Until relatively recently, buying music meant going in to a shop and picking up a CD. Now, all you need is a computer, an internet connection and an MP3 player to instantly download any song you like.

The revolution in the music industry has been driven in part by the success of devices such as Apple’s iPod, which made it easy to download music from iTunes and transfer it on to a device.

Amazon has been leading the charge with its Kindle range in the US, which have won plaudits from the likes of Oprah Winfrey. A large-screen Kindle, dubbed the DX, was launched last month, and is aimed at students who can load electronic textbooks on to a single portable device.

None the less, for some people, the dog-eared paperback cannot be bettered. Many ebook readers are expensive, and getting novels on to the device can be tricky for the less technically minded.

That’s where a British company is hoping to change things. Interead, based appropriately in Reading, has launched a range of colourful, easy-to-use readers that might just persuade people to start dabbling with electronic books.

At £189, its Cool-er is substantially cheaper than Sony’s Reader, which costs around £220. It’s also available in lots of funky colours, and even has its own bookstore, meaning purchasing books and loading them on to the device is as easy as dragging and dropping a file on your computer.

The Cool-er looks rather like a giant iPod, is available in many of the same stylish shades as Apple’s music players, and has a familiar click wheel to flick through pages and navigate menus. It’s thinner than an iPhone, and, at 178g, it’s half the weight of many other ebooks, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Neil Jones, Interead’s founder, believes this portability could be the key to its success: “We have created a reader that is light enough to fit into a jacket or a purse and attractive enough to be reading it publicly.”

Jones says the idea for the Cool-er was born from the frustrating experience of getting a book published. He found himself caught up in endless bureaucracy, and believed not only that there must be a quicker way for authors to get work published, but also that there was a more elegant way to deliver that content to readers.

It took just six months to take the Cool-er from drawing board to production line, but Jones believes it meets the needs of ”normal’’ people, not gadget fiends. “Cool-er has been designed to fit the requirements of a reader. They want it to be portable, light, to fit in a jacket pocket or purse, and they want it to do what they want to do in a simple manner.”

This, he confidently says, could be the “iPod moment that ebook readers have been waiting for,” while he believes that over the next year, his company will be able to build a significant user base that will see behind only Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader in terms of sales.

In time, says Jones, Cool-ers will boast wi-fi, so that users can download books straight on to the device, rather than transferring them by USB or memory card. Likewise, the price, too, should drop.

In fact, he believes the Cool-er could be the start of a new chapter for the publishing industry. “This is not just about technology,” says Neil Jones. “It’s about being a lifestyle accessory.” Well, it worked for the iPod; who can blame publishers for taking a leaf out of Apple’s book?

Cool-er ebook reader: is this the iPod for books?

Although analysts see the international market as fertile ground for Macs, they say the growth momentum may be tough to maintain due to the spreading economic gloom, Mac’s higher price point and smaller retail distribution network.

Mac shipments in the December quarter grew 16 percent internationally and a mere 2 percent in the United States. Mac sales made up more than 40 percent of Apple’s revenue in fiscal 2008.

“You’re just seeing internationally that the Apple platform message is starting to resonate,” said Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu. However, he noted that Apple continues to resist a move to substantially cheaper PCs, making it more difficult to win over converts in some emerging markets.

The MacBook laptop starts at $999, more than double the price of so-called netbooks, the stripped down, mini-laptops that have seen explosive growth all over the world.

Apple enjoys fat margins on Macs, which the company has not been willing to sacrifice to move down market. Wu estimates Mac’s margins at around 25 to 35 percent, twice the overall average for PC vendors.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has pointedly dismissed netbooks, even though Sanford Bernstein estimates 35.5 million netbooks will be sold in 2012, making up 30 percent of overall consumer PC laptop sales.

Needham & Co analyst Charlie Wolf said he does not expect the company to play in lower-priced markets in order to generate unit growth overseas.

“Dropping price is the worst thing you can do …. It would destroy Apple’s margin structure,” he said. “International could help Apple in the March quarter, but it could be nominal, simply because the world’s in a recession.”

FEWER POINTS OF SALE THAN COMPETITORS

PC makers are being stung in what is expected to be a long and steep downturn. Consumer demand began to plunge last fall in tandem with the market turmoil.

Gartner said Monday it expects PC shipments to fall 11.9 percent in 2009, their sharpest fall ever, with sales in emerging markets contracting for the first time.

Apple’s retail stores are key to its expansion efforts, allowing the company to more effectively shape the shopping experience. Retail sales accounted for roughly one-fifth of Mac unit sales last quarter.

Mac’s stronghold is the United States, where Apple has more than 200 retail stores. It was the No. 4 PC maker in the December quarter with a 7.2 percent market share, according to research group Gartner. Its ranks only seventh globally with a share of less than half that.

“For Apple, there still is a fair amount of international opportunity that’s untapped at this point,” said Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall.

Marshall believes Apple can replicate the strategy overseas that it has used effectively at home: generate buzz and get Macs into the hands of consumers who have never used one.

