Samsung rolls out its first e-book reader device in South Korea on Monday with this entry level unit: SNE-50K. According to its specs, the SNE-50K is rather an out-dated device lagging behind most of the counterpart, not to mention Amazon Kindle.
The SNE-50K lacks the feature of wireless downloading, so I am not sure how the readers could access the content. It has a built-in memory capacity of 512 MB, which is quite limited and could only hold about 400 titles as some testers reported. The display is also a problem: the 5 inch screen with a resolution of 600*800 does not seem to suffice for most of us. The only advantage we see from the SNE-50K is that it can be used as a notepad with handwriting recognition.
This device is sold at about U.S. $274. Not really a bargain, is it? People now can only access about 2,500 titles from the book library (Kyobo Bookstore, Korea’s largest bookseller). The first entry of Samsung into the e-book business won’t surpass the Amazon Kindle or even Sony reader in any way, but with the strong electronic technology background of Samsung I bet the next e-reader device will certainly stir the e-book market.
Kindle do not like protections
The Seattle Times reports that one customer is suing Amazon for the trouble caused by the Kindle protective case, asking for $5 million in refunds. Yes, I am not typing it wrong: FIVE MILLION DOLLARS.
Matthew Geise, executive director of a Seattle property management firm, bought a $359 Kindle 2 in February for his wife’s birthday, plus one of the official Amazon Kindle covers.
After about three months the Kindle started cracking around the points where the cover attaches with metal clips. The cracks grew and on July 6 the screen froze and the device (shown above) stopped working, according to the class action complaint that seeks refunds, treble damages and legal costs.
The crack caused by the protective cover has also seen by other customers. So the verdict is: To protect your Kindle, do not use protections.
IBM tops Green500 list
In the latest Green500 supercomputer list published by Green500.org, 18 of 20 fastest supercomputers are powered by IBM. The most efficient cluster is the BladeCenter QS22 Cluster built with PowerXCell 8i 4.0 Ghz processor and Infiniband in University of Warsaw. Actually this cluster is not a computing monster provided the max performance is 18.57 TFLOPs which ranks 422 in the Top500 chart. But the total power consumption is merely 34.63 kW. This achieves an impressive performance/power ratio of 536.24 MFLOPS/W.
Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, decides to postpone pushing its new book “Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse”, a young-readers in the vein of Harry Potter to Kindle, concerning the relatively low selling price of $9.99 or even less. “It doesn’t make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99.” said Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks. Normally the hardcover novels are sold at $25 to $27. The ebook version of “Bran Hambric” will be landed on Kindle or other ebook readers about half a year later after the paperback, that is in January 2009.
The CEO of Sourcebook is obviously not the only one who doesn’t really understand for the ebook business. Another New York Time best selling title is absent on Kindle: Catherine Coulter’s novel “Knockout”. Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group LLC and Ms. Coulter’s literary agent said that he does not allow any of his author’s books to appear as an ebook. “It’s no different than releasing a DVD on the same day that a new movie is released in the movie theaters. Why would you do that?” he said. But he seems to forget that he is the only adamant publisher that refuses to accept ebook format on the best selling chart. Moreover, the analogy of comparing the paperback edition with new movie release in movie theaters is ridiculous. He definitely thinks that reading on Kindle is a far more inferior experience than feeling the real paper.
“WeFound” a Kindle ripoff
WeFound reader
Seen on the Digital Publishing Fair at Tokyo, the ‘WeFound’ reader drew people’s attention by its outstanding cloning appearance as the Amazon Kindle. This unit is manufactured by the Founder Group China, a major technology company well-known in the digital publishing fields. Nevertheless, the company states that it was a product of independent research. “Peking University Founder Group independently developed this terminal, and it has nothing to do with the Kindle,” Founder International said. The display is measured about 6 inch, similar to the dimension of a Kindle 2 screen. E-ink technology is also adopted.
The reader will be available in China by the end of 2009 at the price of $200. It supports wireless download with a SIM card.
Amazon is now offering the 5 month old Kindle 2 ebook reader at $299, that is $60 cheaper than the original price tag. The Kindle DX is still at $489, and it is out of stock.
This 800 teraflop real-time ray tracing system, jointly developed by Toyota and Unisys, consists of 73-core chips and can fit into a desktop computer chassis. This monster GPU system is aimed at the auto industry for efficient prototype body designs and paint combinations. For your information, the NVIDIA Tesla desktop GPU system C1060 featuring 240 streaming processor cores delivers about 1 TFlops of parallel computing in single precision floating point calculations. The high-end Tesla S1070 system with 4 GPUs (and each GPU is equipped with 240 streaming cores) reaches 4TFlops and 0.3TFlops in single precision and double precision calculations, respectively.