So Samsung decided to release its second Android phone in Russia. But news can never remain buried on the Internet. So we know that it is called the Galaxy Spica. This is the same phone that the rumors were calling the Galaxy 17500 Lite. Spica is the official name.

The press release says a lot of things, as usual. You know it has Android and that it runs on an 800MHz processor. But what it does not tell you is what version of Android it will ship with when it does. My guess is Android 2.0, because the release seems imminent. [read]

Then we have the T-Mobile Project Dark plans. After a long line of rumors, spy shots and leaked marketing material, the carrier finally unveiled its twin plans. And they are right on time too because their timeline was already leaked by the rumors.

So what are the plans like? Look above. There’s the $79 Even More Plus and there’s the $99 Even More. Those are the maxed out prices. They start from $49 and $59 respectively. The first one has no annual contract and the second one has a 2-year contract. [read]

Nokia in the meantime has brought out ‘Illuvial Special edition’ phones in Europe. These are normal Nokia phones with floral prints on the back, purple backlighting and purple/pink graphics in the UI. I still think of this tech industry practice of feminizing products as highly patronizing. Plus, companies tend to charge more for these frills. Et tu Nokia? [read]

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The app store is growing rapidly and is now over 85,000 apps. Ever since the $99 iPhones became available, everyone’s been buying an iPhone. And everyone who can is making an app and sending it in. Even the American stock exchange has its own app now.

Yes sir, NASDAQ has an app in the App store. It lets you check stocks and see live activity, which are quite obvious. What is not obvious though is the fact that it shows you live tweets about various stocks from StockTweet. Now that’s something extra that is worth having. Plus the App is very well-designed. [read]

Next up we have a remote app for …get this – starting your car. That’s right folks, now you can start your car from practically anywhere with a free iPhone app. The catch? You have to buy a kit for your car for this to work and Best Buy has the exclusive retail deal on it. You have two models available. One is for $299 (for cars that have the initial system built in) and the other for $499 (for the complete system). [iTunes link]

The next one is only half new because it was already launched in the US last year. Amazon has released their iPhone shopping app in the UK. This app lets you buy from Amazon through your iPhone. It connects you to your account and also allows you to use features like one-click ordering, etc. [read]

Another Amazon app is coming soon though. I am talking about the Kindle app that is headed for us in November. [read]

So I guess these two halves make one, except that you can only buy one half right now. But the US half is already available. So that makes one too. Okay, enough with the halves.

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Amazon recently started exporting the Kindle to other countries, so I bought one. Amazon struggled to negotiate deals with European carriers, which was one reason why the Kindle was not already available to the European market, so instead, the Kindle roams from the AT&T network.

The features are fairly similar to those available to American customers. One can subscribe to and download newspapers, magazines and buy and and download books. One can’t, however, download the images inside the newspapers and magazines, browse the Web or subscribe to blogs. This is all down through a mobile internet connection, either 3G/GPRS.

The 3G coverage in my house is somewhat intermittent, although I still think it is just about tolerable. I find a 2G signal perfectly reasonable for downloading a book or browsing the Kindle store. I initially thought it strange that the Kindle lacks WiFi, unlike many of its competitors, but I have since realised that WiFi is unneeded.

As the mobile internet coverage is included in the purchase price of the Kindle, Amazon prevent users from browsing the web on it outside the US due to the high costs they would face. This would prove annoying to some users, although I imagine web browsing on the Kindle would prove clumsy, due to fact it’s black and white.

The Kindle can also play MP3s, so audiobooks, music and podcasts can be placed on it. I believe that you need to connect the Kindle to a computer to transfer them onto it. For books, magazines and newspapers, no computer is needed. Files can be coverted into Kindle format by emailing it to an address that will automatically send them to the Kindle (at 0.99USD/MB), by using a free Kindle email conversion service and transferring the files via USB, or by using software like Calibre. The Kindle handles the Mobipocket format, so you can get free public domain books from websites like Feedbooks and transfer them on.

The battery life is very good, due to the way text is displayed. E Ink, which the Kindle employs, has extremely low energy consumption. If you turn the wireless off, it can keep going for weeks without being charged. Charging takes a couple of hours, although the charger supplied is a US socket. It does charge via USB so this isn’t an issue.

It has a couple of other nice touches, too. One can annotate texts, have them read aloud via a text-to-speech feature (although this doesn’t work very well) and has a very attractive standby screen which rotates between different images of different writers and writing-related objects.

The International Kindle costs $260, plus postage and import tax. Altogether, mine cost around $340. This is equivalent to about £210 or €225; roughly the same as its competitors. The mobile internet is a big selling point which many competitors lack. They are only purchasable from Amazon.com, so any discounts or vouchers you may have for other Amazon sites won’t work. Also, books are only available from Amazon.com, so you pay notice the absence of the work of your country’s authors. I hope that eventually we will be able to relink our Kindles to our own national Amazon sites, although there is no certainty (or even indication) that Amazon will permit this.

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The customers who have bought the books did receive a refund but were left puzzled and confused. Anyone who thought that ebooks with DRM were just like book purchases might now realize that they are not at all as Amazon and the publishers seem to have the power to remove books at any time from the user’s possession. Amazon responded to user questions with the following paragraph:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Amazon states that is is unlikely to happen again. What users do need to realize is that it can happen at anytime. That’s a huge difference to books or other media that are purchased in stores. Once you bought it it is yours and no publisher or company in the world will come to your house to get the book back and give you a refund. Customers thinking about purchasing a kindle or any other electronic device that is making use of DRM should start thinking about viable alternatives that come without DRM. It’s better for them, their children and our future.

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Feedbooks is providing a similar service. The only difference is that they -only- convert the RSS Feed of a website into a pdf document that can be downloaded without costs from their website. The whole process is as simple as it can get, paste a feed into the form, hit submit and download the pdf document at the end.

Feedbook provides A4 pdf downloads, Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad (whatever that is) and custom documents. I was not able to explore the custom option further because one has to signup to create those.

Feedbooks provides a button that webmasters can embed on their website. I have not tried it yet but I guess it would be possible to use one of the many feed combination services to combine many feeds into one and paste that url into Feedbooks to create a huge pdf document from multiple feeds.

Feedbooks offers more than just this RSS to PDF service. Users can download e-books as well that can be sorted in various ways. I encountered some error messages from time to time when I tried to convert some feeds.

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