products tend to hold their value quite well.  When it comes time to trade up to the next big Apple product rollout you’ll probably get top dollar on your used laptop.

Drop me a comment if I missed something, or am totally wrong about something above.  Again, this is my first dive in to OSX territory.  So far the water is warm.

Tim and I had known each other virtually for close to 9 years.  We met over IRC when I was still attending college at Eastern Michigan University.  We had common taste in music and movies though we frequently debated which were the better and worst movies in the Criterion Collection, or whether trance music was better then house music.  We drifted in and out of contact for a few years but within the past six months we spent many hours together in another virtual world.  The World of Warcraft.

It’s hard to imagine how someone you’ve never physically met can have such an impact in your life, and how them leaving in such an abrupt matter can be so devastating.  We spent hours a day talking over Ventrilo, a popular VOIP client, planning our adventures through the lands of Azeroth or rehashing the same tired debates.  His easy going, laid back, selfless personality was immediately welcomed by everyone who had the pleasure of meeting him.  He truly was one of the reasons for logging in and revisiting the same virtual piece of World day after day.

Some of my friends who haven’t caught the very addictive and contagious bug that is WoW don’t understand why I spend so much time doing what I do.  It’s not just the game itself that’s the draw, it’s the friendships you make along the way.  It’s difficult to understand unless you’ve walked in similar virtual shoes.  Spending hours a week with the same 25 people, experiencing the same virtual victories and defeats creates a close bond.  Even friendship.  The initial draw to upper echelon raiding in WoW is the gear, the loot, the purples.  Over time that becomes sidelined to hanging out with friends you’ve never met in person.  Sharing those victories and defeats, regardless of how valid they are in the real world.

When we first met, Tim and I, our friendship consisted of text on a screen, in a chat window, with a community of people who shared common interests.  As technology progresses it widens the interaction you can have with someone you’ve never met physically.  Until the horrific and inexplicable events from last night I could see “him” on the screen and hear his voice over my headphones.  I got to laugh, scream, and complain with him and his purring cat almost daily.  Interestingly enough, I came to know him just as well, and in come cases better then I know friends I’ve had since 9th grade in real life.

In, and out, of the game I learned that he had a great job and a bright outlook on the future. That he had two adorable cats, a loving family, a house in the country.  And a motorcycle he loved to ride.

At 9:21 PM yesterday I got a phone call from a police investigator from the central New York area.  I was informed that a good friend of mine was in a severe motorcycle accident and the outlook wasn’t good.  Having been the last person to contact him, and his family unreachable, I was the first person to get the call and I spent the next 4 hours frantically trying to reach anyone who would be able to contact his parents.

Hours later, I found out that Tim Petitte had passed away at University Hospital.  His parents didn’t find out for another nine hours.

Tim, I wish I had gotten to know you better.  I wish I would have made the time to meet you in real life.  I wish you could have met Laurane, and Pepper, and my not so talented cat Stoli.  I wish I could have met your two cats, visited your house in the country, and rode your bike.  You’ll be in my thoughts as long as I continue to take breath.  I cherished our friendship.

Tim Petitte, you’ll truly be missed.

Surprising even myself I bought a Mac.  Specs below.  I’ll write more when it shows up in a week or so.

• Processor 065-8136 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• Memory 065-8138 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM 2X2GB
• Hard Drive 065-8140 320GB Serial ATA @ 7200 rpm
• Optical Drive 065-8145 SuperDrive 8X
• Display 065-8646 DISPLAY-HI RES, GL,Widescreen
• DVI Adapter 065-8152 Mini DisplayPort – DVI Adapter
• VGA Adapter 065-8294 N0 VGA Adapter
• Remote 065-8147 No Remote
• Apple Software – iWork 065-7672 No IWork Preinstalled
• Apple Software – Final Cut Exp 065-7674 No Final Cut Exp Preinstalled
• Apple Software – Aperture 065-7673 No Aperture Preinstalled
• Apple Software – Logic Express 065-7675 No Logic Exp Preinstalled
• Apple Software – Filemaker 065-8307 No Filemaker Preinstalled
• Apple Software – MS Office 065-8198 No Microsoft Office Preinstall
• Keyboard and Documentation 065-8155 KYBD/User’s Guide
• Country Kit/AEX 065-8158 Country Kit

Everyone seems to have their predictions of what the new iPhone OS will have, so I’ll throw my .02 in to the virtual hat.  The Palm Pre seems to be the closest thing to an iPhone killer we’re likely to see in the foreseeable future.  Don’t misquote me and say that the Palm Pre is an iPhone killer, because it’s not.  I think Roger McNamee went too far out on a limb with that statement.

