Cell Phone Readers Learning What Japanese Have Known for Years

It's taken a couple of years but it looks as if Americans are finally picking up on something the Japanese have been doing for years: reading books on cell phones. It may be a long time before it becomes the craze we wrote about last year - one Japanese publisher alone carries one million "keitai shoshetsu" titles and receives 3.5 billion visits in a single month. Sales of one or two million hardcover reprints of cellphone novels are far from uncommon.

Nevertheless, readers are discovering the pleasure of reading on mobile screens, however tiny (3.5 square inches) they may be. The New York Times's Motoko Rich and Brad Stone point out that many who don't own an e-reading device are happy flipping pages on their cell phone, at least for short trips like train and bus commutes. After that the eyes begin to tire. The iPhone is a little easier on the eyes at 6 square inches, but Kindle, Sony and Nook screens are many times bigger than that, and they are midgets compared to tablet screens. One such, Wacom's Intuos3 4x6, boasts a working area of over 228 square inches!

Tablets will inevitably become the professional and student reading device of choice, with screens capacious enough to read a full-size text- or picture book in open, double-page format. That said, for down-and-dirty reads, cells and smartphones will be a choice for those who don't want to lug a dedicated reading device around - or pay hundreds of dollars for one.

"Publishers are now rushing to develop new forms of books to cater to readers who will see them on smartphones — books that will not work on today’s stand-alone e-readers," the Times journalists write in Library in a Pocket.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

i Could Be a Contenda - Motorola's Droid Smartphone Predicted to Give iPhone Stiff Competition

Silicon Valley is perpetually hyping the smartphone du jour that is supposed to sweep the iPhone into the dustbin. After a while one's eyes glaze. But Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Murrell thinks the Motorola Droid may be the real deal. "This," he says, "may be one contender that's not all talk."

What makes Droid any better than the rest of the pack? Murrell says the television commercial cleverly distinguishes Motorola's device from Apple's. If you haven't caught it, it goes like this:

"iDon't have a real keyboard. iDon't run simultaneous apps. iDon't take night shots. iDon't allow open development. iDon't customize. iDon't run widgets. iDon't have interchangeable batteries." — and finishes with a hard right: "Everything iDon't, Droid does."

Droid's underlying operating system? Google Android.

For details and informed rumors, read Motorola gives Apple a poke in the i, and for some other reviews and comments, read another Good Morning Silicon Valley blogger, Susan Steade, here.

RC

Reality Not Good Enough for You? Time To Use Your Android

"The world is too much with us," wrote poet William Wordworth. Too bad he didn't have an Android-powered smartphone.

If he did he'd realize how little of the world he'd actually experienced. By strolling through Grasmere, his Lake District hometown, and pointing the device at inns and shops, countless secrets and wonders theretofore hidden from him would have been displayed on his phone's screen.

Wordsworth didn't have a smartphone, but you can experience for yourself the marvels of augmented reality that the smartphone delivers. What's augmented reality? Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, recently reported in the New York Times that "the real world is overlaid with virtual information." By using your smartphone's global positioning application, your phone can see precisely what you're looking at. "The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view."

Football fans have been familiar with an early version of augmented reality: it's the yellow stripe that appears to mark the first down line on the field on game telecasts. In fact it's a virtual line, invisible to spectators attending the game but absolutely real to television viewers. The technology has now been enhanced and adapted to such competitive sports as golf, tennis, baseball and sailing.

And don't forget the competitive sport called shopping. Books, for instance. We recently reported a Google book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book's barcode, "it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter...You'll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away"

But that's just the beginning. Berlin goes on to write, "Augmented reality will 'reinvent' many industries, including health care and training...Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.

"The industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming," Berlin concludes. Actually, not. Traditionally, the earliest adapters of technological advances are warfare and the sex trade. The military has for years been developing "wearable computers" employing what it calls a Battlefield Augmented Reality System. Here's an excerpt from a pre-Android paper published in 2002:

Many future military operations are expected to occur in urban environments. These complex, 3D battlefields introduce many challenges to the dismounted warfighter. Better situational awareness is required for effective operation in urban environments. However, delivering this information to the dismounted warfighter is extremely difficult. For example, maps draw a user's attention away from the environment and cannot directly represent the three dimensional nature of the terrain.

To overcome these difficulties, we are developing the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). The system consists of a wearable computer, a wireless network system, and a tracked see-through head-mounted display (HMD). The computer generates graphics that, from the user's perspective, appear to be aligned with the actual environment. For example, a building could be augmented to show its name, a plan of its interior, icons to represent
reported sniper locations, and the names of adjacent streets.

As for the other application, pornography - well, use your imagination.

Read about recent smartphone advances in augmented reality in Kicking Reality Up a Notch.

“The real world is way too boring for many people,” one game developer declared. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”

Which takes us back to Wordworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea...

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.