Developer and blogger Darren Beckett rounds up a crop of five e-readers and gives them a short price and feature comparison with the newly released iPad—and rolled the results into an eye-friendly infographic.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

We may have our problems with the iPad, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in buying it. This comparison pits the iPad against other similar devices, highlighting price, screen size and type, storage, input, multi-tasking, multi-function, and connectivity. The chart’s not perfect (it only compares the bottom-of-the-barrel iPad, so when it says the connectivity is only Wi-Fi, keep in mind that more spendy iPads also have 3G), and it’s not as detailed as, say, this excellent comparison of the current crop of smartphones (which includes monthly fees for a true cost of ownership), but it still offers a nice overview of the market if the iPad’s piqued your interest.

Most e-reader enthusiasts would likely point to the iPad’s lack of e-ink as a pretty big red mark—and that because of that the iPad maybe isn’t something you’d even want to compare to an e-reader. But convergence devices like the iPad are certainly attractive when they can swallow the functionality of other devices (like e-readers) and offer a lot more at a similar price, so you can be sure that a lot of people interested in buying a Kindle will also be considering the iPad.

Give your thoughts on the matter—especially if you’ve got experience with any of the other readers listed—in the comments. (Note: The JooJoo is still an unreleased product but is, in theory, more like the iPad.)

Go to Original Source

Now that we’ve had some time to play with the Office 2010 Professional Beta, we thought we’d share what’s new and useful inside Microsoft’s big suite. Take a gander at the pictorial evidence below.

Overall, Office 2010 is not the kind of leap forward that Windows 7 was from Vista (or, for most PC upgraders, from XP). It adds a lot of stuff that’s previously been available only through plug-ins, makes performing the basic tasks of opening, printing, and sharing documents a good deal more convenient, and throws in a few new features that will expand the repertoire of those who really know their Office.

The free Office 2010 Professional Beta doesn’t include access to Office’s online component (ReadWriteWeb has taken a quick peek at them), and we’ll mostly be sticking to Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint components on this tour. OneNote fans, you’ll get your own peek soon enough! In the meantime, you can check out Microsoft’s own video preview (Silverlight is, unfortunately, required).

For even more Office 2010 preview, with those new-fangled moving pictures, head over to Office 2010 in Videos, helpfully compiled into one place from YouTube by Adam.

On to the photos. Click any of them for a bigger (usually much bigger) view

Office as a whole

Many of Office 2010’s best new features are present in every application across the suite.

In Windows 7, each app gets a taskbar integration that includes the very helpful “jump lists.” Outlook makes the most use of jump lists, offering message templates and common actions. Other apps can have frequently-accessed documents pinned to their taskbar icons.

Backstage View: Hit the left-most tab (”File,” usually) in any application, and you get the same sort of functionality as was available when you clicked the Office logo in Office 2007—just five times as helpful. The actions under each heading are broken up into clearly explained items with buttons that are easy to click—no more playing mouse cursor maze with sub-menus.

Under the “Share” tab is one of Office’s most helpful features, an option to save to a SkyDrive account. That account, if you’ll recall, offers 25GB of space in a nice web package. Saving to the SkyDrive does take a notable bit of time more than making a local save, and should be more automatic and integrated than hidden in the “Share” tab. Still, it’s a nice security blanket for very important files.

There’s also a “Publish as Blog Post” option in the “Backstage View” that works for most blogs that support remote publishing, although it’s not quite a polished setup.

More useful to most users will be the fairly polished and customizable print options:

Editing and pasting text and images: “Paste Preview” gives you options right as you hit Ctrl+V, rather than making you root through menus to fix the garbled text you’ve just dropped in. From a tiny cursor menu, you can choose to keep or strip formatting and images, and see how it looks instantly:

Once the text is entered, you can apply some neat effects to it while keeping it able to be edited, and similarly see your changes in real time.

