phik

For the last three months I’ve been borrowing Deb’s Cybook, and I’ve had the opportunity this month to play with a Kindle. I think I’ve finally had enough experience to compare the two.

First, I will be unambiguous: this kind of device is a permanent part of my life. Exactly like John, I thought I’d ultimately be unwilling to part with the physical book experience. I miss (a little bit) the sound and feel of turning pages, but on the whole I discovered exactly what he did: it’s not so much that I love books, rather I love to read.

I do not miss having to hold a five-pound book when I’m laying in bed.

Second, I’m finding that I read more. When I finish a book, there are always a few dozen waiting for me, wherever I am. I can read more than one at a time, so there’s never the problem of not being in the mood for whichever I have on hand.

When it comes to travel, it’s a no-brainer — 5×7″ and 6 oz. holds my entire library. No more avoiding The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich just because I don’t want to haul 1,200 pages around.

I do not miss having three books crammed into my laptop bag, giving me scoliosis.

Finally, I have the unique… challenge? of living in Australia, where books were way more expensive to begin with, but are extra special stupid until they catch up to the reality of the weak US dollar. Not to mention that I don’t want to accumulate a physical library that I must someday dispose of, or crate across the ocean.

With that behind us, a brief comparison of the two devices awaits.

They have identical 8″ e-Ink displays. They both offer variable font sizes (though Kindle’s smallest is not quite small enough for Vlad’s tastes), and support pretty much the same file formats. Both take the same amount of time to turn a page, which is mostly a function of the display.

Cybook pros and cons:

• + charges from USB. This is big.

• + marginally smaller, thinner, and lighter than Kindle

• + easy to add TrueType fonts, though I’m told there may be a hack for Kindle

• + excellent battery life — I get 3-4 weeks of heavy usage per charge

• I dislike the colour of the brown leather cover, but I tolerate it because I dislike scratches even more. One-handed operation is more difficult (but not impossible) without it.

• no wireless book delivery, but USB works fine

• no keyboard (or: no space lost to the keyboard); your outlook on life dictates whether this is a pro or con

• - it lacks the Kindle’s explicit stand-by mode. You can disable automatic shutoff at the cost of some battery life, but I’m not sure how much. [Update: the battery only lasts about a day if it's always on, so that's a non-starter.]

• - from a cold start, it takes 20 seconds to boot, which is about twice as long as Kindle. This is only mildly annoying in practice.

• - very occasionally it drops a keypress (yes, even with the new firmware)

• - it has a generally pretty clunky UI:

  • there are no left-handed buttons
  • there’s no way to see which page # you’re on, so jumping around in the book is hard
  • the Library interface is just a flat list, so it gets progressively worse as you have more books in it
  • it requires way too many button presses to use bookmarks
  • very poor use of the few hardware buttons, which can’t be remapped. Three of the six buttons are dedicated to the music player, functionality I don’t even think it should have.

• - Bookeen violates the GPL on at least one piece of software

On the Kindle side of the ledger:

• + direct wireless delivery of books (in the US)

• + a “standby” mode that makes it basically instant-on, but offers only about a week of battery life

• + some very nice user interface elements, including the alien-technology scrollbar

• + a full keyboard, which allows full text search of your library

• + built-in dictionary and (in the US) Wikipedia search via wireless

• + big, easy-to-press buttons for left- and right-handed use

• some complain that those buttons are in fact too easy-to-press, though that does not seem to be universal

• you can take notes, if that’s your thing

• if you crave DRM, you can buy from the Kindle store

• - no USB charging. There’s an adapter, but it’s yet another cable to pack.

• - no built-in sans-serif font (maybe that only bothers me)

I could recommend the Cybook if it weren’t for the licensing issue. There seems to be no doubt that the device runs Linux (and presumably other GPL-licensed software). According to other customers, Bookeen’s response is that a non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer precludes the release of code. In that case, they shouldn’t be selling it.

Most of its other negatives could be resolved by a solid firmware update, so there is some small hope for the future.

The Kindle looks perfectly serviceable, though I lump the Kindle store in with the iTunes music store. On the one hand, Amazon are aggressively pushing down the price of books, particularly eBooks (which many publishers price higher than the paper edition). On the other hand, it’s another DRM-based business model that I’d rather not support. Fortunately, Kindle (Mobipocket) books are trivial to decrypt if you believe in exercising any of your fair-use rights.

Some people really want the functionality offered by the keyboard — direct purchase from the Kindle Store; note-taking; full-text searching — and others prefer the smallest possible device. I want the search, but I find myself rarely missing it in practice.

