Software News

Amazon released a software update for the Kindle Touch, and they now also offer it for sale again, but only the Wi-Fi model. It costs $99 with ads and $139 without ads. The Kindle Paperwhite costs $119 with ads and $139 without ads, the same price as the Touch without ads. The Kindle paperwhite offers several advantages (including higher resolution and front-light), but the Touch has one advantage - it had speakers and support for audio books.

GoodEReader posted a review of Bookeen's Cybook Odyssey HD frontlight. They say that it's quick, stable and robust, with good front light technology (actually better than the Kobo Glo and the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight. But less good than Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite). It's especially useful with PDF documents.

The downsides are a weak default store and lackluster battery life (around a month).

We're happy and proud to announce that after over a year in development, our second Kindle software title has been released. Utility Kit is a collection of must-have applications for your Kindle, which can enhance your reading experience and make your life easier. It includes seven different applications:

• Calculator
• Stopwatch
• Countdown timer
• World clocks
• Calendar
• Units conversion
• Notepad

We're happy to announce that our Kindle Nonograms game now supports the new Kindle Paperwhite e-reader.  Nonograms (also known as Griddlers or Paint By Numbers) are simple yet challenging Japanese logic puzzle games in which your goal is to uncover the hidden black and white picture. Download this exciting game now for $1.99! If you like SuDoKu puzzles, you'll surely love Nonograms...

A couple of weeks ago txtr unveiled their Beagle e-reader - a 5" E Ink device that is powered from two AAA batteries and connects to their Android e-reader software via Bluetooth. txtr said they want to partner with network operators to subsidize the device and their planned price is €9.90 (about $13). Their PR wasn't very clear, and now we have some more info from txtr's Chief Commercial Officer, Thomas Leliveld.

So first of all, it turns out that the txtr eBook platform uses PDF and ePub formats on the smartphone itself, which renders the pages into bitmaps and sends these to the beagle (via Bluetooth). This means that the beagle is really a very "dumb" terminal for the software. According to txtr this makes a lot of sense - everybody has a smartphone already which is great as an eBook platform. Making the e-reader itself simple allows them to reduce the price and complexity. The beagle can store several books (it's not as if you need to be connected to the phone while reading).

Amazon announced a new service called Whispercast - that allows organizations to manage their Kindles, distribute content and control internet access on the devices. It s mainly aimed towards enterprises and schools. The new service is free.

Source: Amazon

Someone managed to port a Sega Genesis emulator to the Nook Simple Touch, and it looks rather good and playable:

The Simple Touch is an Android based e-reader, and can basically run any Android software (although you need to jailbreak it before you access Android software).