Green Gadgets

Amazon enjoyed a market with weak competition for quite a while but now with products like the Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple’s upcoming iPad the company is experiencing pressure to innovate. That’s great for end consumers, many of which are looking to do more with a portable wireless device than just read books. A new job posting from Amazon hints that they’re ready to explore adding features. One example? Better web browsing.

With the Apple iPad shipping in April and Barnes & Noble’s Nook nipping at Amazon’s heels, the company needs to provide more features in order to maintain its existing set of loyal users and attract new segments. A new engineer position posted over at Lab126, which is the division at Amazon that developed the Kindle 2 will explore building a better web browsing experience for the device.

The e-reader market has gotten crowded over the past year with new entries like the Nook and Sony’s Daily Edition. No one had come close to matching Amazon’s all mighty Kindle 2 until Apple announced the iPad. A recent survey shows that the public is eager to get their hands on Apple’s latest gadget.

ChangeWave Research took a look at over three thousand consumers shortly after the iPad was revealed to the world. They gave special attention to the device’s function as an e-reader or its ability to snatch the sales crown from the Kindle. Jeff Bezos should be a little worried about the folks over in Cupertino.

A whopping 40% of those looking to bring an e-reader home in the next ninety days chose the iPad. The Kindle comes in second with 28%, Barnes & Noble’s Nook with 6%, and Sony with a miniscule 1%.

College curriculums and printed textbooks have gone hand-in-hand for a long time, and it looks like that will be the case for a while longer. Feedback was recently published from college students who participated in an experiment that replaced traditional textbooks with an Amazon Kindle DX. That would provide an obvious benefit of fewer things to carry around, and the potential of reducing how much paper is pushed through the education ecosystem.

To sum it up, the Kindle DX didn’t work well as a textbook replacement, primarily because of a loss in productivity and ease of use. Reading textbooks is a much different exercise than reading for leisure because it usually requires note taking. The Kindle DX allows for that through annotations in the margins but students complained that the keypad made for slow text entry.

Recently the CEO of Sprint, Dan Hesse, presented some of his company’s green priorities to a committee in Washington. While the news isn’t as exciting as the buzz flying around about the HTC SuperSonic potentially hitting Sprint’s WiMax network, it’s good to know that the company is taking sustainability seriously by empowering its customers to easily recycle their old phones.

Sprint already had a phone buyback program in place but has expanded the number of devices it will accept. As an example I have an HTC Hero and I’m able to score a $121.87 account credit. Granted, with an HTC Hero that’s in good working condition eBay would probably provide a greater return in cash but that takes the gumption to set up a listing and ship it.

Following the announcement of the mass production of 3D LCD LED TV screens not more than 4 weeks ago, Samsung, in typical "roll the dice" fashion, now has a date set for the arrival of the 3D LCD LED TVs. Along with the new 3D LCD LED TVs, expect a full-scale lineup of features and products that Samsung will use to turn the 3D naysayer into a 3D believer.

When speculation of Samsung developing 3D LCD LED TVs first began, a lack of 3D content was a legitimate concern. Sure, big name production studios had movies like Avatar and Up hitting theaters and the Imax about once a quarter, but there was certainly not the content to support the average consumer splurging on a $4,000 3D TV.

E-book lovers blew up shortly after the iPad launch when details were revealed about Apple’s price structure. Could they really get away with selling e-books at a much higher markup over Amazon’s prices? It looks like we didn’t get the entire story.

For years Amazon has used a “loss leader” idea to sell not only cheap books but also the Kindle. Under the plan, Amazon would buy an e-book for around thirteen dollars from a publisher but sell it at $9.99. They hoped that buyers would be attracted by prices that were much lower than a hardcover version and purchase a Kindle as well.

Scattered throughout the web, you'll find a spattering of LCD and LED TV consumer and expert rankings focused on quality, value, and size. Consistently, among the rankings, is a noticeable trend of Samsung TVs receiving the highest marks.  Sure, LG, Panasonic, Vizio, and Sony have some comparable models, but the consensus is, Sumsung rules LCD LED TVs.

The consensus is not limited to just consumer and expert rankings either. According to DisplaySearch, Samsung controls a demanding 17.2% of the LCD TV market. The next closest is LG with 14.8% and Panasonic falls in a distant third at 6.9%.

LG has shown off some innovative technology for e-readers like solar power, but hasn’t gotten a device to market yet. According to reports, they will join the e-reader marketplace with a new device due to arrive at the same time as Apple’s iPad.

The new e-reader is set to debut in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) in April. Their CEO for MEA KW Kim didn’t exactly say that the product is an e-reader. He only said that “[the product] will compete with Apple and Amazon.” The only other thing that Amazon makes besides the Kindle seems to be money.

They may not be the most technologically savvy pieces of equipment on a computer, and they certainly are not the most glamorous (considering most hide in the shelter of a drawer or shelf until ready to be used), but the computer mouse and keyboard play an integral part in the total energy consumption of the computer. They are the brawn outside of the brain, and they, like all the other components of a computer, require energy.

Not every make and model of the wireless computer mouse and keyboard, however, can be treated the same when it comes to energy consumption. Some are energy hoarders while others are more apathetic. And still others, like the new Logitech mouse and keyboard, are environmentally designed to conserve as much energy as possible.

The Kindle 2 continues to hold consumer attention despite Apple’s recent entry in the eBook reader space with its long anticipated iPad. Both devices have slim form factors and access to a lot of reading material but barring that, the list of features differs significantly. Regardless, the minds behind those products products are competing for the same segments and will be looking for ways to differentiate themselves. How?