After reading the Slashdot article, here is my opinion:

Another reason why Apple getting in to the E-book trade is bad for consumers. If I recall correctly, Apple is the reason Amazon went to the Agency model as well. Above all else, the two companies, Apple and Amazon, are not wholly at fault here. The publishing industry has been strong arming the companies since day one of e-book readers and software hitting the market.

As consumers, stop and ponder this for longer than a second. How much does it cost to make a book, warehouse it, ship it, and sell it at vendors, then collect the profit? Ok, now think about this, how much does it cost to create a digitized version of said book, store the digitized copy, sell it via ecommerce sites such as Amazon, and collect the profits? A whole heck of a lot less than a dead tree version of the same book.

This is the music industry fighting to keep an out of date business model in use all over again, except this time it is the publishing industry. There is no way a digital version of a book should cost anywhere near the same amount as dead tree version. Yet the publishing industry would have consumers purchase digital versions of books at prices somewhere between the soft cover copy and the hard cover copy of a dead tree version.

I have only had approximately six (6) hours to play with it but I already love it. Want a wonderful device with Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi 802.11b/g, and of course 1xRTT/EVDO built in. It is also a Wndows Mobile 6 Professional device, although Verizon saw fit to remove the Live integration for some reason, most likely due to their continuous need to profit from their subscribers in every way possible. As I play with my new gadget further, I will post up a more detailed review.

Although I have had it now for quite some time, I never reported on my other interesting gadget I obtained through a deal on eBay. I have always been interested in embedded Linux devices, especially the Sharp Zaurus series of PDA devices. When I first saw a new Sharp Zaurus SL5000 I immediately fell in love with the PDA and its hidden slider keyboard concept. However, I never got around to purchasing one or its upgraded siblings the SL5500 and SL6000. Then I came across an eBay auction for a Sharp Zaurus C860 PDA. Although Sharp discontinued the Zaurus line in the US, they continued to develop the line in Japan for quite some time and came out with a PDA line which resembled tiny convertible tablet notebooks. Here is a picture of the C860.

It is a very hackable device and there is an excellent following on the Internet which is still developing, upgrading and pushing the limits of what these devices are capable of. Although the device only runs a 400MHz processor is is more than capable of playing multimedia files, surfing the Internet, running office suite tasks (i.e. word processing, spreadsheets), developing code, hacking, and even running security audits.

Enter Sparkfun’s nifty PIC programming tutorial and a lazy Saturday afternoon and I finally had success programming the PIC16F628. Next up, I’ll be attempting the same process with an Atmel AVR MCU. Watch here for future MCU projects!