The Libre isn’t the first e-book reader that I have reviewed, and I must admit that I have reviewed few of them. I didn’t find the Libre from Aluratek to be different from the last one that I reviewed.
Then again, last year brought about more e-readers than I think the general public really wanted, as most were only turning to Amazon’s Kindle to satisfy their e-reading needs. I suppose that this will be the year of the tablet and its derivatives.
But I digress. I will discuss what the Libre does that is different. According to the company, the Libre’s 5 inch black and white screen has “the same appearance and readibility” of printed paper. Since it has no backlight, it is just like reading a book. I think that most other e-book readers can do that, actually.
I do like the way that the Libre wants the first-time e-book user to get reading. It is made to be set up to get an easy Internet connection so you can download many free titles from ebook sites from googlebooks.com and gutenberg.org. The Libre also comes with a 2GB SD Card with 100 titles on it. You can see a complete list here.
The battery life is good for 24 hours worth of reading, and it can also do music files. No big surprise there, as for the support of BMP, JPG, GIF, MP3, and animated GIF picture format. I do like the page turning controller on the left hand side, which feels a little like turning the pages of a real book.
You should be able to get the Aluratek Libre for about $150-$170 on Amazon, and many other retail stores.
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Matt Asay has a great piece over at C|Net today, describing attempts by open source to become more independent of Google, and essentially asking Google whether they are going to let open source leadership slip away from them.
But the question can also be looked upon another way. Who needs who more, Google or open source? (Picture from Wikipedia.)
Many important open source projects, like Firefox, are dependent on Google. The Mozilla Foundation draws most of its budget from the Google box on its software, even after Google has gone into competition with its Chrome browser.
Google is proof that the open source way is the profitable way. It has aggressively pushed code out the door, mainly under the Apache license, and has regularly hosted (even hired) important open source developers.
But Google is not dependent on open source. Google’s contributions can easily dominate a project simply because of Google’s size. The Chrome browser could have come out closed-source — it still lags in the area of add-ons, which are a key benefit to being open source.
Google has grown beyond the open source movement in other ways. Its Android project has evolved into a corporate club of carriers and manufacturers, as it needed to in order to gain market traction. HTC doesn’t support Google because Android is open source, they do so because it’s profitable.
The same could be said of Google’s Chromium project, a full operating system based on Chrome. Here again what Google is looking for is not the help of individual programmers, but of corporations, makers of hardware and complete applications.
There have always been two strategies in to open source, a business strategy and a development strategy. A development strategy, the kind Mozilla is based upon, depends on having a collection of allies, large and small, none of them dominant. A business strategy, the kind Google engages in, depends on leadership and control of a corporate ecosystem.
You can see the conflict. What is good for Google and good for an open source project may not always be the same thing. Google is big enough to deliver its own complete projects, licensed as open source, in order to fulfill its business goals. Open source project developers need more balance to their force.
It may just be that Google has grown up beyond open source. It’s like the tiger raised by a dog. It needs to be on its own, both for its own sake and the dog’s sake.
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We’re pleased to announce that Firefox is now available for Nokia’s Maemo platform. Starting today, Nokia N900 owners can enjoy many of the same Firefox features they know and love on the desktop on their mobile device.
Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step toward fulfilling …
Crave: The gadget blog found this 30 hours ago on blog.mozilla.com
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As if you needed any more evidence of the tech supremacy of your Nokia N900 or N810, here’s Firefox making its official mobile debut on the most righteous Maemo OS. Available for download right now, version 1.0 will come with a pretty sweet feature named Weave Sync, which harmonizes your bookmarks, tabs, history and passwords across devices, making for a seamless transition between your desktop computer and your mobile one. We reckon we could get used to that. Alas, Flash support is still somewhat shaky, and does not come enabled by default, though you’re free to flip the switch and ride the lightning as it were. We’re sure Mozilla will appreciate any crash reports you might want to throw its way as well. So come on already, download the darn thing and let us know if it improves on the already spectacular browsing experience of the N900.
[Thanks, Ross M.]
Firefox for Mobile makes Maemo its first home originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Firefox 3.6 is done.
Several minutes ago, the Mozilla team shot me an email announcing the availability of Firefox 3.6. Please download and tell me what you think of it.
For an incremental update, Firefox 3.6 offers a good number of improvements and new features. The Mozilla team claims the release is 20 percent faster than its six month old predecessor and offers advancements in email, photo uploads, video and social networking.
One would expect the code to be stable: release candidate 2 was made available just two days ago.
Here’s the final new features list, verbatim from Mozilla:
- Personas: Personalize the look of Firefox, select new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
- Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will nowdetect out of date plugins
- Stability Improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
- Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
- Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time
- Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames
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