Amazon Kindle clones from China – half the price, wi-fi and no DRM!

Kindle clone. Even better than the real thing... child (apologies to U2)

I’ve been holding back. I told you about the Apple Tablet clone a couple of days ago, but now I’ll come clean with the whole story. Boeye doesn’t just do Apple Tablet clones… they also do Amazon Kindle clones! Both the DX and the Kindle 2. I tried both of them at GITEX in Dubai, and not unlike my reaction when I played with their Apple Tablet clone, I was pretty impressed.

The screen is exactly the same as a regular Kindle with an e-paper display. No reflections, no backlight and very easy on the eyes. The build quality, once again, was stellar. The controls are pretty much laid out as they are with the Kindle. Boeye does both the larger form factor DX clone and the smaller Kindle 2.

So, why would anyone want the clone in stead of the real thing, you might ask. Well, for one, the Boeye device is supposedly available for $190. Secondly, there is no DRM (Digital Rights Management) or copy protection on this device. After all, on such a true-to-life clone, DRM would be sort of ironic!

China’s Boeye releases “Apple tablet” before Apple can – TechLahore@GITEX

The Boeye in TechLahore's hands. Apple Tablet clone or worthy rival?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been able to post much here. One of the reasons why – perhaps even the most pleasant one – was that I was away at GITEX in Dubai. GITEX has grown to be one of the largest tech shows on the planet, with attendees and exhibitors from all corners of the earth turning up to showcase their wares. Some of it is mundane, much as with any large tech show. For example, the 5,437 different kinds of USB disk-on-keys. But much of it is quite eye-opening. I’ll be focusing mostly on the latter with a series of GITEX updates.

I’ve been talking about the Apple Tablet with some anticipation. I think it could potentially extinguish the Kindle and un-hook the nook. With a colour screen, a broad range of applications, excellent e-reader support and integration with iTunes – soon to be tranformed into a bookstore too - it would be a worthy challenger and an excellent device to carry around on short trips.

The Apple Tablet is one Apple product I *will* buy… if it’s real, of course.

The Apple Tablet - I'll buy it! (Image courtesy Gizmodo.com)

Generally speaking, I don’t like Apple. I’ve made that pretty clear. That said, there is one Apple product I am interested in. And yes, if they come out with it soon enough, I’ll buy it. If you haven’t guessed already, that product is the yet-unnamed Apple Tablet.

True, the Apple Tablet has been a famed beast of legend for over a year now. Much has been written about it, but little has been seen. Stories emerged recently that Apple may have actually built prototypes of tablets as far back as 2003, only to kill the project when it became clear the alphas didn’t work well. It was around this time that Steve Jobs’ gave us his, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk”, spiel.

TechLahore’s about to build a Hackintosh – got any advice?

Lifehacker and other websites have plenty of tutorials on how to concoct a better-than-Mac clone

I’m just not going to buy a bloomin’ Macintosh. That would be against every fibre of my being. I’ve railed and ranted about the deeply philosophical issues I have with Apple, so I don’t want to make this another flame. Let’s just say that TechLahore ain’t no black polo neck wearin’ hippie. Now that we’re five sentences into this post, many of you probably can’t help but wonder why the heck I would want a Mac clone if I feel so strongly about the Cult of Cupertino… and that would be a fair question.

Unfortunately, I need access to a Mac because of some of the development projects I’m involved with. I’d like to be able to run Mac apps in their native environment. And that’s pretty much the only reason I’m even embarking on this project. Yes. To set the record straight, no time soon will you find me attempting to draw pretty pictures with Mac Paint or whatever the hell they call it these days, or move my mouse across the dock gleefully as icons expand and contract proclaiming, “Ooooo… dancing colour picture. Me like!”.

In short: I’m too manly for a Mac. Too manly for a Mac, don’t care if it’s in blaaaaack [to be sung to the tune of Right Said Fred's famous anthem from the '90s]

The Age of “Good Enough”: When cheap beats premium every time

Wired magazine carries a very important story this month. The article talks about evolving business models and a level of development in the technology industry that – excuse the pun – puts a premium on cheap. The piece is titled, “The Good Enough Revolution” and has received wide pickup from other sites and blogs, including the very popular LifeHacker.

The observation that we are now at a point in the evolution of most consumer technology (and increasingly, enterprise tech too) that “good enough” at a low price is what wins most of the time, is crucial for entrepreneurs and companies to truly understand. Unless you have a really killer niche application that solves an otherwise incurable pain point for a very rich set of customers, you have no hope in succeding against cheaper competitors who are “good enough”, even if your products are significantly better.

