iPad's Big Target: E-Readers

The new Apple iPad's color multitouch display will clobber -- but not kill -- the blossoming e-reader market, which includes Amazon.com's Kindle, the Sony Reader and other devices that use gray-scale displays and slower interfaces, some analysts said.

"Apple 's full-color, full motion [iPad] device makes not only netbooks, but any product with an E Ink display look tired and dated," wrote Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe in a blog after spending a few minutes using the tablet device.

Apple iPad

"If you're a publisher who lives and dies by what your content looks like, you want to be talking to Apple now; any other digital distribution is going to look very last decade," Howe continued.

With the first iPads expected to go on sale in March, Amazon, Sony and other companies selling e-readerdisplays using various gray tones will have only a year or so to come up with color displays, or they could be seriously hurt by a second generation iPad, said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

The situation is much worse, he said, for vendors that have announced but not launched their gray-scale e-reader devices, such as the Que from Plastic Logic and the Skiff from Skiff LLC .

"If an executive is considering a Que, but then looks at the iPad that allows him to view multimedia and do light work, he'll end up with the iPad," McQuivey said. And the iPad will win out on price, with the cheapest Wi-Fi-only 16GB v

Plastic Logic Que

ersion going for $499, compared to $649 for the Que with Wi-Fi only and 4GB of data storage, he noted. The iPad's color and multitouch display is enhanced by Apple's iBook store concept and reliance on the open E Pub format, analysts added. The iBook store has five major book publishers signed on to deliver content already, as well as the New York Times .

In the iPad demonstration by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and others, the Times could be read in the iPad and then embedded color video segments could be launched with a finger touch to learn more about an article or issue.

Such embedded video capabilities were demonstrated at CES in early January by Skiff, which is developing e-reader capabilities for dedicated devices and to use in tablet devices with color screens such as the Viliv tablet.

At CES, Skiff President Gilbert Fuchsberg describedsome advantages of e-readers over color tablets, noting that E Ink displays can be read for hou

Skiff

rs at a time because they don't emit light that bombards a reader's eyes like a color LCD display with LED backlighting (as used in the iPad).

In general, tablets are also heavier and can weigh three to five pounds, Fuchsberg noted. The iPad weighs 1.5 pounds and is at least a half pound heavier than the largest e-readers.

McQuivey said iPad users who rely on it for prolonged reading "are going to experience eye strain and will need to blink more and carry eyedrops," he said.

"You can only stare at direct illumination for a short time before it strains the eyes, and sitting in front of many displays that are broadcasting photons into your eyeballs is very disconcerting for the eyes," McQuivey said.

As such, he predicted that the iPad will be for users who are light readers but also do a lot of Web browsing and download music and video. "The iPad is really a multifunction device, and the message Apple gave was that it's not really about it being [just] an e-reader," he said.

Despite concerns about the iPad's impact, Howe said in an e-mail interview that the iPad won't kill the e-reader market. "Rather, it just raises the bar for competitors," he said. "Once the iPad is shipping, good enough [e-readers] won't cut it anymore except for the most cost-conscious buyers."

Both Yankee Group and analyst firm In-Stat are still bullish on the e-reader market. In-Stat said nearly 1 million e-readers shipped in 2008, and that number will growing to 28 million in 2013. Meanwhile, Yankee Group said sales of e-readers hit about $400 million in 2009, but will explode to $2.5 billion in 2013.

"Just because iPad has launched and is an impressive device, In-Stat cautions individuals who are quick to write off the e-reader segment," In-Stat said in a statement.

Stephanie Ethier, an In-Stat analyst, said that future generations of e-readers will evolve and "the line between e-readers and tablets will blur substantially ... within the year."

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld . Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen , send e-mail to mhamblen@computerworld.com or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed .

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CPUs in 2010

Desktop and Mobile PC forecast

No one should be surprised that the big action in the CPU market this year will be in the mobile and low-power processor segments. Rapid growth in the power-saving all-in-one and small-form-factor desktop PC markets, continued strong demand for portable computers, and new usage models (digital photo and video editing, casual gaming, watching high-definition movies and so on) will all ignite demand for powerful new processors that consume less energy than previous generations did.

What's more, a new category of small portable computer is springing up between smartphones and netbooks: the smartbook. Smartbooks are designed to maintain 3G connections to the Internet and deliver a full day's use on a single battery charge, like smartphones, but they're also designed to run productivity applications (usually via the cloud) and feature much larger screens and keyboards, like netbooks. And while Intel Corp. pretty much owns the netbook market with its Atom processor, it could face a strong challenge on the smartbook front from ARM Holdings PLC with its extremely low-power Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors and their successors.

All this emphasis on mobile devices is not to say the desktop processor market will stagnate; in fact, Intel announced no fewer than seven new desktop CPUs at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel are expected to introduce their first six-core desktop CPUs this year.

Here's a broad look at the road maps from the major chip makers, including their overall strategies and promised technologies for the coming year, as well as a peek what they might offer in 2011.

Desktop Processors

Quadcore processors will enter the mainstream this year as AMD and Intel whack down prices to gain market share. You can already find four AMD quadcore CPUs -- the Phenom X4 9850, 9750 and 9150e and the Athlon II X4 620 -- street-priced at less than $100.

At CES, Intel introduced an entirely new series of dual-core processors that were produced using its new 32-nanometer manufacturing process. Moreover, the first six-core desktop CPUs will be introduced this year, perhaps as early as the second quarter, but they will be aimed squarely at the enthusiast market.

