Amazon's Kindle to be sold through Walmart

During my time in the States, the average shopper I encountered in Walmart was not your tech savvy geek. For those who have never had the honour of stepping foot in a Walmart, it is like the love child of The Warehouse, Mitre 10, Countdown and The $2 shop. Anything your heart desires is available in Walmart, for ridiculously low prices.

I'm a massive fan of the Amazon Kindle, having bought one for my partner at Christmas. I see the success of this Walmart-Amazon deal being with how stupidly simple the Kindle is.

The Kindle is small, light and does one thing and does it very well - its e-paper allows you to read books. No flashy graphics, no backlit screen, no having to charge it every night (supposedly the Kindle has a month's battery life) - it really is the perfect device for a book worm.

So Amazon has started with a great product the closely emulates a physical book (eg no eye strain), without having the bulkiness of a thick novel. Good start.

Their next trick is delivery of books to the device. I opted for the WiFi+3G model. I login to Amazon, search for the book I want, purchase it (for far less than a physical book, plus no high postage to NZ) and within minutes it's on the Kindle. Regardless of where you are in the world, Whispernet (Amazon's automagical delivery network, powered by AT&T) gets it from Amazon to the Kindle (or you can do it via WiFi just as easily). Since this is all setup before you receive the Kindle, there's no having to find a NZ sim card, making sure it has credit etc. Amazon do it all for you. Not having to plug the Kindle into a computer to get books is also great.

Two nights ago I was reading a blog post about a book called The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. It's a complete history of Facebook and some of the financial, technical and social hurdless they have had to overcome. From the time I read about the book, to actually reading the book on the Kindle was about 5 minutes, advice. I'm just about finished this book as I can't put it down (I read one book every two years, I'm not a big reader), and would probably not have bought it had I needed to drive to a physical book store, or waited two weeks for it to arrive by courier.

The Kindle really is an amazing device, I highly recommend it. I should buy one for mum for Mother's Day, but I'm cheap, so she'll have to settle for some flowers instead.

Latest and greatest from Panasonic

Last Tuesday I was invited to the Panasonic Roadshow at the Langham Hotel in Auckland. I was part of a small group of seven people, from the main media outlets, able to preview all the new technology coming out from Panasonic. That evening (they had already held one the previous evening), 400 retailers would be shown what we were seeing - the benefit for us is we could take our time looking at everything, while not being told how to sell it to our customers.

The tour lasted for about 45 minutes and a lot info was covered. We got to see Panasonic's 3D offering (which I have already seen and raved about), their new plasma and LCD LED TVs, a LCD screen running 3D graphics natively from a Nvidia graphics card (must have for gamers, and I must convince my better half that I need one), cameras and camcorders, plus offerings in HiFi, DVD and Blu-ray players.

There was so much covered, so there is only a brief summary below. If you're keen to get more info, this post really doesn't do any of the Panasonic products any justice - drop into your local tech retailer and try them for yourselves.

• Plasmas/LCDs
• Improved the front glass panel to minimise light entering in - this means scenes of pitch black are much sharper
• Impressive 178 degree viewing angle (you reading this Samsung?!)
• Has the ability to convert 2D movies into 3D (we watched Sherlock Holmes, not as impressive as a "native" 3D movie, but very cool technology) - the Blu-ray player can also do this
• Better sound (personally I would stick to having a stereo system and not relying solely on the screen)
• DLNA / Wi-Fi enabled
• Ability to record TV to a SD memory card or a external USB hard-drive (plus pause live TV)
• Digital cameras
• Water proof up to 12m (with a dive case this can be extended up to 40m)
• Only compact camera with GPS, a compass, an altimeter and a barometer
• Has optical image stabiliser where other brand only have digital stabilisers.