June 16th, 2009

So far Amazon.com’s Kindle digital book readers can be read on Apple’s iPhone and as Amazon’s own reader, but now the company expects to make the e-books available also on other gadgets, so in the future digital book reader will display more book formats beyond its own.

The company’s device team has the duty of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world, and is are going to give the team a competition. It will make Kindle books at the same price of US$9.99 which is also available on the gadgets like iPhone, and other mobile devices as well as other computing devices.

Currently, the latest Kindle digital book reader model has better support for Adobe’s PDF file format, but in the future Kindle digital book readers would support other formats as well.

It will be a rare achievement if Amazon can build two profitable businesses out of the Kindle. Using the iPod, to which it the Kindle is often compared, Apple mainly profits from the hardware. It says the iTunes store is barely better than break-even. In contrast, Cellphone companies  subsidize the sale of phones but profit from monthly service charges.

But Amazon does not want either books or readers to subsidize the other. Instead, the company considered selling the Kindle with a lower upfront price, but requiring a monthly subscription or minimum number of books purchased.

In short, the company did consider selling the Kindle with a lower upfront price, but requiring a monthly subscription or minimum number of books purchased.

Seiko Epson Corp said it has started to produce two high-temperature polysilicon (HTPS) TFT liquid crystal panels for 3LCD projectors, a 0.94-inch panel capable of WUXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) resolution and a 0.95-inch panel that supports WXGA (1280 x 800 pixels) resolution.

The panels support high brightness (5000lm or more) as a result of the higher aperture ratios achieved by Epson’s D7 process technology, while Epson’s C2 fine inorganic alignment layer technology is used to provide higher than ever contrast.

These panels provide the means to create versatile 3LCD projectors suitable for a wide range of uses and venues, most notably the projection of HD moving images on large screens in auditoriums and at events.

The WUXGA panel is claimed to be the world’s first panel to provide a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, supporting not only full-HD images (1920 x 1080 pixels) but also the higher resolutions required by special applications. The WXGA panel, which displays approximately 30% more information than an XGA panel, is compatible with output from increasingly popular widescreen PCs, as well as HD (1280 x 720) images from HD media players.

Apple has cut MacBook prices recently due to the recession-triggered price war today, though the company is traditionally known as a premium laptop computers manufacturer and the company itself has held its ground so far.

The company has cut hundreds of dollars off its MacBook models. The high-end, 15-inch MacBook Pros fell from US$2,000 to US$1,700 and the price of the unibody MacBook (now renamed the 13-inch MacBook Pro) tumbled from US$1,300 to US$1,200 but the price of Apple’s most inexpensive MacBook, the lone white model, has remained US$1,000.

But Apple has avoided making even deeper price cuts, thanks to the juicy profit margins already baked into its products, the availability of cheap components, and the fact that the company also makes money by selling apps and music to iPhone and iPod owners.

All of these factors mean that Apple has room to comfortably trim prices even further, if it deems it necessary. For instance, the company dropped the price of its now low-end smartphone, the iPhone 3G, to just US$100 with a two-year contract. But that cut doesn’t cost Apple as much as it might appear, given that the company still gets a carrier subsidy of several hundred dollars for each iPhone.

Apple’s laptop computers have historically been priced well above the average PC. However, Apple’s first quarter of 2009 market-share numbers suggest the company is struggling to compete as a premium brand name in the face of the economic recession.

In the first quarter of 2009, Apple’s U.S. laptop computers market share stumbled 0.4% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, and in worldwide laptop market share, the company saw 0.3% growth compared to the first quarter of 2008.