Office 2010’s photo editing panel is much more powerful than its predecessors. A huge range of image effects can be instantly applied. Heck, if you want to give your images that Apple-like reflected-on-a-white-background look, that’s one click. Alignment, re-sizing, cropping, and other tools are no longer sidebar-type actions, but front and center as tools.

Got an image stuck in the middle of a wonky background? Office 2010 can pull it out—sometimes auto-magically, sometimes after asking you to help define where that image actually is.

In Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, there’s a built-in screenshot tool that can grab the screen behind the Office window you currently have open, or allow you to switch to the window you’re grabbing and then grab just a section of it. That’s a nice option for putting together presentations with break-neck deadlines.

Excel

This editor is not an Excel wizard. In fact, he may or may not still be struggling with a COUNTIF() function to mark how many times he took a GPS-tracked walk in October.

Still, the Sparklines feature is instantly recognizable as a really helpful little widget. It turns single cells into mini-charts, which automatically update to reflect changes to the data they’re tracking in whatever cells set you select:

Outlook

When you first start Outlook, you don’t have to steel yourself for an intensive session with IMAP servers and SSL port numbers. In most cases, you can just point Outlook at your email address and password, and—even with a Gmail account—the app just reaches out and hooks into your email. This didn’t work quite so well with our Google Apps-hosted Lifehacker mail, but likely would have worked fine with some manual configuration tweaks.

Here’s the big view of Outlook’s main screen:

Most intriguing of all is the inclusion of a “Quick Steps” toolbar. It’s a killer feature that already caught our eyes, and it allows you to perform one-click, multi-step automated actions on any message:

PowerPoint

The most eye-opening feature in PowerPoint 2010 is its broadcasting capabilities. At the moment, it only works with Microsoft’s own sharing service, but future plug-ins are promised for other screencasting services. Open the Slide Show tab, hit Broadcast Slide Show, and you’ll get a link you can IM, email, or otherwise pass onto anybody with a web browser, and they can see your slide show, slide by slide, as you move through it.

Your guests are, of course, prompted to install SilverLight for a “better” viewing experience, but, as we noted, other services will be integrated for future slide show sharing.

The “Smart Art” clip art isn’t exclusive to PowerPoint, but makes the most sense here, as it’s meant to help you organize your thoughts visually, rather than find cute illustrations of cowboys and smiley faces:

Streaming video embedding, once a semi-tricky prospect, is now as easy as embedding on a web page. Paste in the embed code you get from just about any Flash-based video site, and it’ll play in PowerPoint:

What’s your favorite feature from the Office 2010 beta? Share your finds, and paste screenshots, in the comments.

Go to Original Source

It’s not officially released, but a gallery-like site for extensions has made itself known into the latest development builds of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux. Take a peek at what’s coming, presumably very soon, in these development screenshots.

The Download Squad blog was the first to notice the new new thing in Chrome—namely, a jigsaw-like page corner in Chrome’s new tab page, next to a message at the bottom that reads “New! Chrome now has bookmark sync and extensions!”, with both the message and the corner piece linking to http://chrome.google.com/extensions

I saw the same link appear in the chrome://extensions page on my copy of Chromium, from a nightly build Ubuntu repository. Clicking that link, however, re-directs you to Google’s home page. But as many are guessing, Chrome/Chromium wouldn’t push out a new link to leave sitting dead for too long, so we’ll keep watching that page to see when a full-fledged gallery pops up.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler dove into Chromium’s Code Reviews section, and finds screenshots and discussions indicating that Chrome’s extensions will be able to add icons to Chrome’s top toolbar, inside the address bar, and in the bottom-right status bar, and that developers will also be allowed to customize items such as Chrome’s new tab page. Right out of the gate, developers are also indicating extensions from Google itself tied to its Maps, News, and a Gmail checker.

Exciting stuff, and even more so if many of Firefox’s developers take notice and bring over some of the same functionality that hardcore Mozilla users could never imagine leaving behind. Top and bottom photos from TechCrunch; new tab page image from Download Squad.

Go to Original Source