Many an Android device might soon have access to Google’s free map application, Navigation, but for those of you that can’t hold out until early November there is always the Garmin nüvifone G60 GPS Phone for AT&T.  During the initial launch AT&T was asking as much as $300 for the handset.  Now Amazon has it for a mere $99.99 (2 year contract required), which begs the question: is the Nuvifone G60 not selling well and how long will the GPS maker stay in the game?  After all, the company just lost (the grammar police got me!) $1.2 billion from their market cap after Google announced their own FREE GPS app.

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According to CVG, Amazon UK has already slashed the price of the Black Nintendo Wii before it even hit their shelves on November 6th.  The original price was £179.99 and now it’s being offered for £164.99 and bundled with a copy of Wii Sports Resort.  Live in the US?  Are you still jealous?

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Just in time for the holidays, Roku has announced an all new Roku Player…sort of.  Actually, the HD-XR model just adds a USB port (not enabled) and support for 802.11n to the HD version of the box.  You can grab one now for $129.99 or opt for the now discounted SD version for $79.99.  For some the $30 for the HD-XR version might not be worth it, but for those streaming users that want to move their box further from their router it might make sense, and who knows, maybe that currently disabled USB port will actually facilitate not only local play from an attached hard drive but enable it to be a NAS.

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I was just perusing Amazon when I noticed an announcement on their home page stating that they’ve dropped the price of the Kindle from $299 to $259. What’s more interesting, though, is the addition of the Kindle International, which demands a $20 premium over the now cheaper Kindle but includes the ability to download books in over 100 countries. Otherwise, it’s the same old Kindle.

The International Kindle will ship October 19th, but they’re taking preorders starting today.

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That’s a strange thought to wake up to, isn’t it?  Well, it turns out they’ve got reason.  Read on:

Words like “clunky”, “slow”, and “a real pain” have come up, as students trying out the Kindle DX in classes are discovering that the ereader may not be the replacement for overpriced textbooks they’d hoped for.

One student found it awkward to hold down the “alt” key every time he wanted to type in numbers.  Since the Kindles have no page numbers, but rather, “location numbers”, students requiring source documentation find themselves typing out huge location numbers rather than simple two or three digit page numbers.  Plus, anyone working out of a regular book will be utterly lost by the Kindle’s location numbering system and be unable to crosscheck the reference without a Kindle of their own.

More suggestions emerged, citing that the Kindle needed page numbers, but also asking for improvements to note taking and highlighting.

So, okay–maybe the Kindle isn’t an academic’s dream gadget just yet.  But there’s every possibility that it will become so in the future.

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Much like Tivo, Peek has gone the route of lifetime service.  Exclusively available at Amazon, you can now purchase the latest Peek, the Pronto, for $299.95 with lifetime service.  Assuming that the company is around longer than 16 months from your date of purchase, you should be in the clear.

We reviewed the Peek Pronto, and for the most part like what we found.

Note: Since there is a 2 to 5 week ship window, we can only assume that this promo is going off like gang busters.

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Over on Amazon, you can buy most anything cheap and easy, from TVs to home stereos to books to groceries.  But have you ever thought about buying your home theater accessories from them?

You will now – no more buying badly overpriced Monster cables for you, no sir or ma’am as the case may be.  Now, with Amazon Basics, you can pick up everything from HDMI cables to USB/Firewire cables to blank CDs and DVDs.

You can get free shipping on orders over $25 AND they promise that your gear will be shipped in “Frustration free packaging”, which I assume means “packaging you can open without the benefit of knives, heavy construction equipment and/or explosives”.

You can get cheap cables and such on Amazon already; you can get, for example, a six foot HDMI cable for one cent plus $3 shipping.  But the Amazon Basics gear comes with the Amazon brand name, plus you’ll get a warranty, something the third parties won’t do.  That and you can get a pack of blank DVDs for just over $18, which is pretty good as long as you get something else to qualify for free shipping.

So, not a bad move on Amazon’s part, I’d say–hopefully it works for them.

[via WalletPop]

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So there’s been an announcement that Best Buy means to sell the iRex book reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, among numerous others.  It’ll cost a whopping four hundred bucks, but come with an eight inch touchscreen (8.1, actually), connect to Verizon Wireless networks, but while Verizon itself is open to connecting other e-readers through its networks, it’s not willing to sell the iRex in its own stores, at least for the time being.

This is probably the best move Verizon can make, even if it isn’t exactly good news for Best Buy.  However, even Best Buy can get away with a little piggyback advertising with “Verizon’s network”, and of course, the first mover advantage will be a big help for the iRex.

Keep your eyes front, folks–this could be a real donnybrook, with plenty of new players moving for the Kindle market.

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Seems the competition for a piece of Amazon’s coveted Kindle market has already started to boil up out of the woodwork.  iRiver’s Story is one of the first off the block.

Formerly a major player in the Flash-based MP3 market, iRiver’s been having a lot of troubles in its home market of  Korea.  Thus, they’re looking to join in on the e-reader market and snag a little market share away from Amazon.

The iRiver Story has a six-inch LCD display, two gig of internal memory and comes in white only.  It’ll also play back MP3s, which is handy for those books on tape.  It’s not a bad little design, from the look of things, even if it really DOES look a lot like the Kindle.  So hopefully, it’ll manage to pull off a comeback.