But although Apple’s online store is popular, Mac’s global retail presence is smaller than that of competitors, with 12,000 points of sale. Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard Co has 80,000 outlets, while No. 2 Dell Inc has 24,000.

The iPod is available at around 50,000 spots globally, and Apple products can be found in dozens of countries through major resellers such as Best Buy, Fnac, Dixons and Bic Camera.

Gartner analyst Charles Smulders said nine of out 10 of Mac sales are in mature markets — Western Europe, the United States and Japan. He said Mac has a strong presence in important markets like the United Kingdom — where it has 20 retail stores — France and Japan, but is weak in countries like Germany, where it has only one store.

Apple, which has more than 250 stores in 10 countries, plans to open 25 new ones in fiscal 2009, with about half being international. About 46.7 million people visited its stores in the December quarter.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

Apple Mac growing overseas but facing challenges

Instead, Amazon sprung the feature on publishers and the retailer is now taking public-relations hits that it might have avoided if it hadn’t been so tight lipped.

Following the debut of the Kindle 2, the 9,000-member Authors Guild claimed text-to-speech created a derivative work and violated copyright. Paul Aiken, the guild’s president said many publishers were also angered over the speech function, adding that Amazon never consulted beforehand with either of those groups. Amazon responded Friday by handing publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech feature on any title they choose.

Amazon’s response has disappointed some customers, who are left with the impression that the retailer is unwilling to go to bat for them.

This is exactly the kind of public relations blunder that Amazon can ill afford as it attempts to breathe life into the digital-book market. In this endeavor, who can argue that Amazon isn’t off to a great start?

The Kindle is a hit. The e-reader has been blessed by the doyenne of publishing herself: Oprah. A Citigroup analyst recently estimated that Amazon sold 500,000 units last year. He also predicted that the Kindle would generate $1.2 billion by 2010. That number didn’t include book sales.

Amazon might have avoided the controversy, had the company enlisted the counsel from important constituents in the publishing industry before launch. This way they could have a) learned about the objections quietly; b) done any haggling there and maybe come to a financial arrangement; c) scrapped the whole idea of text-to-speech if there was too much push back.

Hindsight is 20/20, sure. It’s easy to tweak Amazon for failing to see the problem coming. But how are execs handling the controversy now?

"Kindle 2′s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal," Amazon said in a press release issued on Friday, announcing the company would give publishers the option of disabling text-to-speech on any title. "No copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given."

If Amazon believes those things, some will argue (certainly those in the anticopyright crowd) that the company should take a stand–if not for its own sake than on behalf of customers.

Fighting a potentially expensive and prolonged legal battle with suppliers is a lot to ask of Amazon or any other company. Perhaps if text-to-speech were a vital or much-loved feature, then Amazon would be more apt to hold the line. But it’s not.

Text-to-speech isn’t going to threaten audio books for a long time. That’s not my opinion. That’s the opinion of Andy Aaron, an IBM expert on text-to-speech and a self described "booster" of the technology.

"I don’t think at this point, or for the foreseeable future, (text-to-speech) is going to compete meaningfully with a professional book reader," Aaron said last week. "Am I going to sit down and put my feet up and listen to text-to-speech read ‘War And Peace’ or ‘Harry Potter’ for six to eight hours? For someone who has the choice, I think they would rather get an audio book."

For Amazon to be taking heat over this issue is silly. There’s not that much in it for the company. Next time, they should take a few more risks with media leaks and get some guidance.

Amazon misread book sector on speech feature

My Phone service

My Phone is a free service that allows you to backup your phone’s information to a password-protected Web service. It offers automatic synching and backup so you can store your contacts, appointments, text messages, and other information to the service and then easily restore the information to your device if you happen to lose it or upgrade to a new smartphone. In addition, My Phone lets you automatically upload photos and videos straight from your phone to tbhe service. Currently, My Phone is only available as an invitation-only beta.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile

Windows Marketplace for Mobile will operate as the central hub for searching, browsing, and purchasing mobile applications for your smartphone. It come preloaded on all Windows Mobile 6.5 devices where you’ll be able to download applications over the air or from your PC simply by entering your Windows Live ID. Developers who have already created programs for Windows Mobile will be able to offer their products through the marketplace after a security and compatibility check from Microsoft.

Internet Explorer Mobile

With Windows Mobile 6.5, you’ll get more features from Internet Explorer Mobile. Built on the Internet Explorer 6 engine, the mobile browser will support Flash and Javascript and includes new tools for better page navigation, such as zoom in/out sliding scale and a breadcrumb features that shows you where you are on a Web page. In addition, Microsoft added that the browser allows for more transactions (e.g., checking flights, buying movie tickets) than any other mobile browser.

