On Monday evening, Amazon announced that it would soon be offering a Kindle app for Android. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone considering the company already had software applications for the PC, Mac, Apple's iPhone and iPad, and BlackBerry phones. But it is worth delving into how the Kindle apps on these platforms differ, if at all, and which one has the best non-Kindle Kindle experience.

Amazon has not been resting on its laurels when it comes to the Kindle as a platform. While the Kindle hardware itself is only in its second generation, the strength of Amazon's strategy is in getting its digital bookstore into the hands of as many users and on as many platforms as possible. The end goal, you see, is that everyone buys their books from Amazon, even if they're not willing to invest in the Kindle hardware itself.

What becomes clear, though, the closer you look, is that the Kindle software Amazon provides for third-party hardware is universally less full-featured than what one can do on a Kindle proper. Is that by design? Certainly. We'll delve into that a little later on. In the meantime, let's start by taking a look at Amazon's various kindle apps by order of release.

The platforms

Apple iPhone/iPod Touch (March 2009)
The iPhone and iPod Touch Kindle application was the first of Amazon's efforts to offer Kindle users a way to read their books on something other than a Kindle device. Amazon released it about a year and a half after the launch of the first Kindle hardware, and just a month after the launch of the second-generation device.

At launch it wasn't the first e-book-reading software for the iPhone platform, nor was it the best. Competitor Stanza, which Amazon ended up acquiring just a month later, offered far more features as a reader, though it was missing a first-party sales library and a way to sync reading sessions, and titles between devices.

For iPhone and Kindle users alike, the release of this software was a big deal, since they could get all their purchased books synced to their iPhone or iPod without having to pay extra. And not so secretly, Amazon was hoping the app would act something like a gateway drug to get users to buy the Kindle hardware in order to get a fuller reading experience.

One problem that was apparent at the release of the iPhone app, and that still exists today, is that you cannot actually purchase books from within the app. Instead, it kicks you out to Safari to browse and purchase. As we go on you'll find this is a bit of a pattern.

Windows (November 2009)
Amazon released the PC version of its Kindle reader software to users in early November 2009. Like the iPhone iteration, it did something the Kindle hardware itself could not do, which was display illustrations and digital publications in full color. It also had the rather obvious benefit of being able to use whatever peripherals were attached to your computer, like the mouse and keyboard to turn pages and adjust various options.

However, the real reason to use the PC software was its potential for use on tablet PCs, which Microsoft highlighted a month prior to the software's release at the Windows 7 launch party. Windows 7 users could use pinch gestures to change the zoom level of the page, as well as use a swiping motion to turn pages--all things that regular Kindle users could not do on the Kindle hardware.

BlackBerry (February 2010)

The Kindle software app came to BlackBerry users just three months ago (to the day) and works on seven of Research In Motion's phones. Like the other apps, it syncs up with whatever purchases you've made, as well as bookmarks, notes, and your progress, though it doesn't let users create new annotations.

Because of the variety between the smaller-style screen models and the large, touch-screen models, the two reading experiences can differ drastically. For obvious reasons, users with larger screens can see more text, and those words comes across more clearly. Even so, small screen reading can be just as enjoyable for those with the smaller screens, and Amazon has coded in a simple system where you can use the BlackBerry's space bar to turn the page.

Mac (March 2010)
Amazon released the Mac version of its desktop Kindle app to Mac users back in March, and it was met with lukewarm enthusiasm. Despite being released four months after its PC cousin, the Mac version didn't offer anything PC users weren't already getting. And just like the PC version, it was missing a way for users to create annotations or highlight passages, leaving that functionality exclusive to people with the Kindle hardware.

The Mac version also drew criticism for not taking advantage of some of Apple's gestures, such as pinching to zoom--something the PC version was able to do for Windows 7 users with touch screens, or multitouch trackpads. Also, users with PowerPC processors and/or the Tiger (OS X 10.4) operating system were shut out of being able to install the software.

Limitations and criticisms aside, Amazon said up front that the software was beta, and like all its other Kindle apps, offered it free of charge.