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Guess who wants a piece of Amazon’s Kindle market?  As it turns out, a whole a lot of people.

The list is pretty wide and growing by the day, and includes names like News Corp (otherwise known as Fox), Hearst Publishing, and now, Time Magazine wants to change the way you read books and possibly even its own magazine.

At the rate things are going now, it’s not so hard to believe that dead tree publishing will go the way of the dodo within the next 20 years.  After all, who is really that interested in keeping giant cases full of books in their house when all they have to do is put their library down on the nearest end table at night?  Taking a paperback book with view to the grocery store or jury duty or to a doctor’s appointment is a pretty cumbersome task unless you have deep pockets or a handbag,  and you can really only carry one at a time. But imagine the possibilities of being able to take your entire library with you. And why stop at yours? Why not the entire Library of Congress?

Maybe print-based books will have longer than I think they do to live.  But with the sheer amount of competition coming for them, it won’t be an easy fight.

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Bet you didn’t know that Amazon, Sirius Satellite and Apple Computers can tell where you are anywhere in the world, did you?

Well, that kind of shocker revelation requires some background.  Most everybody’s felt the heartbreak at one time or another of a favorite gadget just “wandering away”.  Whether it fell or it was pushed, the end result is the same–your valuable gadget is GONE.  It might surprise you to know that most of these gadgets actually already come with the technology required to track them down remotely.

But the companies won’t actually use this technology to help you track down your wayward gear. In fact, just trying to get the companies to shut down your missing tech so that it can’t be used in the future requires a subpoena and a whole lot of dancing with lawyers.

Some say the companies themselves won’t bother because they’d sooner have someone out there use the product and occasionally buy new apps and services, while you have to go buy a new one, plus in some cases all the content you already paid for once.  The companies themselves, meanwhile, are being tight-lipped about the whole thing.

This doesn’t bode well for the gadget makers–unhappy customers are very seldom repeat customers.

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This is a development the folks at Amazon likely weren’t expecting.

Seems that some enterprising soul out there, whom you might recognize when I tell you it’s Jesse Vincent, managed to get his recently-released Kindle 2 ebook from Amazon to run Ubuntu 9.04.

He apparently did it for no other reason than 1. to prove it could be done in the first place and 2. to get some serious geek cred at Foo Camp last weekend, where he showed off his new, previously unheard of Linux Kindle.

The practical ramifications of this do escape me somewhat, but even I’ve got to admit, as a concept, it’s still pretty cool.

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You might remember the old vinyl records, if you’re a club DJ or know some elderly folks who never quite got the hang of cassette tapes, let alone CDs.

A lot of people, of course, converted their vinyl collections to other media, either by re-recording them or just buying new, but what to do with all those old vinyl records that no one, not even collectors, wants?

Simple–make BOWLS out of them.

Yeah, you read that last sentence right; bowls.  They’re available on Amazon for twenty nine bucks a pop, and are actually food safe.  It’s not recommended that you put anything wet in there, as they’re likely to leak, but if you need a bowl for your keys or your Cheetos, you may want to look into vinyl.

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Without a moment of hesitation, Amazon has already posted the pre-order page for the Slim Playstation 3.  So before you rush out and grab a discounted Fat PS3, you might wanna consider the feather weight version since it costs the same amount ($299.99) and includes a larger, 120GB hard drive.  Currently, they’re limiting the total amount of Slim PS3s that can be purchased to 1 per household.

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Although we’ve known for a few months now that Samsung had plans to enter the e-reader game, we didn’t know when the device would emerge.  Today the company made the device official and what was known as the Papyrus has now become the SNE-50K, at least as far as I can tell.

It sports the same 512mb of storage as the Papyrus, a 4320 continuous page view battery life, 5-inch screen, 6.5oz weight, lack of any wireless connectivity (everything must be downloaded from a computer iPod style) and costs about $270.  Right now it’s only available in South Korea, but Samsung says they’ve got plans to show off a prototype e-reader to international markets at CES 2010.

To put it in perspective, Amazon’s Kindle 2 offers a 6-inch screen, wireless connectivity and its very own e-book store.

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Price drop alert! Amazon today cut the price on their Kindle 2 E-Ink reading device.  It includes a 25% longer battery life, 6-inch sun bright readable screen, 20% faster page turns, weighs 10.2oz, wireless and is just a 1/3-inch thick.  It’s $359 – $60 instant savings + $0 S&H = $299 shipped!Similar Posts:

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Well, that didn’t take very long.  Although the official Amazon Kindle DX press event is just under 48 hours away, images of the latest iteration of the e-reader have been leaked to the blogosphere.  Not all is known, but expect at least a 9.7-inch display (why not 10-inches), PDF reader and the ability to add annotations as well as notes and highlights (how are annotations different from notes).  And fitting the bill, you know because this version of the Kindle is supposed to be more newspaper friendly, the New York Times will purportedly be offering a discounted monthly subscription that will run $9.95 as opposed to the regular $13.99.

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On May 6th, Amazon will hold a press conference to announce something cool and Kindle related.  Amazon will holds its press conference at Pace University in NYC and rumors are abound stating that they will announce a larger, big screen Kindle tailored towards newspapers, magazines and textbooks.  Sounds like a good idea to me as the larger size will help traditionalists adapt to portable electronic media.  Stay tuned for when this rumor bears some actual fruit to taste.

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