Infibeam Pi

At my workplace are doing some work with Infibeam for their new ereader Pi.

A quick rundown on the specs
(from the Infibeam site)

Height     188 mm
Width     118 mm
Thickness     9.5 mm
Weight     180 gm
Screen / Display

    * 6" E Ink® Vizplex
    * 600x800 pixels
    * No backlight. Daylight readable.

Battery Life     7 days

File Formats Supported
Books / Text     PDF, EPUB, HTML, TXT, MOBI, DOC
Images     JPG, BMP, PNG
Audio     MP3

Control & Connectors

    * 3 mm Audio Earphone Connector
    * SD Card Slot
    * Mini USB Slot
    * Button for 4-Way Navigation & Selection.
    * Buttons back, home, plus / minus for size changes etc.

Internal Memory     512 MB
SD Card Slot upto 4GB

    * Screen Rotate for landscape / portrait views
    * Search inside a book or document
    * Game Play by Function Key & Navigation for Soduku

How does it feel
It is light. Much lighter than the Kindle. However, somehow you don't get the same intuitive feel as when you hold the Kindle. The Kindle UI can be used either handed, especially when you hold it for long periods and one hand gets tired

The first iteration of putting our India Today on it shows that the Infibeam team has put in a lot more thought into the presenting the magazine.

In the Kindle edition of India Today, the magazine runs like one solid block of text, without any formatting, indentation, tables etc. as if it were a book.

The Infibeam guys on the other hand have put in some effort in making the content presentable. It actually nicer to read, because of all the formatting elements introduced.

So to answer the eternal question. Is it worth it? At 10K a pop it is definitely worth a look as an alternative to the Kindle whose landed cost in India is Rs 18000 (Rs. 16000 is you got a customs refund).

This coupled with the fact that the Kindle does not do Indian languages and the Pi does, is a huge leg up for the Pi. Those reading books in Indian languages should definitely be looking at the Pi. Find out more about the Pi here.

The Kindle remains an attractive option for whoever is travelling and finds it necessary use the Internet to get his books. Also if you are subscribing to a few magazines and newspapers and rely on automatic wireless delivery. Then the Kindle is currently unbeatable. You can read about or get your Kindle here.

For a detailed thoughts on using the Kindle in India, see the post "Kindle in India" and a mini-faq on Kindle see this post "Kindle on the Delhi Metro"

Stop motion Jigsaw assembly

This is a stop motion video of a Jigsaw puzzle my mother and brother put together.

I took 300 time delayed photos with my Canon PowerShot Series S5 ISslaved to my laptop and knitted everything together in Windows Movie Maker and this is the end result.

Kindle in HT Brunch

About 10 days ago, a journo from HT Brunch followed the ever popular Kindle in India post and left a comment saying he would like to speak to me regarding my experience using the Kindle. So he called up and asked his questions. He then called back asking if they could photograph the Kindle (amusingly HT, which publishes a Kindle edition did not have a Kindle handy to shoot) which he did against the backdrop of my wife's Agatha Christie collection. (in case you are curious, the book open in the Kindle is one from the Star Wars series).

I was quoted some. You can read the story here.

Does it have a Kindle Edition?

We recently got a bookshelf made for our house and all the books that had been jammed into clothes cupboards and  were lying around the house came together into it. I found (re-discovered) a a book titled The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, a book I bought almost a couple of years ago at a BN store in Baltimore. Anyway so I finally decided to start reading it. A few dozen pages into the book I was wishing to myself. Does it have a Kindle edition? (It does.)
In a few short weeks I have become addicted to reading on the Kindle. I don’t think I will ever be comfortable reading long form text on a computer screen as it exists today. Even reading physical books  seems to be a bit old fashioned. I will admit that there is there are lots of merits in a physical book. No battery. You can toss it anywhere with almost anything without anything happening to it. You can stamp on it etc. etc. But still.
The only reason one would want books is for beautiful production and presentation (differing very politely with Mr. Simon Cogley from Star Trek TOS episode Court Martial). Something like the severaltomesthat masqueradeas comicbooks.
How does a Kindle compare with the Infibeam Pi? or the Apple iPad? That is a story for another post.