Apple has to swing for the fences on this one.  The 2nd generation iPhone, or iPhone 3G, was a minor upgrade at best.  Everybody else had 3G speeds and GPS — welcome to 2005 Apple.  Unfortunately for Apple everyone else has quite a list of features that are mysteriously missing on the iPhone: copy/paste, MMS, turn by turn directions, backgrounding apps, a decent camera, laptop tethering, and stereo Bluetooth.  Back to the Palm Pre, I think it has a decent shot at stealing a customer or three but Apple has one thing that acts as a buffer between delivering what users want and what they want to dish out in small bite sized doses.  The iPhone is a product by Apple, it doesn’t matter what they push out in any quantity people will snap it up.  I’ll admit, I was a early adopter of the first iPhone and while it was a technological step backwards from my AT&T Tilt 3G phone it just felt like a better phone even without the App Store and almost-broadband Internet connection.

The iPhone needs to catch up where it still has been lacking some seemingly simple features and here’s what I think they’ll deliver tomorrow.

WILL HAVE

• Copy & Paste — Kevin Rose said it’ll be there, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.
• Stereo Bluetooth — Another simple feature that free phones from AT&T offer.
• MMS — It’s holding them back in European markets they need this for success outside the US.
• Push — Push technology is useful for IM and periodical update applications that don’t need to be running 24 hours a day.  Jobs promised this to us in September, it’s March, it should be ready by now.
• Premium App Store — The App Store is flooded with garbage and a few gems.  This would give applications a way to stand out and say, “I’m not another iFart app.”
• Backgrounding Apps — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this will be allowed in some form.  Windows Mobile does it, the Pre does it, Apple has to do it to be considered a smart phone.  Do I really think backgrounding will be in 3.0?  I’m going to say yes, but it’s probably just wishful thinking.
• Turn by Turn Directions — I’d like this to be a standard feature not a 3rd party app.  I remember in 2006 a co-worker did this on his flip phone and found a pool hall in the middle of Nowhere, KY.  My Jesus Phone can’t do it 3 years later.

NEEDS TO HAVE

• Everything above
• New design — It’s nice to match the competition but that’s not exactly Apple’s style.  The current iPhone was a leap forward now it’s just another phone.
• Higher resolution screen
• Improved battery life
• Flash support — okay, the iPhone doesn’t need flash support, but it’d be nice to have.

WISHFULL THINKING

• Play remote library — doubt AT&T or any other carrier would let this fly over 3G but over WiFi it’d be nice.
• WiFi iTunes sync
• Improved springboard — it worked great when we had 14 apps, it works okay when you have 50.
• Improved keyboard — I’m used to it now, but I’d still like a physical keyboard.
• iChat — And it can be ran in the background
• Notification screen — When are my next appointments?  I missed 3 calls but why do I have to click 3 times to see from who?
• Front facing camera — It’s 2009, I should be able to video conference while driving my flying car
• Voice Dialing — I truly miss this feature from Windows Mobile phones
• Email Improvements — it works okay now, but it could be considerably better
• Video capture/improved video — Qik has been great for now but the video quality could be a lot better using Cyrecorder (jailbreak)

We’ll see how accurate I was in another 24 hours.  I’ll be surprised if they don’t announce everything in the first section.  Steve Jobs said they’re two years ahead of the competition two years ago.  Lets see if they can pull the same feat this time around, or at least give us what most smart phones had 4 years ago.

Tonight 9 EST.

And this is why I look forward to them.

Google has officially announced the first Android phone, G1, which will be released on T-Mobile some time in early October.  I remember when Google first made their announcement that they’d be entering the cell phone marketplace and I was ecstatic.  At the time I was fluctuating between the first gen iPhone and HTC’s 8925, more commonly known as the AT&T Tilt.  Both phones were great in their own right.  The iPhone had a great web browser, was sleek and shiny albeit slow (EDGE) whereas the Tilt was slow overall but had a good deal more features and worked on AT&Ts 3G network.

Overall, the iPhone lacked a ton of features (and still does) that it should have had out of the box.  Thankfully people much smarter then myself did some voodoo magic and opened up the phone to third party applications which were unsanctioned by AT&T or Apple.  The Jailbreak community took off in storm from re-engineering the main screen interface, Springboard, and adding all sorts of useful applications.  Unfortunately Apple would break the Jailbreak applications almost monthly with their upgrades.

Fast forward to July ‘08 and the iPhone 3G and we’re more or less in the same place we were last year, and maybe not a lot better off.  The iPhone 3G added aGPS and connectivity to 3G networks around the world, and most of all they saw the value of releasing a developer API to create and distribute native applications via the Application Store.  At first everything seemed great, a lot of people made a lot of money and if you want to use your phone as a flashlight or play sudoku you have about 100 different applications that will help you reach that goal; and that’s where things get sticky, and the Android phones seem more and more viable.

