reading

Lenovo, which reported first-quarter earnings in Hong Kong on Thursday, discussed its upcoming strategy for Ultrabooks--ultraslim, light Windows laptops that compete with the MacBook Air.

During the earnings conference call on Thursday, Chief Operating Officer Rory Read spoke about Lenovo's Ultrabook strategy in response to a question from an analyst. "Lenovo will invest in innovation to be a leader in that space and that will drive demand. No doubt," he said, referring to the Intel-based laptops.

Read continued. "You'll see us introduce over the coming quarters the ability to reach mainstream price points with [Ultrabook] … Read more

Interesting. A few weeks ago, Barnes & Noble starting selling refurbished Nook Color e-readers for $199. Not long after, I started seeing them as low as $179.99 from outlets like 1 Sale A Day. (Incidentally, I ordered one from there; it arrived in about three days, and in mint condition.)

Now, Buy.com has the refurbished Nook Color for $169 shipped. But here's the interesting part: they're selling them on behalf of B&N. Which makes me think something's up.

I have a couple guesses. First, B&N knows a competing color Kindle product … Read more

In order to hang onto those articles you want to read but might forget about later, you need to keep some sort of list. Magazinify offers the ability to keep tabs on the things you want to read, and even send them to your e-mail inbox all in one PDF. With this service, you can read content in your browser, on your PC, or even transfer it to an eReader. Best of all, it'll be in magazine format, but only feature stories you actually want to read! Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Head to&… Read more

Google Books for Android offers an awesome way to sync your books across multiple devices, and even your computer. What can be easily overlooked is the fact that most of your reading material is only available while you're online. So if you want to read while you're traveling (or just looking to save some battery by turning off your data connection) it's a good idea to make sure the next books on your reading list are downloaded to your tablet. Here's how:

Step 1: Open the Google Books app and find a title you'd … Read more

As a kid, we couldn't wait to get our hands on the comic section of the Sunday paper. These days, we get our comic fix by perusing comics on the Web. Comic Reader supposedly offers a one-stop shop for keeping up with all of your favorite comic strips, and while it did offer an impressive list to choose from, it failed to launch any of the comics we selected.

The program's user interface is pretty bland. A gray box appears with buttons for each comic, which are alphabetized. Using the Next and Previous buttons at the bottom of … Read more

Quick housekeeping note: I'm on vacation this week. It'll be a few days before my next post.

As CNET's David Carnoy reported last week, Amazon just dropped the price of the refurbished Wi-Fi Kindle to $99.99. And if you want the 3G model, you can snatch it up for just $129.99. These are the non-ad-supported versions, FYI.

Pretty nice deal, right? They may be refurbs, but they carry the same one-year warranty as new Kindles.

But speaking of "new Kindles," it's a poorly kept secret that Amazon will soon unveil one--maybe two. … Read more

Yesterday, we reported that Apple had finally cracked down on iOS e-reading apps, enforcing its new in-app subscription rules that require app developers to strip out any links to external mechanisms for purchasing digital books or subscriptions. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo all altered their apps to reflect the rules change, removing any links or mentions of their respective company Websites.

Now Kobo is first out of the gate to announce that it's prepping an HTML5 Web app that will be accessible through Safari on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, and will provide improved functionality even beyond … Read more

Learning the basics of music is easier than you'd think with Music Reading DeLuxe. This free educational software uses a simple gamelike process to teach "absolute beginners" how to recognize and read music. To use it, your computer must have a sound card or sound capability and either Windows XP, Vista, or 7.

Music Reading DeLuxe took over our desktop with its interface and disabled our mouse within its view, too, which are necessary steps for classroom use. We could mouse over to the Windows toolbar, though, and access other system functions normally, and exiting the program … Read more

The Internet is the Best Thing Ever for news junkies, and RSS feeds help make it that way. Pmcc's News Messenger is a free news reader that reads not only Atom and RSS pages but also HTML, so it can read headlines from sites that don't support syndication. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or higher.

We extracted and saved News Messenger's program file, which immediately scanned for updated headlines when we opened it. The program displays headlines and brief summaries as well as time stamps in a narrow vertical column that can be configured to … Read more