Apple iPad (March 2010)
The iPad version of the Kindle software is the most interesting on this list because, unlike any of the others, the iPad is easily the Kindle's biggest threat.

The Kindle app on the iPad is very much like a grown-up version of its touch-friendly sibling on the iPhone and iPod Touch, except bigger (see the difference in the screenshot below). The amount of text you can see on the screen rivals that of the Kindle hardware itself, though comes in full color with three page themes and a dimmer toggle that can tone down the intensity of a white screen without actually lowering the device's brightness.

Apple does not yet ship the iPad with its iBooks storefront and reader application, but offers it as a free download (complete with a reminder) the first time iPad users head to the iPad's App Store. And unlike what Amazon has done with any of its Kindle apps, Apple actually combined the storefront and the reader in one--just like Amazon offers on its own Kindle hardware.

For more on how the two apps differ, read my colleague Rafe Needleman's take.

Android (this summer)

So what will Android's story be? From the looks of things, it's going to be the same as most of the other apps on this list. It will sync up whatever page you were on if you were reading the same book on another device, as well as giving users both a portrait and landscape mode.

It also appears as if the storefront aspect of making purchases will continue to exist within a Web browser, instead of an in-app directory.

These are all minor details, though. Where things get interesting is if Android gets a tablet-flavored shot in the arm at Google I/O this week. That would signal that there could soon be sibling apps on Google's burgeoning platform just like there are for the iPhone and iPad. But more importantly, it would mean yet another device that would replace some of the functionality--and need--for Amazon's own Kindle hardware.

Which one's the best?

The answer here should be quite obvious: whatever you've got with you. These applications were all designed to be a companion to the Kindle hardware as much as they exist to add an extra sense of value on top of whatever digital content is purchased.

If I had to pick personally, I'd go with the iPad version since it's around the same size as Amazon's Kindle hardware. But that doesn't mean I'd pick it over the Kindle hardware if it was something I was going to use every day. The Kindle's e-ink display is far easier on your eyes, it works well in sunlight, and you get free 3G for the lifetime of the product to browse and download titles. These are three big things the Kindle hardware has on all these software apps and the hardware they run on (go here for a full list).

The bigger issue at hand is that Amazon inherently limits the features it includes in these apps. This is because it's in Amazon's best interests to get you to buy its own device, where the Kindle store is the only way to go. Going forward, it will be interesting to see which features Amazon chooses to add to these apps, either from the Kindle itself, or its Stanza acquisition, in order to keep up with competitors. Or, in the case of devices like the iPad--where there is already an incumbent--whether Amazon chooses to make software that's even better.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

Long considered the fastest and most unobtrusive of the various torrent clients around, uTorrent announced last week a surprising step toward plug-ins with the introduction of an "app store" in the Windows-only alpha release of uTorrent 2.2.

Called the Griffin project, the HTML and JavaScript-based API system will display apps from within the uTorrent interface in an embedded browser window. The developer SDK has yet to be released, and there was no indication which browser engine was being used at the time of writing. Currently, four demo apps are available.

There's a VirusGuard provided by security vendor BitDefender; a list of the top free games at Raptr that includes download links, file size, and genre; and VODO, which is like Raptr but for legally free independent movies. There's also �Gadget, which adds an Ask.com-powered toolbar to Internet Explorer and Firefox and gives users uTorrent features. uTorrent has long had a relationship with Ask.com, where the program has often opted users in to installing the Ask.com toolbar unless they actively opted out, so it's not surprising that Ask.com shows up in the only "monetizing" demo app.

During casual testing, the apps appeared not to affect torrenting or other program behavior adversely.

For readers who've noticed that the screenshots and download of the alpha say "beta" on them, it's apparently because of an internal uTorrent naming convention that forces all releases to be marked as beta--even the alphas.

Tell me about your experiences with Griffin and the new uTorrent in the comments below.

Does your iPad pull a lot of desk duty? Does it adorn your kitchen counter or even your nightstand? Do you routinely leave it on a dock or charger? If so, you should put that sucker to good use--even when you're not using it. After all, a big, beautiful screen is a terrible thing to waste.