There’s been a bit of nastiness surrounding the Application Store in the past few weeks, which should be good news for Android phones.  There have been two stories that have gotten pretty good press lately.  The first is a guy who created a Podcast program that will download new podcast shows over the air directly to your phone.  The second application, MailWrangler, brings the enhanced functionality of Google Mail to a native application on the iPhone.  Both applications were rejected from the application store because they rivaled functionality in Apple’s products.  The moral of the story is, make whatever you want for the application store as long as it’s a flashlight application or some variant of Sudoku.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch but however great Apple’s applications are an outright rejection based on competition is a poor move.

A few days after these incidents caught the attention of bloggers around the world Apple revised their strict NDA to restrict App Store rejections to be made public knowledge.  Alex Sokirynsky, creator of Podcaster has stated that he “will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.”  I’d wager a guess that he’s not alone.  Perhaps this will turn more people to release these apps via Cydia, the premier distribution application for the Jailbreak community.  Perhaps it will turn more people to Android.

Apple and Google are very different companies, at least from a third party perspective.  Apple is about making money and apparently stamping out competition, whereas Google seems to welcome competition and rewards worthy competitors.  Not only will the Android application store be unrestricted but they’ll also have a variation of the iTunes mobile store which connects to Amazon’s MP3 store which provides very reasonably priced music free from DRM.

From videos around the web and reading many tech blogs posting about the Android phone I can deduce that the G1 is very first gen.  The interface seems very inconsistent across the board and a bit clunky at times.  It definitely doesn’t have the polished look and feel that you get from the iPhone.  The interface seems a bit less then smooth and doesn’t feel as usable in comparison to the obvious rival.  However, Google long since embraced the Open Source community and their platform will be free to modify by anyone that chooses to do so.  My gut is telling me to hold off on the first round of Google Android phones and wait for things to get cleaned up considerably before jumping on the bandwagon.

Apple seems to be toeing in shark infested waters by restricting the platform that has made them boatloads of money, Google on the other hand is jumping in head first and the water looks mighty nice… maybe a bit cold right now though.

After debating with myself for a long time I finally decided to make the plunge and grab an Amazon Kindle.  After a few days of playing around with it I’m very impressed it.  My biggest concern was if the battery life would really hold up during a long weekend away from home and potentially without power.  The result was all I could hope for.  After having the device powered on and actively used I’ve managed to get about 25 hours of use out of the device with it still being at 1/2 charge.  Most impressive indeed.

The screen is definitely easy on the eyes and does a great job rendering text, although pictures don’t look so good.  It’s about what I’d expect from a greyscale E-Ink display.  There iss minor ghosting of the previous “page” but not enough to be overly distracting.  After switching to the next page the screen will go black for a split second then render the next page.  This is a bit distracting at first but I’ve gotten used to it.

The biggest downside of the Kindle is most definitely the shell’s form factor.  The device itself is small and very lightweight but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to hold it without accidently hitting either the Next Page or Prev Page buttons accidentally.  Maybe with more use or a protective case I’ll be able to get past this obvious design flaw, but out of the box it’s definitely cumbersome.

The Kindle reads a good variety of formats: .mobi, .prc, .txt, .jpg, .gif, HTML, MS Word, and Amazon’s own .azw format.  After a bit of browsing I found that Mobipocket can convert .pdf files to .prc with little effort.  All in all, you should be able to convert any eBooks to a format the Kindle will recognize.

One of the biggest benefits of the Kindle is the considerable discount on purchasing a book from Amazon.  After unboxing the Kindle for the first time it was pretty cool to see that it had been preconfigured to my Amazon account with a personalized “Welcome Aaron” message, which is a nice touch.  I recently purchased “Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China” which can be bought in hardcover form for $18.48 (list $25) or through the Kindle for $9.99.  Most New York Times best sellers are all $9.99 or under so if you’re an avid reader the Kindle should pay for itself in no time.  Whether you purchase the book on the Kindle or on your computer in under a minute the book will automatically download over a free CDMA connection to your Kindle.

One of my favorite features is the search.  I did a search for China and five results came up in the books on my device or I could select Dictionary entries, Wikipedia, Web, or Kindle Store.  Also if you come across an unfamiliar word while reading if you scroll up to that line and click the scroll wheel you’ll get definitions from The New Oxford American Dictionary for all words on that line.

Besides reading books and E-Books you can use the Kindle to play mp3s browse the web and grab RSS feeds.  It’s a wonder that you can do all this without any additional fees.  The internal storage space is relatively small at 200mb but that should be more then enough space for most people, and if not, it’s expandable via an SD memory card slot.  All in all, it’s very impressive for a first gen device and if you’re not interested now I’m sure the next iteration will turn more then a few heads.

There’s a small but active Kindle hacking community that I’m still discovering I’ll talk about that and some cool shortcuts and Easter Eggs after the break. Read more..