The Net

NEW. FACTS AND SITES. MARTÍ CRESPO

Amazon's new Fire range

From 99 euros and in three sizes Amazon aims to attract new clients to the biggest shop in the world

Com­pul­sive read­ers know full well the ad­van­tages of elec­tronic read­ers and the biggest sell­ing range avail­able, Ama­zon's own Kin­dle, de­signed es­pe­cially to in­te­grate with the com­pany's e-books, has just got big­ger, brighter, and cheaper. The cheap­est of these has just hit the mar­ket at 99 euros. Kin­dle read­ers come in var­i­ous sizes with dif­fer­ing op­tions but are also com­pet­i­tively priced.

Jus­tine Dil­ley, a proud com­pany di­rec­tor stated on a re­cent visit to Cat­alo­nia: “We sell pre­mium prod­ucts but are not at pre­mium prices.” These are ob­vi­ously good prod­ucts and de­signed to cap­ture new clients. Top of the range at 8.9” is the Fire HDX with its four nu­cleus proces­sor of 2.5 gHz that loads graph­ics 70% faster than pre­vi­ous ver­sions. Wifi con­nec­tions are bet­ter and faster (more ef­fi­cient cloud up­load for all those pho­tos or to cre­ate back-ups) and it also has 4G ca­pac­ity. This slim and light model comes with un­lim­ited cloud stor­age, start­ing at 379 euros, be­com­ing more ex­pen­sive with ex­tended ca­pac­ity and con­nec­tiv­ity.

Those who are look­ing for some­thing smaller and cheaper can choose be­tween the six and seven inch Fire mod­els with their HD screens and Quad Core proces­sors. The seven inch starts at 139 euros and the new six inch model that ri­vals the iPhone 6Plus, starts off at 99 euros. Ama­zon's Fire range uses its own re­cently up­dated op­er­at­ing sys­tem which strangely is known as Sangría, al­low­ing di­rect ac­cess to the com­pany's ser­vices and prod­ucts and also their pro­pri­etary de­vel­oped An­droid apps. The clas­sic Kin­dle e-reader has also had a make-over; it's 20% faster and the mem­ory has been dou­bled. The 4GB drive can store thou­sands of books but Ama­zon also of­fers free cloud stor­age for books pur­chased from their own store. The new Kin­dle costs 79 euros with the tra­di­tional Pa­per­white com­ing in at a slightly higher price.

The com­pany does all it can to at­tract new users for elec­tronic read­ers who know more than sim­ply need­ing to con­nect their Fire to a com­puter to start read­ing can also ben­e­fit from a sixty sec­ond down­load for their pur­chases while at the same time being able to take ad­van­tage of im­proved func­tions, such as dic­tio­nary ac­cess and ad­justable read­ing op­tions.

Ama­zon feels that the six inch model is still the op­ti­mum size for this type of e-reader. While the new model may have lost in res­o­lu­tion (from 212dpi to 167dpi) it still can eas­ily be read in day­light. Using elec­tronic ink means less eye stress than other sys­tems over pro­longed ex­po­sure. Even the bat­tery lasts longer at a more than re­spectable two-week au­ton­omy, claim Ama­zon en­gi­neers bas­ing their cal­cu­la­tions on a daily usage of 30 min­utes (with­out Wifi con­nec­tion).

Full charge is reached in four hours but a quick charge will usu­ally give a user enough power for daily use.

One of the new fea­tures of Kin­dle is Free­time, a sim­ple func­tion which gives par­ents op­tions to en­cour­age their chil­dren to spend more time read­ing. Kids earn re­wards ac­cord­ing to the time they spend read­ing and par­ents can see progress as they do, even see­ing how many words they are look­ing up in the dic­tio­nary pro­vided.

For in­ten­sive read­ers, per­haps the most at­trac­tive fea­ture is Word Wise, es­pe­cially aimed to im­prove Eng­lish lan­guage lev­els as the sys­tem pro­vides brief and sim­ple de­f­i­n­i­tions of com­plex words which show up above the word con­cerned with­out the reader hav­ing to ac­tu­ally call up the dic­tio­nary.

The sys­tem is avail­able for a num­ber of books and can be reg­u­lated de­pend­ing on lan­guage level with fewer or more de­f­i­n­i­tions. Other func­tions, such as the syn­chro­ni­sa­tion of the last-read page, notes, re­main­ing time pre­dic­tions and oth­ers have not been touched.


Just a few days after the “no” vote in the Scot­tish ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence [scotre­f­er­en­dum.com], the coun­try is al­ready in­de­pen­dent, at least on the In­ter­net.

The .scot do­main, the re­sult of a pe­ti­tion from non-profit mak­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion [dot cot.​net] in 2009 to iden­tify web­sites re­lated to Scot­land, its cul­ture and lan­guage has been avail­able for reg­is­ter since Sep­tem­ber through some 40 of­fi­cial reg­is­tra­tion com­pa­nies around the world.

“The .scot do­main gives in­di­vid­u­als, or­gan­i­sa­tions and com­pa­nies a way to clearly iden­tify them­selves as Scot­tish, a unique brand­ing avail­able to all Scots dis­persed through­out the world.”

WEL­COME.SCOT

The first do­main up and run­ning was the reg­is­tra­tion com­pany Cal­ico.scot [cal­ico.scot] and since then a num­ber of other web­sites fol­lowed [dotscot.net/pi­o­neers], tourism's wel­come.scot, and the ref­er­en­dum webs [yes.​scot] and [bet­ter­to­gether.scot].

Also of note is the fact that this sum­mer the do­main process for both Basque and Gali­cian web­sites got un­der­way with the do­mains .eus

[www.​domeinuak.​eus] and .gal [ ww.​dominio.​gal], both of which have re­ceived help from the Fun­dació Punt­cat [do­mini.cat] through­out the process of ob­tain­ing recog­ni­tion for their re­spec­tive com­mu­ni­ties.

The do­main names will not be avail­able until later this year.

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