I think the next generation of these devices will resolve a lot of my complaints, but they are already at the point that, if you enjoy reading, I recommend you buy one today. It is one of very few devices that has truly improved my life.

Now that iPhone on T-Mobile is a reality, I was going to write about unlocking iPhone with a Mac, but I figured if I waited long enough someone would beat me to it. Problem solved.

Some additional recommendations, however:

1. Download iNdependence and use it to activate. The new version makes YouTube work too.

2. Get AppTapp, that shit is white-hot.

3. If you don’t want iPhoto to open every time you sync your iPhone with new photos, you have to change the pref inside Image Capture.app. I thought having to use Safari to set your default web browser was insane, but at least they’re sort-of not-really consistent.

4. I haven’t tested this yet, but the prospect of unlimited iPhone data for $6/month is cause for salivation.

The only annoyance so far is that iPhone seems to assume that you have new voicemail after you reboot it (presumably some mild confusion related to T-Mobile not doing the new visual voicemail protocol). After you dial the voicemail number, or actually get some, it seems to keep up.

It’s a nice upgrade from the 2001-era phone I’ve been using, which had 64 KB of memory, lacked a music player, camera, email, web browser, bluetooth, colour display, and touch-tone dialing, and had a separate backpack-mounted lead-acid battery.

Stuart brought a GPS receiver with him on our grand adventure, and that more or less got me hooked. I’m a big fan of having my photos location-tagged, being one of those people who, with some 5,000 photos spanning 7 years, can no longer keep track of where they were taken. I’m also sold on its value as a flying tool; it’s been enlightening to look at my tracks after IFR lessons (to see how badly I’m botching the wind correction in a holding pattern, for example).

I hitched my chariot to Vlad and rode him all the way to victory, graciously allowing him to do all of the research related to this particular buying decision. In this instance he did not steer me wrong, selecting the Wintec WBT-201, a rugged, vanishingly small logging receiver with just two buttons and no display.

First, the good things:

• It’s like two cubic inches in volume. If that. It weighs nothing and you cannot beat the size.

• I haven’t scientifically evaluated their 12-hour battery life claim, but it is quite acceptable. I charge it every few flying days, maybe once a week.

• It has Bluetooth and USB.

• gpsbabel can be harnessed to suck out the track data and erase the device.

• It’s very, very good at maintaining a GPS lock in the face of lousy reception. I leave mine in the outside pocket of my flight bag, or the pocket of my trousers, in the mostly-metal airplane cabin, and it has no problem.

And of course, the inevitable accompanying problems:

• It’s very bad at acquiring a GPS lock under poor conditions, and even under good conditions sometimes takes as long as two or three minutes. Worst of all, if you start moving before it’s locked, even under good conditions, you may never succeed.

  Just walking around, holding it in my hand with a clear view of the sky, I had it fail to establish a lock during the entirety of a thirty-Earth-minute walk. (!)

• Apart from this GTK software, which I haven’t even contemplated on OS X, there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure the device apart from their Windows software. The default settings aren’t disastrous, but they’re definitely not perfect.

• The aforementioned Windows software is a disaster. It is dangerous at any speed. Use it to set the few options whose meaning you can decipher and close it immediately before your brain atrophies.

• In fact, it is the documentation for the software which causes the most harm, because it is total garbage of nearly zero value. It reads like a motherboard manual, full of helpful information like this complete explanation for the DGPS Timeout value: “DGPS Timeout”

  If any of the options were explained at all, the software would be merely bad instead of useless.

• Every once in a while I get a point or three way off to the side, maybe 30 miles from where I actually am, and then it settles down. This seems to happen chiefly when I’m walking around and just establishing a GPS lock. It’s confused momentarily, and doesn’t seem to realize that those points are low-confidence. Fortunately, these don’t seem to happen if I let it get a solid lock before moving.

  gpsbabel has an option to discard points below a certain confidence threshold, but either the device doesn’t produce this data, I don’t know how to enable it, or the gpsbabel reader doesn’t know how to parse it. If I had to guess, I’d wager it’s the second.

On balance, I recommend it with relatively few reservations. If you can wait 3 minutes to establish a lock before you move, and don’t mind editing the odd broken point out of your track, it is an excellent device that will maintain its lock in the face of very poor reception. I think it’s hard to do better at any price, and this is sub-$100.

Given its long battery life, tiny size, and negligible weight, it’s the kind of device that you can turn on, toss in your flight or camera bag, and forget.