At the other end of the spectrum, Intel will continue to dominate the market for ultra-low-power desktop CPUs. AMD is completely out of the picture there, but Via Technologies Inc. has some interesting products to offer.

Standard Desktop CPUs

AMD will continue to rely on its K10 microarchitecture and won't ship any 32nm processors in bulk until 2011. As a result, the company's official desktop road map reveals very few CPU introductions this year. That will force it to compete with Intel largely on price in most market segments, since it can't challenge its rival on performance. (Update: Five days after this story was posted, AMD announced a handful of new processors that reflect this emphasis on price.)More significantly, AMD is preparing to introduce a six-core desktop CPU -- code-named Thuban -- sometime in 2010

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What's Going On Here?

I'm not sure what to laugh at... the multiple police car crash or the guy standing in the middle of the road with his pants down! This happens once every 10 years =D So remember it...

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I'm Only Speeding...

A license plait that causes a lot of trouble... Her owner is stopped by the police almost every week... And he still drives with it..

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Airport Smuggling: The Weird and Wacky

Drugs aren't the only things people try to smuggle through airports. Inside customs at Dulles International Airport, officers seize everything from illegal narcotics to the wacky and weird. They come from the thousands of people that arrive each day from around the world.

Agents with Customs and Border Protection quiz passengers when they come in. "Do you have any fresh fruits or meats in luggage?" is a standard question. Some people fess up. Some forget they've still got a piece of fruit from the flight. Some deny it until officers open up their luggage and find meats and fruits most people have never seen.

"I have seen a lot of interesting things, that would be an understatement," said Officer Jennifer Jones.

The contraband food and agriculture Officer Jones and her beagle Hudson sniff out may be the most bizarre.

"We get a lot of the bush meat from Africa. Very often sometimes it's very hard to tell what the meat was at one point," said Jones.

One officer found a full body smoked monkey. Its face and teeth were still clearly visible. Another officer discovered in someone's luggage two full length uncooked cow legs. Many of the meats are considered delicacies in other countries.

Often officers say people want to bring something from their homeland for friends or relatives.

"From South America they like to bring a roasted hamster called quwi," said Jones. "It still has the face and the teeth and the claws."

Suspect bags get searched and x-rayed. Once inspectors found a roasted chicken, but that wasn't grandma's stuffing inside.

"It looked too full. The x-ray looked solid and they decided, let's take a look at this. It didn't just look right and upon looking at the chicken the contents happen to be cocaine inside," said Officer Christopher Downing, a Customs Supervisor. In more than 20 years, he's seen just about everything.

At BWI Marshall Airport, someone packed a bra. There's nothing unusual about that, except the extra padding: two and a half pounds of cocaine.

"There's always more creative ways that people can sneaks stuff in," said Officer Ehtesham Khan. He's been on the job for about a year but has seen his share of oddities.

Customs officers say often, drug smugglers have people on the inside at factories who package drugs inside everyday items. In one case, officers seized six boxes of powdered soup mix. They looked like they came straight from the factory. It was powder all right, powdered cocaine-- not soup.

Officers say these days there is no "profile" for someone smuggling in drugs. They can be from anywhere and any age. In one case, a 70-year-old woman hid her stash in the pages of a magazine, proving marijuana has no age limit.

When it comes to food and agriculture, 99 percent of the time officers say it's an honest mistake, but if it's not you can be fined. If you're carrying drugs, there could be jail time. Officers say finding the contraband is part luck, part training and intuition.

"Something just doesn't seem right. The more you investigate the funnier the story gets and you realize you have something," said Downing.

Sometimes officers don't have to look hard to find something coming into the country that shouldn't. Officer Downing recalled the time a man arrived from South America with a deadly scorpion.

"I happened to look at the top of his hat and I asked what kind of emblem is that on your hat. He said I don't have an emblem. We put the hat down on the counter and low and behold he probably took an 8 to 10 hour trip with a scorpion on the brim of his hat the whole time and didn't even realize it," Downing said.

One wrong move and the scorpion could have killed the man.

Banned food and agriculture gets inspected for invasive insects or disease then destroyed. It's serious business. Entire crops or herds can be wiped out. Yet people keep trying, like the person Officer Khan found who packed a dead fruit bat.

"I was surprised, shocked. How could you bring a fruit bat in? What would you do with it?" he wondered. Khan doesn't remember the passenger's excuse, but the bat got taken.

It's easy to understand why some people would try to smuggle drugs or bring back strange foods from their homeland, but sometimes there doesn't seem to be a rationale explanation. Someone once wrapped a tree in foil, with plastic leaves and flowers to make it look fake. Officers weren't fooled.

It goes to show some people will go to extraordinary measures for the strangest things.

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'Grand Theft Auto IV' PC, PS3

Rockstar Games announced the pair of downloadable episodes for open world crime romp Grand Theft Auto IV - The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony - will finally debut on the PC and PlayStation 3 later this year.

The DLC, which debuted last year exclusively on Xbox 360, will be available on March 30. Users can either download the episodes individually or buy both on retail release Episodes From Liberty City.

According to a release from Sony, each PS3 episode will cost the same as the 360 versions, $19.99. While Rockstar's statement does not include PC pricing, users should likely expect the same cost.

The Lost and Damned features biker Johnny Klebitz and his motorcycle gang The Lost. The Ballad of Gay Tony tells the story of Luis Lopez as he attempts to salvage the empire of his boss, nightclub magnate Gay Tony.

PC and PS3 owners, looking forward to more GTA IV?

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