As you learned yesterday, the iPad already knows how to function as a photo frame--and a damn fine one at that. But not everyone wants to look at photos all day. Maybe you'd prefer stock updates? Tweets? How about fish? Here are five apps to keep a docked iPad interesting:

Bloomberg: Want to keep tabs on the stock market? It's hard to imagine a lovelier window on Wall Street than Bloomberg for iPad. It delivers news, equity indices, a personalized stock portfolio, currency exchange rates, and plenty more, all wrapped in a gorgeous interface--and updated at regular intervals. Best of all, it's a freebie!

Chirp Frame: Twitter addicts, this one's for you. The app serves up tweets as they arrive, effectively turning your iPad into a big, beautiful Twitter frame. You can choose from one of three slick backgrounds, swiping as desired to read earlier tweets. Of course, when you're feeling the need to send out your own status update, all it takes is a tap of the screen to tweet (or reply). Chirp Frame costs 99 cents.

iQuarium HD: Real fish are kind of a pain, don't you think? You have to feed them, clean the tank, yell at people to stop tapping the glass, and all that. iQuarium provides all the joys of fish-tank ownership with none of the hassles (or expense--it's a mere $1.99). Actually, the app is as much a Tamagotchi-style game as it is a virtual fish tank, as you have to feed your fish daily--eventually earning "fish points" to decorate your tank with accessories, backgrounds, more fish, etc. If you want more instant gratification, check out Marine Aquarium (also $1.99).

Magic Window--Living Pictures: An absolutely dazzling alternative to family photos, Magic Window serves up 15 gorgeous animated nature scenes--everything from sunrises to mountain valleys to tropical oceans at dusk. Actually, they're time-lapse photos, but they look animated, especially if you adjust the time slider so the action moves slowly. Magic Window is by far one of my favorite apps for a docked iPad. It's currently on sale for $3.99 (normally $4.99).

My Frame: Like the iPad's own Picture Frame on steroids, My Frame lets you view photo slideshows--but with your choice of information overlaid on top of them. You can add a clock, a weather forecast, a Twitter feed, birthday/anniversary reminders, sticky notes, and even iPod controls. Not bad for a $1.99 app.

Have you found any other interesting apps to run on your iPad while it's docked or charging? If so, tell us about them in the comments!

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

Nearly six months have passed since Slacker first announced its intentions to bring caching capability to its app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In that time, I've received dozens of e-mails from fans of the music service who have been anxiously awaiting for updated app. Today, I get to deliver some good news: Slacker 2.0.56 with iPhone caching exists! In fact, it's downloading stations to my iPod Touch as I write this. Unfortunately, you still can't have it...and yes, I can hear the groans from here. Slacker's latest update has been submitted to Apple for approval, but there's no solid time line for the approval process, or even a guarantee that it will be approved at all.

In the meantime, however, I'm more than happy to inspire some jealousy with a firsthand account and screenshots of Slacker with caching. It's a pretty great feature to have (especially on the Touch), but it's not without limitations. For one, caching stations takes forever--even over Wi-Fi--and it requires the transmission of massive amounts of data. Also, you can only save up to five stations, and you must refresh all cached stations at once, so--once again--the process is terribly sluggish. An option to refresh each station individually would be preferable. Plus, in my initial testing of the feature, only one of my five stations would refresh anyway, and it still took ages. (I hope that Slacker is working on a fix for this apparent bug.)

A subscription to Slacker Radio Plus is required for caching capability, but the fee is a very reasonable $4.99 per month--or $3.99 per month if you pay one full year up front. The service's other features have been done to death, but for a closer look at the latest version of the iPhone and iPod Touch app, check out the gallery.

Originally posted at MP3 Insider

A few days ago, Chrome turned 6. Version 6, that is, though only on the developer preview channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The move doesn't mean a radical new version of Google's browser is available to test--the changes over the 5.0 series are pretty minor, chiefly reflecting the fact that a new branch has sprouted from Chrome's source-code tree. But the change is important for a couple reasons.

