April 18th, 2009

If your are an Amazon customer, you’d better not return any  product you have bought to the book-shopping site, because it may brick your kindle. A recent posting on an Internet forum dedicated to e-books brings a significant issue to light and then Amazon threatened MobileRead with legal action for merely linking to software.

Someone who is a loyal Amazon.com customer for many years, one day received an email which stated that he has been banned from the site and my account has been closed, because he apparently has an extraordinary rate of requesting refunds due to a variety of factors.

The customer said that this is patently not true, because he  has only returned items that were defective, in complete accordance with their policies. He was not trying to game the system and not trying to get things for free but he only wanted products that worked properly - so if they did not, they had to be returned.

He  has kept thousands of dollars worth of items purchased from Amazon and planned to be a lifelong customer, so the ban from the main site is bad (and inexplicable) enough, but he has now discovered that he cannot manage my Kindle2 account and he  can’t log into Amazon or purchase any new content.

In effect, the customer said that now he has a $359 brick, not covered under any warranty, not able to be used the way it was meant to be, not able to be returned.

A quick search on the topic showed that many people over the last few years have been banned from Amazon, receiving the same e-mail almost verbatim. Although this is a little disheartening, there are plenty of places on the Internet that already cover the topic. What made this user’s tale stand out was the fact that he was also a Kindle owner.

As you may already know, Amazon’s digital book reader, the Kindle (and newer Kindle 2) is linked to the owner’s Amazon account where the inventory of purchased books is managed. In addition, although there are a few other sources, it is primarily the only way to buy books for the device. When this user’s Amazon account was closed, he also lost access to all the books he had purchased, as well as the ability to shop for new material.

This situation brings the bigger picture of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the forefront. When you purchase any form of media from a company, do they have the right to deny you access in the future (presuming it was not purchased on a subscription basis)? The above mentioned user ended up with a $360 device that was totally worthless to him. He couldn’t even access books he had already paid for.

Via: Engadget.

Kyocera has introduced a EOS folding concept phone that incorporates a flexible OLED screen and  changes its form factor from a clamshell into something more closely resembling a wallet or clutch-purse.

Kyocera’s industrial designer Susan McKinney said the concept envisions a future where we have a more humanistic relationship with our phones.

She said the shape memory allows keys to morph up from its surface when needed and fade away when not in use. The flexibility of the screen allows for greater adaptability of form and interaction, and maintains a compact shape (the size of a small wallet) for simple phone calls, and unfolds to reveal a large widescreen display, she said.

Via: Core77. photo courtesy of Jeffrey Sass.

US President Barack Obama said the government will seek to develop high-speed rail nationally, considering that the country’s infrastructure investment and transportation alternative have been ignored and dismissed by previous administrations but long embraced by Asia and Europe.

Obama said the first steps of this ambitious initiative will tap $8 billion in newly available economic stimulus money through 2012, and his high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way of travelling in America.

He said further that the funds will go to states for upgrading existing passenger rail lines and laying the groundwork for high-speed projects, 10 of which are in various stages of planning in California, the Gulf Coast and other regions.

National passenger railroad, Amtrak, which is financially supported by the government, also hopes to tap into the stimulus money to improve its heavily traveled line between Boston-New York and Washington.

Amtrak has experienced a boon in ridership recently and new political footing after nearly a decade of confrontation with the Bush administration, which once sought to dismantle its operations.

Source: Reuters. Via: Inhabitat.