I got to see the new Sony ebook reader at Borders. It’s very nice - really readable, and a lot thinner than I expected. The pages actually look like real book pages. No aliasing, easy on the eyes. And even the background color of the screen looks like the medium-gray of a paperback book.

However, I don’t think it will take off in the general public. For one, when you flip a page the wait is “long”, 2-3 seconds, which is long for the average person when compared to flipping the page of a book, and more importantly the screen flashes black/white 2 or 3 times each page flip. I think early adopters like us may overlook that, most users will not.

Not to mention the price gouging on accessories. The Device itself is $350, then you have to pay $50 for the dock and $30 for a case - bringing it up to a possible $430 off the bat for the reader and cover.

The screen isn’t touch sensitive, which is a little annoying, but not a deal breaker. I’d really like to be able to highlight and mark actual text. I used to do this on an iPaq with the Microsoft reader, which was also very crisp, and legible for reading books. Afterwards I could export a text file of all the passages I had highlighted. But size, cost, usability perhaps wasn’t there for this first version of the eBook reader to have touch screen. You can mark a page, which makes a little ‘dog ear’ icon in the top-right corner of the page and then go back to view your marked pages from the book’s table of contents.

The buttons are a little weird, there are 2 sets of “page” buttons. And the menu button is odd, diagonal push below a directional joystick. The joystick doesn’t seem to serve that much purpose as most navigation is just up/down. There is also a row of number buttons below the screen, from 1 to 0 (yeah it’s “computery” as they did 1-9, then 0. Why not just make it 10?).

Also, the view should be rotatable, but again, not a huge deal.

You can upload images, which are viewable in a grayscale, kind of pixelated/newspapery look. None of the demo books of text had embedded images, so I wonder how that works out. I’ve seen demo videos that show reading a page of text and having an embedded video (hrm, YouTube on your portable ebook reader)

What I’d *really* like to see, from a geek perspective, is an SDK for developing my own text/software so I can, say, make a dynamic map

I like it, I may consider getting one, but will probably wait for v2.

Mobile GIS is becoming more interesting and easy to get into. Yesterday Navicore released their navigation software for the Nokia 770.

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project - an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather - people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.

TrollTech announced an ‘open’ phone, called the Greenphone. It runs Linux (QTopia Phone Edition specifically)

It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:

• dual-core 312MHz XScale processor
• 64MB Ram, and a mini-SD flash slot
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• WiFi networking

Looking at the success Nokia has had with exposing various developer interfaces to their mobile phones and N770 tablet (Maemo), I think there is a huge market for an “openphone”. When I first heard of the O’Reilly Telephony Conference, I pictured people sitting around with their antiquated telephones, talking about switchboards and the like. I guess it’s a lot cooler scene than that.

Additionally, hopefully Open-hardware like mobile phones and tablets will kick the closed-minded carriers into realizing they’re slowly strangling themselves by keeping everything closed and begin to work with the huge, untapped, hobbyist and developer community.

gpsd has been ported to the Nokia770 Maemo. It seems to require some fiddling around with files on the Nokia770 after installation. Hopefully the package can be updated to handle this and added to the Repository listing for automatic install.

Technorati Tags: nokia770, gps, gpsd, maemo

Eye-Fi produces a card, Eye-Film, that is an SD card that can geolocate photos taken on it. This is an incredibly smart and easy way to add location to photos and still use any camera you choose. It does this by measuring the Wifi signals in the area and talking to Loki (no, not that one)

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.