The Demo Site

(Credit: David Carnoy/CNET)

The Amazon Kindle 2 is a good device. No question about it. Almost everyone who has one seems to love it, and indeed, there's a lot to love. But no device is perfect, and that's what keeps us members of the tech media in business. So, I thought I'd start a semi-regular series in which I attempt to give friendly suggestions to companies about how to make their products that much better--how to take it to the next level, if you will. And I'm starting with the Kindle 2. These suggestions aren't all the same issues that our expert reviewers point out in "the bad" section of our official CNET review, but just assume those are in there, too. And yes, some of these ideas depend on widespread adoption of the Kindle or any e-book reader: but they'll also help it get to that widespread adoption in the first place. Win-win! Let's begin.

Make it better with sharing
The Kindle 2, or any electronic book reader, marks a dramatic change from the way we normally read books. Sure, the reading is solitary, but books are fundamentally social in nature. You share books. You recommend them, you loan them out, you pass them around, you mark pages for each other. The Kindle 2 takes all of that away: sure, someone can come along and look at everything you're currently reading (which has its own set of issues), but you can't lend anyone a book, you can't share a subscription, and you can't even tell someone you loved a passage on a certain page, since the Kindle doesn't use standard page sizes. OK, Amazon. What can we do here?

Learn from iTunes and allow authorizations. Let me authorize multiple Kindles on a single account so that I can share subscriptions and purchases between them. At minimum, allow two authorizations, which would cover several households; better yet, allow up to four or five. This lets me share a book with a friend, a spouse, a roommate, a parent. This is just a no-brainer. There's no reason to undo the tradition of sharing the Sunday newspaper by tying a subscription to a single device. Let's hurry up with that one, shall we?

Learn from the Microsoft Zune and allow one-time content sharing. Let me use the Whispernet to send another Kindle user an entire book that will expire after two or three days, as a sample. Or, heck, if you want to be stingy, just let me send a chapter. Similarly, let me send bookmarked sections, either Kindle-to-Kindle or via e-mail. I'd love to be able to select a block of text and choose, "e-mail this passage," so I can send particularly poignant text to a friend. This could be a great feature of the Kindle DX: allow limited sharing of helpful textbook passages, or let me play the age-old game of sending newspaper clippings to someone! ...

Continue reading Panasonic DMC-ZS3 hands-on and review

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Panasonic DMC-ZS3 hands-on and review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Blizzard Entertainment sent out an e-mail this weekend imploring media members to set up an account with Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer service, in anticipation of the Starcraft II beta program. StarCraft II, of course, is the sequel to StarCraft, the wildly successful, still-popular 1998 sci-fi strategy game for the ...

The batteries in electric shavers suck. Charge-times are better measured as large fractions of days than as hours, you can't use them while they are charging and, even when full, they don't last long.

Wahl's new trimmer tries to fix this, and Wahl is so proud of the battery technology that it has put it in the name. The Lithium Ion Trimmer is the fist trimmer ever to use a Li-Ion battery, according to Wahl, which has several advantages. First, it only takes an hour to charge and then, when done, stops using power. Second, the shaver will run for a couple of hours instead of just a half an hour. It also has "2x more torque", which we imagine would only be useful on the most wiry beards.

Last, and possibly most useful, is the quick-charge function. Plug a dead trimmer in for one minute and you get four minutes of use, enough for a proper shave (or, if you are as scruffy as me, eight proper shaves). The price is a reasonable $40, and it comes with enough special styling attachments to turn you into a facsimile of even the most primped and preened R&B singer.

Better still, though, is the Amazon product page. Scroll down to see the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section and you'll see the "Mangroomer DIY Electric Back Shaver" and, at the end of the row, the James Bond "Quantum of Solace" DVD. Testoster-tastic.

Product page [Wahl via Uncrate]

Continue reading Push notifications go live on iPhone courtesy of Tap Tap Revenge

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Push notifications go live on iPhone courtesy of Tap Tap Revenge originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.