New user interface

The most noticeable difference you’ll see in Windows Mobile 6.5 is the user interface. It was designed to be “finger friendly” and “people centric,” bringing more important information up front and allowing for a better navigation experience. The Start menu now features a honeycomb format so you can more easily tap on icons without hitting the wrong button. You can also move and rearrange the icons to your liking. From the lock screen, you’ll be able to see any missed calls, voicemails, new messages, and upcoming appointments, providing your most important information at a glance. The Home screen also uses Zune’s interface. Our slide show below better illustrates these features and how they work, so be sure to check it out.

Now, while these capabilities seem aimed for the touch screen, Microsoft said it’s still committed to non-touch devices and offering its customers a choice, so Windows Mobile 6.5 will also come in Standard Edition.

Availability and partners

Now, here’s some bad news. Microsoft doesn’t plan on releasing Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrades or devices until the second half of 2009. While there were a couple of handset announcements made in conjunction with the Windows Mobile 6.5 news (LG has committed to Windows Mobile as the primary operating system for its smartphones and will release a 6.5 device later this year, and HTC will offer Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrades for its new HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC Touch Diamond2 devices), you can bet that Microsoft’s competition won’t be sitting still during that time and will make gains in their own OS.

The new enhancements promise to improve the usability of the OS but they seem more like baby steps rather than giant leaps forward, so it will be interesting to see where Windows Mobile 6.5 will be in the game by the time it finally comes out.

Microsoft previews Windows Mobile 6.5

It’s been a long wait for Palm to join the modern era of mobile computing, but until the company unveiled the Pre last month, it wasn’t clear that it had any kind of viable strategy for replacing its ancient Palm OS. However, the fact that the new platform has been built from the ground up also means that older applications will not run in webOS, and the company will certainly want developers to start creating apps fast in order to compete with Apple’s 15,000+ and growing catalog.

Perhaps for this reason the Pre will not only have a central application storefront at launch, but it will also be able to load unofficial apps made by developers who don’t wish to go through the official store. Finally, referring to the possibility of a patent battle with Apple, Colligan said that there are no pending legal actions between the two at the moment but noted that Palm has amassed 1,500 patents over 15 years just in case.

Palm officially abandons Palm OS

According to the Maryland-based firm Independent Security Evaluators, hackers can take over an iPhone if a user accesses a Web site designed by the hacker.

For example, an attacker can send an iPhone user an e-mail that says, “‘Check this link out. It’s great,’” Charles Miller, the firm’s principal security analyst, told ABCNEWS.com.

If the user then clicks on the link to the site, the person controlling the site can access anything on the user’s iPhone, including text messages, e-mails, phone numbers and address books. In other words, hackers can access “stuff you don’t want people to know about,” Miller said.

If hackers connect the server to a computer, as the security firm did, then they can download all of the information.

“People put all sorts of information on it. It’s important that they work properly,” Miller said of the phone. “That was our main motivation. We want to make sure we can feel safe and comfortable carrying them around.”

Potentially, the method can also be used to send text messages and dial calls from the phone, although Miller said that Security Evaluators did not test for this capability specifically.

Public Wi-Fi a Concern

The firm began looking into potential security issues last Monday when the company’s founder, Avi Rubin, was showing off his iPhone, Miller said.

“He gave us the proposition,” Miller said. “‘If you guys think you can do it.’ He gave us a week and an iPhone to play with.”

When the firm made the discovery last week, it called Apple to warn about the issue.

“They haven’t said a whole lot to us,” Miller said. “They basically acknowledged that they were looking into it.”

Apple told ABCNews.com that the company is looking into the firm’s report.

“We always welcome feedback on how to improve our security,” said Lynn Fox, an Apple spokeswoman.

The security firm also found that the iPhone could also be hacked using a public Wi-Fi connection, for example at an airport or a coffee shop, if the hacker set up an additional wall between users and the connection.

“I can basically sit between you and the real Web server you’re talking to,” Miller said. If the user connects to any Web page, the hacker can take control of the iPhone and the owner’s information.

Although the test was only for the iPhone, Miller said that if future Wi-Fi capable phones have similar flaws, they probably can be accessed in a similar way.

iPhone Gets Hacked

Anyone remember Psion’s Netbook Pro? No? You aren’t alone. Last year when the netbook world started heating up, Psion was warning manufacturers that it owned the trademark on “netbook” and I suspect that, considering the Psion netbook is nothing but a memory of a little bag of fail, the company may be looking to sell the trademark. Either that or they are hoping to launch a netbook people will actually buy and want to have the only “netbook” on the market.

Google informed advertisers that “netbook” could no longer be used in ads they place, chalking up a win for Psion. Where exactly this trademark war will go is hard to say. “Netbook” is a word used by consumers, the media, and even Intel to describe products in a generic manner. A trademark becomes difficult to enforce and perhaps even unenforceable if the trademarked term becomes generic.

Should Psion succeed in killing off the term “netbook” as a way to describe the current litany of small and cheap notebooks on the market, what will we call them? Will we revert to the sub-notebook moniker or coin a new phrase? What do you think we should call them?

Google bans term “netbook” from Adsense ads

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