PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

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14 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009 first looks CoNsUMEr ElECtroNiCs Kindle 2 Alternatives Amazon’s Kindle sequel may be the shiniest new e-book reader on the block, but it’s not the only game in town. Here are some alternatives.—Corinne Iozzio eReader 1.3 for iPhone Free l l l h m The eReader does a decent job of presenting books on your iPhone, but acquiring reading material needs to be made easier, and the software should support more file formats. Click here for more. BEYOND BOOKS biggest upgrade is the new 6-inch, 600-by-800 electronic paper display, which shows 16 shades of gray instead of just 4. Amazon claims the new display is also 20 percent faster, but I wasn’t able to detect any significant difference. As cool as this display is, it’s still not a touch screen. One genuinely new feature is text-to-speech functionality. Select any book or magazine, and the Kindle 2 will read that selection aloud to you. The voice is pretty robotic—more Stephen Hawking even though the Kindle 2 is referred to as an e-book reader, it lets you access a lot more than just your favorite paperbacks. Currently, you can subscribe to more than 31 newspapers and magazines via the Kindle. Thanks to its wireless capability, each new issue will load automatically when you’re in Wi-Fi range. Also, there are a selection of blogs that you can access via the Kindle—for a fee of $1 to $2 a month to port the content to the Kindle platform. Here’s a few of the choices: Newspapers •Le monde •The Independent •The New York Times • The Wall Street Journal •USA Today Stanza for iPhone Free l l l l m With support for a broad range of content, Stanza is the most versatile e-book application for the iPhone. Click here for more. Magazines •Fortune •The Atlantic •The New Yorker •Time • U.S. News & World Report Blogs •BoingBoing •Gawker • Huffington Post •Slashdot •TechCrunch Sony Portable Reader System (PRS-500) $250 street l l l h m When we first saw the PRS-500, we dubbed it the “best e-book reader that has ever been made.” While it’s still among the leaders of the pack, it’s been eclipsed by the newer PRS-700. Regardless, it’s still a solid reader—and you’d be hard pressed to beat its new street price. Click here for more. Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-700) $399.99 direct l l l l m The Sony Reader PRS-700 is an elegantly designed, easy-to-use device for e-book fans. As long as you can deal with the steep price and the lack of wireless book buying, it provides a good reading experience. Click here for more. than HAL—but it works. Options let you control the tempo of the reading and choose a male or female voice. This feature doesn’t really compete with the fluid, emphatic storytelling of audiobooks, which the Kindle 2 also supports, but it’s nice nonetheless. Although the Kindle 2 costs the same as the original, it has eight times the storage. There is no memory card slot, but the company claims you can store more than 1,500 books on its 2GB of internal flash memory (1.4GB is available to the user). And all your book and magazine purchases are also backed up online. The Kindle 2’s design does not let us perform a battery rundown, but during informal testing I ran it for a week with the wireless radio on before the battery drained completely. In terms of file format support, it supports AZW, TXT, Audible, MP3, Unprotected MOBI, and PRC (natively), and DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP (through conversion). The notable missing letters there are “PDF.” All in all, the Amazon Kindle 2 looks like a worthy follow up to its popular predecessor. The quirky design choices of the original have been ironed out, and the device has been made easier to use and read. It’s still on the expensive side, and I would love to see a touch screen, a more elegant interface, and support for an open publishing platform (like ePub), but I'm confident that those things will come in time.—Dan Costa
Samsung Memoir SGH-T929 (T-Mobile) $299 list and up with two-year contract L l l l m Pros best camera-and-video phone in the u.S. excellent video player. lots of features. Fun to use. Cons Web browser is a bit sluggish. bad shutter lag. buggy on a couple of tasks. expensive. Click here for more. Helio Ocean 2 (Virgin Mobile) $149.99 list with two-year contract l l l l m Pros Push e-mail. brings together contacts, iMs, and e-mail messages from multiple accounts. gPS. Plenty of additional features and apps. Cons Very bulky. Default Web browser is slow. requires a two-year Virgin Mobile contract. Click here for more. first looks consumer electronics SaMSung MeMoir SgH-T929 (T-Mobile) The Best Camera Phone In the U.S.A. The Samsung Memoir SGH-T929 (T-Mobile) may be the phone that gets you to leave your digital camera at home. This 8-megapixel shooter is full of surprises, including support for two decent Web browsers, a fun widget-based interface, and 640-by-480 video recording. The Memoir is expensive compared with other T-Mobile feature and camera phones, but if price is no object, this Samsung can’t be beat. The Memoir, which measures 4.7 by 2.1 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.4 ounces, resembles a Samsung Behold mated with a point-and-shoot digicam. The face has a 3-inch, 240-by-400-pixel touch screen with Send, End, and Back buttons sitting in a row below it. The back looks a lot like a digital camera, with a protruding autofocus lens, flash, and slightly textured grip. As a phone, the Memoir is adequate. Reception on T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks is very good; the phone also works on 2G and 3G networks in other countries, though it can’t access AT&T’s 3G network anywhere. Earpiece and speakerphone volume are both decent, though the earpiece tends to distort at top volume. Transmissions through the microphone Helio ocean 2 (Virgin Mobile) The Pre Palm Pre? One of the coolest elements of Palm’s highly anticipated Pre has arrived early: Contact synergy comes to the masses in the form of Virgin Mobile’s Helio Ocean 2. This new feature merges address books from several different sources to let you e-mail, text, or instant message all of your friends quickly and easily. Synergy on the Ocean doesn’t go as far as it does on the Pre, but it’s here now, it’s inexpensive, and it’s a pretty cool device for messaging friends. There’s no getting around the fact that the Ocean is huge. At 5.9 ounces and 4.7 by 2.3 by 0.8 inches (HWD), this is no slim-and-light handset. The phone opens two ways: You can slide the screen up to get a traditional phone keypad or slide it sideways to get a full QWERTY keyboard. Navigating is done by means of a four-way rocker with a trendy optical sensor in the middle. You also get a 2-megapixel camera and 2.6-inch, 320-by-240 LCD. Battery life came in at 6 hours 44 minutes of continuous talk time. Sure, the Ocean 2 is a fine voice phone, but really, you’re not buying a warship like this to talk on—it’s all about the messaging. The phone lets you com- sound a bit muddy on the other end, and a lot of background noise tends to come through, although there’s remarkably little in-ear feedback of your own voice. The Memoir’s battery life, at 5 hours of talk time, is passable. The big deal with this phone, of course, is the camera, which is better than that of any other carrier-subsidized phone in the U.S.—both for photos and for video. It’s not on a par with top dedicated still cameras like the Editors’ Choice Canon PowerShot A1000 IS, but it competes with lesser cameras like the Casio Exilim z250. Even though the Memoir doesn’t have full smartphone capabilities, its superior ability as a camera phone lead us to award it an Editors’ Choice. —Sascha Segan and PJ Jacobowitz bine all your contacts from a free 100MB Helio webmail account, AOL, Microsoft Exchange, and Yahoo into one master address book. E-mail and IM run in the background and automatically push messages to you as soon as they arrive (except for messages from generic POP/IMAP accounts). The one bump in the road is that the Ocean 2’s Web browser is painfully slow. Though it is not as sleek as the upcoming Palm Pre, the Ocean 2 is worth a look for heavy messagers who are willing to jump to Virgin Mobile.—Sascha Segan aPril 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 15
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