First and foremost, it means the work of buttoning down geolocation support and other new features in Chrome 5 can begin in earnest since experimental work is now happening elsewhere. Chrome 5 will be the first stable release for Mac OS X and Linux, a move that's important for attracting mainstream users.

Second, starting Chrome 6 frees the cutting-edge coders up for developing those new features, making the new branch more than a mere twig.

Google doesn't make a big deal about Chrome version numbers, treating them as mere milestones passed on the journey to a better browser. If a feature doesn't make a particular milestone, it gets pushed back, as indeed has happened with a few items planned for Chrome 5. But Google updates Chrome relatively frequently, so delaying a feature typically pushes it back only a few months.

Chrome updates are installed transparently in the background by default, a move that might cause some indigestion among those who want to stay in charge but that ensures that nobody is still using a 9-year-old browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.

So what exactly are the new features in Chrome 6 so far? Nothing major, according to a blog post from Google Chrome team member Karen Grunberg. Most significant are some further tweaks to omnibox behavior to better handle right-to-left languages and copying Web addresses.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Microsoft Office 2010 is available today for business licenses, with the public release coming in June, but we've had a chance to put the review copy through its paces. According to Microsoft, the focus of this major overhaul was on three things: to make work flow more efficient; to effectively use Web applications to make your work available anywhere; and to make collaboration with others much easier. In our review of Microsoft Office 2010, we look at the notable feature changes across many of the applications. Microsoft says Office 2010 will let you use your PC, smartphone, and the Web to make your projects come together more efficiently. From what we've seen, the company might be right, but it will need to work out some of the bugs before the launch in June.

Read our review of Microsoft Office 2010, and about how you can update to Microsoft Office 2010 Mobile for free on your Windows Mobile 6.5 phone.

EMC's Mozy online backup service just got a lot more compelling--because it's not just online anymore.

Version 2.0 of the cloud backup service, released late Monday, adds a very useful option to store your data on an external hard drive, too. Storing data remotely is well and good, but a local backup is easier if you need to restore files, and setting it up was as easy as plugging in a drive and telling the software to use it. External USB drives are economical these days--less than $100 for 1TB--and it's nice not having to configure two different backup systems.

In my tests of the revised software over more than a week, I found other good reasons to use the service and its new version 2.0 control software. I expect some of those improvements to appeal to many of the million regular users and 50,000 business customers who collectively store more than 25 petabytes of data with Mozy--or at least to those using Windows machines, since the Mozy 2.0 software for Mac OS X won't arrive until later this year.

Cloud-based backup is a nice option for those who really want to protect their data. The obvious reason is that if your house is reduced to ashes or vanishes into a sinkhole, your data is safely stored far, far away. Sure, you can stash backup drives in safe deposit boxes or with friends and family, but keeping those up to date is tough.

The flip side is that online backup can take a very long time, especially for somebody like me with a lot of photos. I have more than 600GB of data, and with my upload rate topping out at about 1 megabit per second, I still haven't finished my initial backup even though I've been a Mozy customer since late 2009. It hasn't helped of course that I've taken so many more pictures recently, of course.

Because of my overstuffed hard drives, I preferred an online backup service with unlimited storage rather than paying by the gigabyte, and I wanted my data to be encrypted for security and privacy reasons. There are other choices in the market--I considered Carbonite and BackBlaze when I was getting started a few months ago--so look carefully at the latest prices and options if you're thinking of signing up.

Mozy costs $4.95 a month, $54.45 a year, or $103.95 for two years. I went with the two-year plan. If you want to test the waters or only backup some particularly precious documents, there's also an option for 2GB free. Multi-computer households will have to pay for each machine, though.

I generally have been happy with Mozy, but it's been hobbled by my relatively pokey network connection. So I was pleased that Mozy's 2.0 software is faster. My gigabyte backlog has been dwindling significantly faster since trying Mozy 2.0.

It's hard to quantify the improvement given various complications in what else I'm doing with my network, but with several gigabytes headed into the ether each day, there's now an end in sight for my initial backup. Mozy said the new software compresses files 75 percent faster and transfers them over the Internet (still fully encrypted, by the way) 25 percent faster.

