| Take 200 books along with Amazon's new electronic reading device
Amazon.com Inc., the world's largest Internet retailer, introduced an electronic reading device as it seeks to do for books what Apple Inc.'s iPod did for music. The portable device, called Kindle, sells for $399 and is about the size of a paperback. More than 90,000 books are available electronically, including best-sellers and new releases, many of which cost $9.99 each, Seattle-based Amazon.com said Monday. "The product is innovative and has the capacity to re-create the e-book business," Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. in Manassas, Va., wrote Monday in a research note. He recommends investors buy the shares. The Kindle wireless system uses EVDO, the same high-speed data network as high-tech cell phones, and doesn't require a PC to download content to the device.
Yellow Pages arrives for iPhone/iPod touch
The famous Yellow Pages phone directory, owned by Apple partner AT&T, is now available in a format specifically tailored to iPhones and iPod touches. Users must navigate to the Yellow Pages website via the Safari browser, where a formatted version of the site appears that allows users to quickly start a search or input a place and category. The site also provides access to ratings, maps and directions, and in the case of the iPhone, the ability to dial a number directly from a listing. AT&T says it has also made available an optimized WAP website, a downloadable client for 20 other AT&T phones, and the ability to text a search query to YP411. Conversely, users browsing the website can have results texted to a cellphone, complete with driving directions. .
iPod Nano Clone Has Camera, Touchscreen
We normally turn to China for knockoff products, and although the text looks Korean or Japanese to me, the actual product shown is indeed made in China. The third-generation iPod nano has received a very warm reception from the public for its cool CoverFlow navigation, pipsqueak proportions, and glorious color screen. But this knockoff seems to be even better. Created by ECNokia (spreading the piracy love to cell phone manufacturers too, I guess), this iPod nano-like music player takes on the exact same form factor as the third-gen nano, except it boasts a few extra features. Additional goodies include an FM tuner, microphone, a bigger display (that happens to be a touchscreen), and even a 1.3 megapixel camera. The menu navigation still has that cool split-screen thing, don't worry. There are sacrifices that need to be made, of course.
Apple Launches iPhone in Germany, UK
Germans lined up to buy Apple Inc.'s iPhone as it made its European debut on Friday, with the company hoping to replicate overseas the success the combination phone, music player and Web browser has seen in the United States. Apple hopes to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, helped by the launch of the iPhone in Europe, then in Asia next year. It goes on sale in Britain later Friday. In Germany, the phone -- a combined cell phone-iPod media player that also can wirelessly access the Internet -- went on sale at more than 700 T-Mobile shops. One store in Cologne opened just after midnight to some 350 would-be buyers already lined up. Johannes Krause, 32, waited for nearly four hours to get inside, but said it was worth the wait. He told The Associated Press he had wanted to his get his hands on an iPhone since January when Apple first unveiled the device in the United States.
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