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Posts Tagged ‘Alex’

Keepin’ it real fake: Teclast’s dual-screened K9 e-reader looks like Alex and Kindle made a baby

We almost hate to throw the KIRF moniker on a product we wouldn’t mind owning, but this e-reader that popped up at the EREXPO in Shenzhen certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to the Spring Design Alex e-reader — and the button layout on the right is a dead ringer for the Kindle. It’s called the K9, the latest reader from Teclast, and it follows a growing trend of Android-powered devices with a color LCD on the bottom and an E-Ink screen on top. The screens measure 3.6- and 6-inches respectively and, while we don’t know anything else about it at this point, we wouldn’t be surprised it inherits its father’s tardiness.

Keepin’ it real fake: Teclast’s dual-screened K9 e-reader looks like Alex and Kindle made a baby originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June

Well it’s about time, Spring Design! After missing its February ship date, the company is finally ready for you to whip out the plastic and pre-order its Alex — that dual-screen, Android-based ereader we liked so much at CES. While you can shell out the $399 today, you’ll still have to wait until mid-April for the mailman to drop off the package. We’d like to say the wait stops there, but we’ve also learned that early buyers won’t have access to the promised Borders eBook store until June. When we chatted with Spring Design CEO Priscilla Lu last week she confirmed that Borders will officially launch its store in the “June time frame,” which will be around the very same time that the 3G version of the Alex will be ready to hit the market — at least there’s access to Google Books and an micro-SD card slot for sideloading in the meantime. With so much coming down the pike it may be worth waiting a bit more time for this one, but our own Alex arrived just last night so no matter what it’d behoove you to wait a few days for our review before you hit the source link to pre-order.

Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spring Design’s Alex e-reader hits the FCC

Continue reading Spring Design’s Alex e-reader hits the FCC

Spring Design’s Alex e-reader hits the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter To Add “Nifty” Site Features That May Make You Forget Third-Party Clients

Twitter appears to be on the verge of some big changes to its website if the tweet that Twitter developer Alex Payne sent today is any indication. In fact, the new features may be so good that they may make some people re-examine their use of desktop clients, apparently. As Payne writes:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

Not surprisingly, that tweet had a few third-party Twitter developers worried.

“@al3x as a developer, i’m not sure how to take that looming tweet….,” wrote developer Chad Etzel (who actually used to work part-time at Twitter). Payne immediately repsonded, “@jazzychad I don’t mean that developers won’t be able to compete with the site. We still release most everything API-first, of course.“

While I dabble with both Brizzly and Seesmic Desktop, I still mainly use Twitter.com day to day, so the prospect of these new, more powerful features excites me. The reason I never got into one of the desktop clients is the same reason I only dabble with Brizzly and Seesmic: The lag in the API (and the rate-limit) annoys me. But that should hopefully change soon with the new Twitter firehose of data.

Last year, Twitter added two huge new features to Twitter.com: Lists and Retweets.

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It’s February 23rd, do you know where your Spring Design Alex is?

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but it looks like the lovely Spring Design Alex has quietly missed its ship date. Back at CES the word was Febuary 22nd and, after spending a little quality time with the thing, we’ve been counting the days. Here we are on February 23rd and the only thing up for sale at the Spring Design website is a “coming soon” note, and we already have more of those than we know what to do with. Even more discouraging, the Borders site is still listing only Sony Readers up for sale. We’ve reached out to Spring Design to see what’s up, so hang onto your pulp until we get a response.

[Thanks, Matthäus]

It’s February 23rd, do you know where your Spring Design Alex is? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kids Say the Darndest Things: Teens In Tech 2.0 Video

Our young friends at the Teens In Tech Conference this year have all the blessings and foibles of their tender years.

They haven’t learned that the sky is not, in fact, the limit – and for god’s sake, don’t tell them. And, like we likely felt at their age, they feel the adults are the slowest, dumbest, IE-using, fax-sending nerds imaginable. Check out this video of these great kids and the adults who admire and are inspired by them – including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who stopped by the conference to mingle with the youth and sign a few MacBooks.

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Be sure to check out our Facebook album of pics from the Teens In Tech Conference, held yesterday at the Google offices in San Francisco. You’ll get to see Robert Scoble in action and Steve “The Woz” Wozinak in a giant space helmet. And if you haven’t done so yet, please connect with us on Facebook while you’re there!

While making this video, we were privileged to chat with Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky, Tobias of Nimbuzz, John Ramey of isocket, Adam Helweh, the talented youngsters of SimFlecks and Alex Nichols.

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Down For Everyone Or Just Me Gets A New Owner

With web hosting services like Rackspace going down time, and time again, Down For Everyone Or Just Me has become a hot spot to check to see if a lagging site is down for everyone, or just you. The site was created as a side project by longtime Twitter engineer Alex Payne, and has managed to grow quite a large following.

Over the weekend, Payne sold the site to Bweeb, Inc, which is known for running Site5 Web Hosting. Although Payne isn’t too sure what Bweeb’s plans are for the site, I suspect they’ll keep its functionality largely the same (and people will keep coming to it).

In a blog post, Payne mentions that the site hasn’t received that much attention lately, and wanted a new owner that would continue development of the site and add some new features.

I had numerous feature requests after the site launched, but turning it into a robust, multi-homed uptime checker was never my goal. All I’ve ever done with the site is:

1. Ported it from a simple Ruby implementation to App Engine.
2. Put some ads on it; first Google AdWords, then later individual campaigns that I negotiated by email. I made about USD $300/month from the site, on average.
3. Wired up a Twitter account that would tweet out sites that were frequently seen by the service as “down” within a short time period. (This functionality has been inactive since November, 2008.)

The price of the sale was not disclosed, but Payne also mentioned that “it was proportional to the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it (that is, not much).” Payne has also made the source code of the site public again.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Spring Design Alex hands-on

Spring Design was poised to take the official wraps off of its dual-screen, Android-based ereader this Thursday, but we were able to catch an up close and personal glance at the device today here at CES Unveiled. Highlighted over at the Marvell booth (understandable given the choice of processor), the reader was intensely thin and remarkably snappy. We had some gripes with the speed of the Nook, but every action we took on the Alex was relatively lag free. We even downloaded a book and watched it open up immediately, and the touchscreen response was also satisfactory. Spring Design also opted to expose the microSD card slot on the rear; you simple mash your card into the slot and listen for the click, and mash it once more to eject it. You better hope nothing pushes it by mistake, but hey, at least you’re not stuck removing some rear cover just to swap cards. We’ve gotta say — we’re digging this thing based on our brief time with it, and we’d invite you to have a peek at the gallery below till our demo video is prepped.

Spring Design Alex hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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