Of course, for people with more modest storage needs, it shouldn't take as long to get started, and then the incremental backups are less taxing.

Another gripe that's been improved with Mozy 2.0 is that I can throttle and pause backup. Many times with the earlier software I was frustrated when I wanted to give network priority to something else--a Skype videoconference or a YouTube upload, for example--and the only option for Mozy was to cancel the backup altogether.

Mozy 2.0 lets me pause it if I want to and throttle its network use at other times--for example when my computer's processor is busy.

Unfortunately, there's no way to tell Mozy to stand aside when another computer on the local network might be busy. Thus my wife's recent exasperated cry from downstairs: "Stephen, what are you doing on the computer that I'm having so much trouble uploading a photo?"

I have plenty of nitpicks, too. I'd like to see what file is being uploaded for various reasons, but there's not enough room on the non-resizable status window. Configuration is a bit clunky and the software didn't even suggest the option of backing up an external drive where I store much of my photos. And in the version of the software I tested, some configuration settings--including enabling local backup--required a trip through Windows 7's permissions system.

Most mysterious, for reasons I don't understand, my remaining total of gigabytes to be backed up fluctuates sometimes--leaping by about 200GB for no reason I can discern halfway through my test of the Mozy 2.0 software.

But my case may be unusual. I have thousands of photos, many of them stored in Adobe Systems' DNG (Digital Negative) format. One nice thing about DNG is that it packages up the raw image from my SLR with all its metadata--captions, keywords, and editing changes--into a single file. The bad thing about this approach, from a Mozy perspective, is that a little tweak of a few bytes such as changing a photo's title means the entire 30MB file has to be uploaded again.

Mozy's software is intelligent enough to detect changed blocks within a file so that sometimes it doesn't have to re-upload the entire file but instead only the changed portion. Alas, that doesn't apply in the case of DNG files, where the small changes happen at the front of the file where the metadata is stored.

Happily for me, I haven't had to test Mozy's ability to restore data. This is one of cloud-based backup's big weaknesses: who has time to wait days, weeks, or in my case months for a computer to be restored? It's nice that BackBlaze, for example, will send you your data on DVD or another hard drive, but I like the option of having Mozy take care of it for me on a local drive even better.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Picture, if you will, me as the "Lost in Space" robot, flailing my arms madly and blaring, "Danger! Danger! This Netbook will sell out, Will Robinson!"

That's because this is one of those lowest-price-ever deals, and you know how those go.

Today only, Wal-Mart has the Asus Eee PC 1005HA-EU1X Netbook for $198 (plus sales tax in most states). Shipping will run you just 97 cents.

Update: As I feared, this is already sold out. (I did flail my arms, you know.) But see Bonus Deal No. 1 down below for a damn fine alternative.

This is a 10-inch Netbook. It's new, not refurbished. It requires no rebate forms--$198 is your out-the-door price. And it sells for at least $250 at most other stores.

The specs are about what you'd, well, ex-spec for a Netbook (yuk, yuk): 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, and 1,024x600-pixel screen resolution.

On the plus side, the Eee PC offers 802.11n Wi-Fi, not 802.11g like on a lot of models. On the downside, it sports a three-cell battery--good for a few hours of runtime at best. Also something of a downer: it runs Windows XP Home, not Windows 7.

Still, this is an awful lot of portable PC for an awfully low price. Might make a nice gift for the dad or grad in your life.

Bonus deal No. 1: If you want something a little more robust, today's Woot.com deal is for a refurbished Gateway 10-inch Netbook with a 250GB hard drive, Windows 7, and a 6-cell battery, all for $239.99. (Wi-Fi is 802.11g, though.) That's pretty stellar.

Bonus deal No. 2: From today until May 19, IObit is giving away free licenses of its Advanced SystemCare Pro utliity, which normally sells for $29.95. It's a system cleaner, error fixer, performance optimizer, etc. I'm not generally a fan of these tools, but if your machine's been causing you trouble, this might be worth a try.

Originally posted at The Cheapskate