Saturday, May 17, 2014

Yahoo News Digest Review

Yahoo-News-Digest-for-iOS-7

Yahoo unveiled their curated news service last week for Android and has been available for iOS earlier this year. The premise of this app is to give you 10 new stories every twelve hours, focusing stories relevant to the UK, US, Canada and international events.

The top Yahoo brass is happy that 40% of all users who have the app installed, access it on a daily basis. The news that Yahoo curates basically give you the gist of a major news item or event. Every story consists of a Yahoo summary, plus several “Atoms,” or key quotes, images, videos, Wikipedia excerpts and other material relevant to the story. Since the news on this app is basically a summary each story has close to 10 references, so you can dive deeper into something that rivets you. Twitter also plays apart in the layout with sites such as Cnet, Verge, Reuters all weighing in. The idea is to give you more information than the typical wire service story or single-sourced report.

Twitter are quickly becoming a metaphor of the way news stories develop. Frequently you will receive news on these sites first and news outlets will pick up on it. The Arab Spring, internet suspensions in Turkey and the war in Syria all broke on Twitter first. Companies like Facebook and Yahoo are betting on curated stories with sourced information from Twitter and other breaking news outlets. This app feels very much like a product from 2014, which is quite refreshing. Its layout is intuitive and easy to dive in for ten minutes and get a sense on the day’s top stories.

Download Yahoo News Digest for Android today.

Yahoo News Digest Review is a post from: Good e-Reader

Amazon Kindle DX vs Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2

paperwhite2-vs-kindledx

The Kindle DX Graphite edition has been Amazons flagship large screen e-reader for a number of years. The main premise behind this unit is to give you a large screen to read your PDF and eBook files on. The Paperwhite 2 features a second generation illuminated display and a myriad of software enhancements. Today, we are going to evaluate what is the better e-reader.

The Kindle DX features a 9.7 inch display and does not have a touchscreen. This results in a learning curve to orient yourself with the D-Pad and what the settings menu does, depending on if you are reading a PDF or standard eBook. One of the things I like about the base model is free 3G internet access, so you can buy books while on the go, or even make purchases while traveling. PDF files look simply amazing, it may not have the software features the later Kindle has, but it does a better job than any other Kindle. The standard eBook does not let you change the font type or line spacing, but does let you make notes, highlights and change the size of the font.

One advantage the DX has is the ability to render text to speech. It has two speakers so you can listen to audiobooks or listen to music while you are reading. There is a small dedicated section on the Kindle store to buy additional audiobooks.

The Paperwhite 2 has all of the bells and whistles you can expect out of the latest generation Kindle. You can read at night with the six inch display and control the brightness settings. It has GoodReads integration to let you converse with people who have the same taste in books as you do. It also has dictionary lookups, translations and X-Ray for eBooks. The smaller screen makes PDF files difficult to navigate and large files buckle under the pressure and crash the e-reader. The overall book experience is better on the Paperwhite due to the advanced augmentation options.

In the video below we document the same PDF file on each unit and show you everything that you can do to craft your own experience. We also fire up a purchased book from Amazon to give you an indication on what might be the better investment.


Amazon Kindle DX vs Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2 is a post from: Good e-Reader

Amazon Kindle DX VS Apple iPad Air

kindledx-vs-ipadair

Welcome to another Good e-Reader Comparison Video! Today we evaluate the core reading experience with eBooks and PDF Files on the Amazon Kindle DX and Apple iPad Air.

The DX and iPad Air both have 9.7 inch screens, but are quite different in their form and function. The Kindle has an e Ink display screen, which means in long reading sessions you won’t strain your eyes. The iPad Air has the traditional LCD screen, so you will have light emitting from behind the screen. The DX does not have a touchscreen, so you will have to use the menu/settings and the DPAD to navigate around. The iPad Air has the best touchscreen in the business and you can easily pinch and zoom PDF Files.

The Kindle DX has a resolution of 1200 x 824 pixels and uses an E Ink Pearl display screen. The screen is a giant sized 9.7 inches, which really makes PDF files shine. Most files you will load in won’t look good right off the bat, so you have to use the zoom function to find your sweet spot. The bigger a file is, the longer it takes to zoom and to turn a page. This unit has free 3G internet access, which works in over 300 countries, so you can buy books from Amazon while on the go. Reading a standard eBook is pure bliss, it has text to speech and plenty of ways to augment the margins and font size.

The iPad Air has a staggering resolution of 2048×1536, which blows the DX out of the water. Reading a PDF file is a cakewalk with the ability to pinch and zoom on the fly. I noticed when you load in a 100MB file though, the iPad tends to struggle with it and you tend to see clipping with big black boxes if you pinch/zoom quickly. The overall clarity in reading PDF files is really nice, there is a ton of detail that is evident. One of the things I liked is being able to do highlights and note taking right in a PDF file, while the DX has no functions at all. Your standard eBook looks really crisp, lots of great functions in iBooks to change the font size, font type and lots of advanced highlight features.

The video below documents the same PDF side by side on the iPad Air and the Kindle DX. You can get a sense on what both bring to the table and what types of functionality you can expect. We also fire up an eBook, so you can see what device may be right for you.


Amazon Kindle DX VS Apple iPad Air is a post from: Good e-Reader