I have seen the future of books, and it is the Kindle. Or maybe Kindle rev. 2 will be anyway.Having witness the repeated failure of several electronic book efforts in the past, I was pessimistic. But now I believe. Amazon's new approach to the electronic book has successfully tackled several of the key barriers that stymied earlier efforts with a very well-executed end-to-end service on top of an aggressive device design. And while there are still a few warts on the Kindle typical of most first-generation consumer electronics products, it is clearly pointing to a very interesting future.As an avid reader with an extensive personal library of fiction, non-fiction, and technical books (as the numerous bookshelves scattered about the house and the 40 boxes of books in my garage will attest) the idea of forgoing the heft and ease of browsing and reference was a daunting one. And yet, I acknowledge having suffered under challenges of managing both the library and the habit, particularly while traveling. I have come to resign myself to allocating at least 10-12 pounds of luggage space to carry the books and magazines necessary to fuel a week-long trip ...

Here's the HP nostalgia piece.

This is a watershed moment in consumer electronics! For decades now, LCD panel technology has dominated portable consumer electronics despite its need for power-hungry back-lights. The newer AM-OLEDs that are self-emmisive (requiring no back-light) have been in development since around the time I started MicroDisplay in 1995, with some early applications emerging over the last few years in tiny segmented character display applications like MP3 players.Well today's news held the first product announcements from Samsung and Philips/LG to show the new technology in active matrix formats that can display high quality video (albeit still in limited QVGA resolution.)What will this mean for Joe-consumer? Well, our sexy gadgets are going to get even smaller, thinner [about half a MILLIMETER in thickness], and draw even less power than before (allowing the batteries to be smaller and thinner as well.) Oh yes, and the viewing angles and contrast [10,000:1] will be much better than for LCDs. Check out these images from AVING.net.

Hat tip to Gizmodo.More details here.

HP has just released a new digital camera that includes a new image processing feature they dub the "Slimming Effect."There's no miracle weight loss here, just a simple horizontal stretch transformation which compresses the center of an image and stretches the edges. (Note to the unwary: don't try this one if your wife is near the edge of the image. She won't thank you for it.)So now we can trade off apparent poundage for reduced cranial volume and that ever-memorable cone-head sort of look.I'm sure it will become a standard Photoshop filter within a 30 days. Who knows? This might even open up the fashion industry to the non-anorexic!

After having started MicroDisplay a few years back, every now and then, someone asks we which television they should buy. Assuming you can convince your SO to tolerate some new living room accessories, now is actually an excellent time to be thinking about investing in a large number of new pixels. The prices are actually starting to become reasonable for some serious high-quality screen acreage.There is a new wave of televisions arriving on the market supporting the latest high-definition "standard" DVD players coming out. The nice thing about standards today is that there are so many of them to choose from, what with Blue-Ray and HD-DVDs and all.As far as the television sets go, if you happen to wander into a Fry's or Magnolia Hi-Fi (The Best Buys and Circuit Cities of the world tend to stock the lower-end mass-market models) and ask for one of the better sets, the average commission-seeking sales associate will probably steer you towards one of the new 1080P sets. This means that the set supports the highest-resolution progressive (not interlaced) video modes being output by the new DVD gear, and hopefully by some of the forthcoming cable and ...