Photo: JulesHolleboom.nl / Flickr

The Amazon Kindle e-reader – and the whole e-reader market – is about to get a dramatic sales boost when the device goes on sale in AT&T stores around the US. The e-reader, which is by far the bestselling device in its category on the planet, is continuing its slow march into physical stores after initially building its user base on its own store online.

Rollout from next Monday

Starting next week Monday, 6 March 2011, all 2,200 AT&T retail stores in the US will be carrying the Amazon Kindle 3G. Nothing changes here – it costs the exact same $189 (about £116) it costs online and in other physical stores, and it will be identical to the other models currently on sale.

Who benefits how?

Amazon’s major benefit is that it has yet another outlet to reach its customer base, adding AT&T to Best Buy, Target and Staples as the other physical retail stores the devices are carried in. As if the insane exposure it has from its online platform alone isn’t sufficient, now retail stores all across the US will have the company’s devices on show.

AT&T benefits mostly because Amazon will pay the company for the data transfer used when Kindle users purchase books over their 3G connections. This is the primary reason why AT&T will not carry the non-3G Kindle e-reader. With a Business Week report suggesting AT&T’s windfall could be up to $4 monthly for each Amazon Kindle 3G on its network, the company would do well to sell these devices hard.

The e-reader marches on

The Amazon Kindle 3G and its non-3G counterpart remains the shining light in the e-reader marketplace. The device continues to perform exceptionally well, even after people speculated tablet PCs would erode their sales. As Amazon puts the digital reader in more people’s faces, other e-readers can only benefit, too.

Photo: louisvolant / Flickr

Samsung and AT&T announced the upcoming release of their own smartphone and the preview was the highlight of the CES 2011 convention earlier this month. A plethora of new technologies were announced at the CES 2011, all of them eye-catching, but all of them taking a backseat to Samsung’s new smartphone, the Infuse 4G.

Detailed display

The highlight of the Infuse 4G release was the inclusion of a Super Amoled Plus display, a state-of-the-art technological breakthrough which increases the number of sub-pixels in the display by 50 per cent. This increase of sub-pixels allows the screen to be more visible when exposed to bright light, according to Samsung.

Additionally, the text and image edges appear significantly crisper, while improving the contrast at the same time. The classic Amoled display is good enough as it is, and with the addition of these new improvements, Samsung clearly knows how to do one better on its rivals.

Technical

Time for technicalities. The smartphone makes use of a 1.2 GHz single-core Hummingbird CPU which is, quite frankly, capable of insanely high-speed calculations. The screen is an impressive 4.5 inch Super Amoled Plus display, while the smartphone includes a modest 8MP phone and a 1.2 MP camera for video-conferencing.

Android 2.2 is the operating system in question, the 2.3 Gingerbread is disappointingly not pre-installed, but the phone does make use of HSPA+ connectivity.

Beautiful look

The Infuse 4G also comes with built-in support for services such as Facebook, Twitter and Picasa, while 802.11b/g/n wi-fi connectivity is included and the MicroSD/MicroSDHC card slot allows for memory expansion.

The Infuse 4G seems to be another addition in the Galaxy S series of smartphones, meaning that the line is clearly here to stay. The design of the phone itself is pleasing to the eye, remaining super-thin although we are told that the beautiful textured matte rear cover is not yet the final product.

Samsung declined to announce a release date, but we can expect to see the phones reaching our stores sometime next month.

Photo: AT&T

AT&T’s iPad’s data was breached, leading to 114,000 email addresses being exposed, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s personal email addresses. Now, even the FBI is involved investigating the breach. Not only is this a PR nightmare for AT&T and Apple both, it raises some interesting questions about web privacy.

Broken telephone

An online security group called Goatse performed the hack. Unlike the perception most have of hackers, this group claim they did it for the protection of the American public – and in the interest of data protection. After discovering the exploit, they got word to AT&T through a third party, and then leaked the information to Gawker Media only after AT&T plugged the hole up. Gawker then broke the story and naturally, AT&T has reacted negatively to this revelation, the FBI has since gotten involved, as confirmed by Gawker writer Ryan Tate, himself, and the web is all a flutter about this news.

About privacy

Outside of the alarm iPad users would have had through the discovery of the data breach and their subsequent privacy breach, it raises a few critical questions. Goatse doesn’t only defend itself in a blog post, the company also asks a very important question relating to a data breach and privacy in general. With the FBI investigating this case, and AT&T and others accusing Goatse of acting irresponsibly by not approaching At&T first, many questions loom. Goatse asks the question better than we could ever paraphrase it (the bold is ours):

Photo: Apple

‘This disclosure needed to be made. iPad 3G users had the right to know that their email addresses were potentially public knowledge so they could take steps to mitigate the issue [like changing their email address… do you really think corporate privacy breaches should stay indefinitely secret? We don’t]. If you’re potentially on a list of exploit targets because someone has an iPad Safari vulnerability and they scraped you in a gigantic list of emails it is best that you are informed of that sooner than later [after you’ve been successfully exploited]. We did this to help you.’

And we tend to agree. Perhaps they should have told AT&T themselves and then leaked it to media. But to have a data breach or privacy breach of this proportion swept under the carpet does not sit easy with us.

How would you recommend this on-going development were handled?

Photo: Matthew Yohe / Wikimedia Commons

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the guest of honour at this year’s All Things Digital conference – D8 for short since it is the eighth such event – giving a lengthy interview with Walt Mossberg and then briefly taking questions from the audience thereafter. Given Apple’s recent history, it’s no surprise he had a few tasty soundbites on everything from Google Android, to AT&T and even Adobe Flash.

On Google and Android

Mossberg asked Jobs if he felt Eric Schmidt and Google entering the smartphone business was a form of betrayal to that relationship to which Jobs responded, ‘My sex life is pretty good’, drawing huge laughs from the crowd. Clearly Apple’s growing conflict with Google is a sore point for Steve Jobs who, one imagines, formed a very close relationship with Eric Schmidt while Schmidt was on the Apple board. Steve’s answer deflects the Google Android question somewhat, but we get the sentiment.

On AT&T

Photo: AT&T

Many have felt that AT&T and its struggling network were one of the only areas where the iPhone was not stellar in the US, to which Jobs gave two vastly differing opinions. He first acknowledged that ‘AT&T took a big leap’ for Apple in supporting them when it was unclear if Apple could crack into the smartphone market at all. But in answering an audience question regarding the inability to make calls, Jobs joked it gets worse before it gets better and, judging by the current situation, it should get a whole lot better soon. Stinging? You bet.

On Adobe Flash

When asked about Adobe Flash, Jobs responded by saying Apple has always been in favour of technologies on the up, implying Flash as a platform was not that. He said: ‘Flash looks like it had its day but it’s waning, and HTML5 looks like it’s coming up.’ People thought the omission of Flash in favour of HTML5 would hold Apple back, but Jobs pretty much squashed those fears, saying the company was selling an iPad every three seconds since the launch of device. Remarkable.

Circles, circles, circles

Photo: Apple

What came across in this interview with Mossberg was that Jobs and Apple try concern themselves as little as possible with what the competition do, and rather focus on making the best possible product. Apple is winning with the iPhone, but Google Android has clearly become a legitimate competitor. AT&T were a great enabler, but the time for bad service appears to be coming to an end. And the omission of Adobe Flash is clearly not slowing iPad sales. Like the strategy or not, to Jobs credit, this all seems very good for business.