Tech Today w/ Ken May

The Kindle Fire is about to get some major competition and as early as November 7th. The Digital Reader, pretty much the best source online for ebook news, has several sources indicating that B&N will have a large announcement on November 7th. The next Nook Color is expected to headline the show.

The Nook Color set the standard late last year for enhanced ereaders. By using a color LCD screen and a highly curated Android release, the Nook Color was an instant hit and was no doubt the template for Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But Barnes & Noble isn’t just going to roll over and let the Fire steal the market it created. Enter the next-gen Nook Color.

Expect the Nook Color 2 to go toe-to-toe with the Kindle Fire. It will likely carry the same $200 price and similar internal specs. But B&N isn’t Amazon and hasn’t built a massive Android ecosystem. Where Amazon can serve everything from books to movies to cloud storage on its devices, Barnes & Noble is stuck hawking just books and housewares. But B&N might be fine as long as they can sneak Netflix and the entire Google Apps suite onto their tablet. Plus, it needs to be as hacker friendly as the original.

It was previously rumored that the new Nook Color would launch in September but that fell through. Another older rumor also states that there will be two new Nooks coming this quarter. November 7th might turn out to be a big day in the ereader world.

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Is The Nook Color 2 Launching On November 7th?

There’s nothing better than unplugging on a Sunday afternoon with a newspaper and a cup of Joe, which is exactly what AU Optronics hopes to facilitate with its 6-inch Rollable Organic TFT E-paper. We’ve heard rumblings about the foldable photovoltaic device before, but the company has finally delivered a working prototype that is completely solar powered and elastic enough to make even Gumby jealous. Made of organic TFTs, the SVGA e-paper has an amorphous silicon PV battery, which turns natural or indoor light into solar energy without requiring a power plug. The only downside? Unlike the dead tree variety, wrapping presents in this stuff is a no-go. Check out the extended PR after the break.

Continue reading AUO’s flexible e-paper to take on Stretch Armstrong in battle of the bendiest

AUO’s flexible e-paper to take on Stretch Armstrong in battle of the bendiest originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has released a statistic showing that fewer than one-tenth of one percent of logins into the social network are compromised. But since more than 1 billion Facebook logins occur each day, that could add up to 600,000 breaches every 24 hours.

Specifically, an infographic in an

One of the most enlightening trips I have ever taken was in 2000 when I traveled through Turkey.

The Tor Project has released an upgrade to its software that blocks some recently revealed critical vulnerabilities in the Tor network’s protection of user anonymity. The Tor Project’s Erinn Clark detailed the fixes in a blog entry, and urged all users to update immediately.

Tor, originally called “The Onion Network,” anonymizes user visits to websites and other Internet traffic by passing it through a series of relay servers around the Internet. It also can be used to bypass national firewalls like China’s Great Firewall, or Internet “shutdowns” like the one imposed by the Mubarak regime in Egypt earlier this year, through “bridge relays” that connect to the global Internet through dialup or satellite connections or other connections that bypass normal Internet routing. However, an attack has been developed that could be used to track individuals using the Tor network, and discover hidden bridges, potentially putting them at risk.

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Tor Project patches critical flaw in its anonymizing network

While everyone is gaga for the Kindle Fire, according to reports, Barnes & Noble has been working on the next Nook Color. Get ready for a fall color-eBook-reader smack down. LET'S GET READY TO sit down, have some tea, and read to a nice book before bed. More

iHome hasn’t had the best rep for putting out stellar products for a while, but its new fully-wireless and rechargeable iW1, which was announced alllll the way back at CES, actually looks pretty awesome. More

What do you get when you spend over $700 million on a new Swedish party house for your servers? This. 300,000 feet of buzzing, scalding Facebook servers in a spot so cold, they can just let the air in. More

Lithium-air batteries are the coming thing. They have the potential to hold ten times the capacity per unit volume of lithium-ion batteries and are lighter, since one of the charge-carrying materials is ambient air. These air-breathing monsters look great. But, as with all monsters, they have their vulnerable spot. In this case, the vulnerability is something akin to asthma—the inability to get enough air into the battery. Medical scientists don`t seem to be too interested in making inhaler products for batteries, though, so scientists have been trying to come up with ways to keep the air flowing.

In some recent work, published in Nano Letters, researchers show that producing graphene as poorly as possible helps a lot. Yes, it truly is a case of deliberate incompetence saving the day.

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Deliberate incompetence makes for better lithium-air batteries

Remember the display on your first mobile phone? If you’ve been chatting on the go for as long as we have, it was probably barely big enough to fit a complete telephone number — let alone a contact name or text message. And your first smartphone? Even displaying scaled-down, WAP versions of web pages was asking a lot. Now, those mobile devices we couldn’t live without have screens that are much, much larger. Sometimes, though, we secretly wish they were even bigger still.

Samsung’s new GT-N7000 Galaxy Note is the handset those dreams are made of — if you happen to share that dream about obnoxiously large smartphones, that is. It’s as thin as a Galaxy S II, lightning fast and its 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display is as gorgeous as it is enormous; the 1280 x 800 pixels you once could only get with a full-size laptop (or in the Galaxy Tab 10.1) can now slide comfortably into your front pocket. Its jumbo display makes it the perfect candidate for a notepad replacement and, with the included S Pen stylus, you’ll have no problem jotting notes on the fly, marking up screenshots or signing documents electronically. But, is that massive display too much of a good thing? You’ll need to jump past the break to find out.

Continue reading Samsung Galaxy Note review

Samsung Galaxy Note review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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