This is why I loathe Apple (most of the time anyway)

You can have all those features and more for $99 up front and a 2 year AT&T contract (~$1,500 over 2 years). And oh by the way, you also have to spend your life in servitude of the Grand Masters of the Temple in Cupertino.

I absolutely hate people trying to get into my business and attempting to limit my freedom. That applies to politics, business and equally, to technology. One of the main reasons I’ve never been an Apple fan – and never will be – is the fact that they engender a culture of suffocating control over consumers. You can either have it 100% their way, or stuff it. The third option, of course, is to buy a PC. Most people tend to go with that last one.

Apple has written another golden page in its history of limiting consumer choice by rejecting Google’s Voice Apps for the iPhone. Whether they perceive this to be a challenge to voice cellular telephony and hence an impediment to their grand plans to fleece people via AT&T, or whether they have some other dark reason for their miserable controlling behaviour, I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t like it one darn bit. Foo to you, Appstore!

Six reasons why Google’s Chrome OS announcement is HUGE

Google's Chrome Browser will soon be running on Google's very own Chrome OS.

This is massive news for the IT industry by any measure. It had been anticipated for a long time and feverishly denied by Google every time speculations appeared in the press. However, they’ve come out and admitted it now. Google is busy at work building their very own desktop for mainstream desktops, netbooks and laptops. The project is being called “Chrome OS“, and as the name implies, it is designed to optimize the user’s internet/web experience. The idea is to rethink the OS stack from scratch and bake in remote service leverage or the ability to ‘tap into the cloud’ at a fundamental, architectural level.

The Chromium code-base has been evolving in an interesting fashion; many of the early features that distinguished it from other browsers involved OS-like functionality.

New Swiss Airplane to fly 24×7 on sun juice; is Solar finally coming of age?

Solar Impulse HB-SIA - sailing through the atmosphere on sun power

News.com reports that a new Swiss aircraft will be the first to fly night and day without the need for any external source of energy. All its power needs will be met by the nearly 12,000 solar cells mounted on top of its wings. And those are pretty large wings too, mind you. The span is about the same as a Boeing 747, which stands at about 229 feet.

Borschberg and Piccard (no, not Jean-luc), the project promoters, will be taking the HB-SIA for a test spin this year, followed by a second flight in 2010. Soon after, in 2012, they intend to unveil the next generation of their solar powered marvel, in which they hope to fly around the world.

According to C|Net’s news.com:

The importance of imagining the future

Nanotechnology will make space elevators viable in a few years

If you’re in technology and you don’t think about the future – like *all* the time – then something’s probably wrong with you. The future is coming at us fast. And I don’t mean that in the sense of the Sardarji who wasn’t worried about his 14 year prison sentence since, “Koi gal naieen, 14 saal tey do mintaa’n ich guzar jaan gey“. I mean it in the sense that innovation in many important and varied areas is unfolding at a far more rapid pace than ever before. You’ll understand this well if you’re up to speed with any of Ray Kurzweil’s writings, are a Hans Moravec aficionado, an Eric Drexler fan, or even a student of the wider consequences of Moore’s law.

Many of the things that will exist in future will result from parallel technological paths merging to form unique devices, technologies and environments. For instance, nano applications in battery, CPU and screen technology, combined with a software mastery of vision and speech recognition, strung together with gesture based interfaces and large-format interactive displays. What does the fusion of these imminent developments look like?

HD DVD’s already dead, but is Blu-ray next?

Lots of hot stuff based on Blu-ray technology, but will it ever be mainstream?

HD DVD, as well know, was Toshiba’s much-hyped successor to DVD technology. It was competing with the Sony Blu-ray technology, and while it provided slightly lower quality, it was cheaper and had the support of giants such as Microsoft. As a matter of fact, HD-DVD even made its way into the Xbox 360. None of this, of course, prevented the standard from dying a horrid death. Toshiba could not compete with the significant array of movie production companies Sony had lined up behind its standard… and if Toshiba had a distribution vehicle in the Xbox, Blu-ray had one in the Sony PS3. At the end of the day, Toshiba decided to call it quits and the industry was awash with articles reminding us of the Betamax/VHS wars.

So, if HD DVD lost, did Blu-ray win? Well, certainly in the short term. But to borrow a line of argument from former President Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word, “win” really is? It’s certainly not clear to me that Blu-ray will ever *really* be the “new DVD”. In fact, I think online distribution is fast making distribution by disc meaningless.