The Dell offers a "sound bar" as an accessory that clips to special brackets at the bottom of the display, resulting in "built-in" sound for those who want it. But there's no cable integration for it; you have to use its own power wall-wart and a sound cable to the green socket on your computer. Older Dell monitors supplied power to the sound bar.
The glossy screen is stupid for a touch device. After an hour's use, mine is a gross-looking mess of finger smudges when turned off. And no, I wasn't eating a turkey leg while using it. They supply a wiping cloth. Great.
One drawback of these touch-screens is muscle fatigue. Arms get tired when they're held in position to write on - or gesture at - a vertical surface. This complaint sounds silly until you actually try it.
That said, I disagree with the reviewer about the value of multi-touch. For certain tasks, like dealing with photos, rotating and pinch-zooming are very natural. And touching on-screen buttons rather than mousing over to them just makes sense. The key to making this stuff work well is to choose the "large" option in W7; you lose some screen real estate but the touch controls become far more usable.
@John: There's nothing outmoded about "20th century" terminology such as lend and steal. Stealing something that the original owner still retains is nothing new; sneaking into a movie theater without paying is an example. "Lending" is the perfect description for what BN is offering, as the owner loses access during the loan period just like a real book.
Ebooks are an existential threat to the publishing industry. In the absence of physical manufacture and distribution what function do they perform? They just become meddlesome middlemen. They have every right to be paranoid; the end is near for them.
Interesting idea about sculpture, but the guy you're thinking of is Auguste Rodin. "Rodan" was a movie monster in a spinoff of Godzilla in the Fifties. The actual permanent market for traditional booksellers will be art books, antiquties, and fine bindings for collectors.
All this "should" stuff is silly. Where are these supposed rules written, and by whom? Should restaurants give you free bread and butter? Your experience says yes, so you would be upset if they charged for it, but if a restaurant wanted to charge, your recourse is simply not to eat there. Similarly, the producers of movies have a right to control them any way they want, as long as everyone understands the deal before putting their money down.
If all music becomes free, people will still make music. The same is not true of movies, which require huge capital investment. So cut these guys some slack.
The text of the article says Netflix will "push that premium higher by around 20 percent"; the premium, not the total price. So, they are clearly wrong, and should correct it to "...push the total monthly cost higher by around 20 percent".
After my first burst of outrage, I consider that - The $1 charge always seemed surprisingly low, and if they had started at the new rates I would have been satisfied - The argument about greater supply driving this, which sounds crazy, actually makes sense: It means that we are actually receiving a much higher percentage of Blu-ray disks than we did as early adopters, and so it's reasonable to pay more. - The era of physical media is at an end anyway, so who cares what they charge?
A pallet gets moved around by a forklift. A palette holds a painter's colors. A palate is at the roof of the mouth, and is the appropriate target of this misused metaphor.
I know these things because I want to be a paperback writer.
At their current stage of development, ebooks are a great value for people who both read a lot and travel a lot, and for whom the initial cash outlay for the device isn't a problem. Not everyone fits that description, but fortunately people who don't, or who prefer books printed on paper, are not required to buy one. It's hard for me to understand what's making some of them so angry.
Guys...it's great that you're excited about the Palm, but each of you needs to let the others finish a sentence before jumping all over it. It's totally impossible to listen to this broadcast and understand what you're trying to tell us. Take a breath!
My only real problem is navigating the Netflix site to find content for the box, a process I find totally confusing. I would like to see a checkbox called "Show only Instant content", and then have all the regular search and browsing features work exactly as they do for disks.
I would NOT want to have queue management on the box itself. One of the great joys of this device is its utter simplicity, which would be lost if more functionality were added.
Complaining about the lack of current movies seems pointless, unless you are willing to give up the free (at the margin) subscription. People won't make movies if no one pays for them.
"I love my little computing companion but I often find myself missing a full sized keyboard. I have been looking at several of these portable and flexible keyboards, but I can't seem to make up my mind about which I should buy. I don't want the keyboard to be overly expensive, but I want it to be good quality. Also, how difficult is it to type on these keyboards? Thanks!"
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