A New Way To Explain Everything

Surfer-Physicist Offers A New Way To Explain Everything

Garrett Lisi is widely recognized as a thoughtful physicist. But unlike most, he has no longstanding university or research affiliation. He surfs. Snowboards in the winter. Scrapes together cash, and in between, has published a paper that outlines a new universal theory of everything.

Lisi's paper, published in pre-print form here, has won him instant buzz in the physics world, as well as popular attention unusual for such a mathematically abstract topic. He's convinced he has found what amounts to the field's Holy Grail: a way to explain all physical forces, including gravity, as different manifestations of the same underlying principle.

Physicists since Einstein have tackled this problem with substantial success -- but only up to a point. The ever-more-complicated string theory is one deeply abstract way of approaching the problem, which requires a universe with 11 dimensions to make mathematical sense.

Lisi's idea is based on an extraordinarily complicated geometric shape called E8, an eight-dimensional shape with 248 points – a pattern he thinks may describe the underlying geometry of the universe itself. The myriad of different particles and forces we perceive would then stem from this shape's weirdly symmetric geometry.

One of the most intriguing things about the theory is that it might be tested more easily than string theory in the powerful Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator that will start operating in Switzerland next year. It makes predictions of particles that no one has ever seen, but which might show up in the LHC's detectors, Lisi argues.

So stay tuned – if the surfer's theory turn out to be even partially descriptive of the world, a story to rival Einstein's will enter physics history.

Google Wants to Bid for 700MHz Wireless Spectrum

Reportedly, Google wants to bid for a serious chunk of wireless spectrum in the Federal Communications Commission auction coming up in January. The report, by Wall Street Journal, claims Google is prepared to bid on its own without any partners for a sum of up to $4.6 billion or higher.

Google would need to decide before a Dec. 3 FCC deadline for declaring intent to bid. "In the meantime, we are making all the necessary preparations to become an applicant to bid," said a Google spokesman to WSJ. "Our goal is to make sure that American consumers have more choices in an open and competitive wireless world," the spokesman added.

The FCC last month rejected again heavy pressure from those "wireless cartels" (described by former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Reed Hundt) and said it won't budge on the rules it announced for the 700 MHz spectrum. Specifically, the FCC requires winning bidders for a certain portion of the 700 MHz spectrum called the "C-block" open up their services to their customers' choice of equipment.

The auction, which was postponed by a week, is expected to raise at least $10 billion for the U.S. government from airwaves being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. The official date for the auction is now eight days later than previously announced, on January 24, 2008, reportedly as a small concession to companies deciding whether they still wanted to bid.

The open-access rules were adopted by the FCC at the suggestions brought by Frontline Wireless and Google.

Google already reportedly operates an experimental advanced wireless network at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, that could be used if it wins the spectrum and decides to become a national mobile carrier. The network, operated under a special license from the FCC, allegedly tests the newly announced Android platform.

A 'Super' Mario Game and a 'Modern' Classic

UPER MARIO GALAXY

The latest 3D Mario adventure doesn't look much better than Super Mario Sunshine, which came out eons ago on the obsolete Gamecube. There: that's the first and last bad thing we're going to say about Super Mario Galaxy. (Okay, at times, it also has the tendency to make you feel dizzy and give you wrist cramps, but these are positives because they're symptoms of Galaxy's innovative, Wii-enhanced game design.) Mario, you see, has to save Princess Peach — we gotta say: her constant need for rescue doesn't say much for female empowerment — and this time around, he has to fly from planet to planet and, later, from galaxy to galaxy in order to collect enough Power Stars to force a final showdown with Bowser, who's never met a damsel (or mustached plumber) he didn't want to distress.

Galaxy smoothly integrates the Wii's motion-controlled controller in ways that legitimately compliment the gameplay (instead of interfering with it, like so many other Wii titles). Mario can now do away with enemies by waving the Wii remote, which makes him spin around and stun them. You can also use the remote as a pointer to collect stardust flotsam and shoot it at Bowser's minions (another player can do the same by picking up a second Wii remote — not exactly co-op play, but better than nothing). Many Mario games have had a flea-circus sensibility, chock full of moving parts and obstacles, Galaxy expands on that tradition by introducing vertigo-inducing levels that can leave you hilariously disoriented. While circumnavigating a globe, for example, your viewpoint might flip rightside up when Mario crosses the equator — or it might not, causing you to move about ''upside down.'' And a wacky candy-themed world, features a series of moving platforms that alternatively rotate clockwise, counter-clockwise, left, and right — all at different speeds. Puzzles like these are tons of fun to navigate and despite its Wii-nnovations, Galaxy still feels like a classic Mario game, which is to say it is charming, brilliantly-conceived, and utterly capable of making you feel like a kid all over again.

CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE
Modern is the operative term in the latest chapter of the Call of Duty series, which up until now was known for its harrowing recreations of World War II battles. In their place: intense — dare we say FUBAR — combat scenarios that unravel in the present day, the kind that might've been ripped from a Tom Clancy novel. And no where is this updating more obvious than in the hardware: CoD4's high-tech weapons — sleek and lethal — are a far cry from the clunky MP40s and M1s from previous CoD games. Our new favorite: a devastating shoulder-fired guided missile called the Javelin that and can skewer a tank like a shish kebab.

Modern also describes the underlying technology behind CoD4's marvelous visuals, sound effects, and gameplay — simply put, this is one of the best-looking console games around. While the graphical environments are often startlingly realistic, the in-game sounds (like an incoming RPG that whizzes over your head), do an even better job at teasing your brain into thinking you're in the middle of a firefight. Just two examples of the intricate code-crunching happening under the hood are the "bullet penetration" system that will make you reconsider shielding yourself behind a rickety wood fence (bullets go right through it, but are stopped by harder objects like cement barriers) and the artificial intelligence guiding the movements of your fellow soldiers, who (unlike in most combat titles), can autonomously take out enemies without you having to bail them out all the time. CoD4's technology doesn't always triumph, however: M.I.A. is a cover system that enables you to hide behind a wall from an enemy's gunfire and then partially lurch out to return fire. A game this advanced should also have a co-op option that allows you to play through the campaign with a friend over the Internet. Most won't care about these faults because the single player experience and the elaborate online multiplayer modes are exceptional reminders that war is a lot less hell-like when played out on big-screen HDTVs in 5.1 surround sound.

Wii attracts gamers : Xbox Live hopes to press more players into service

Given the sales prowess of the Wii, you might think that the only haters left are people with paychecks stamped "Microsoft" or "Sony." After all, the console sales data for October just came out this week, and Americans bought 518,000 Wiis, compared with 366,000 Xbox 360 systems and a meager 121,000 PlayStation 3s.

Apart from September, when Halo 3 temporarily gave Microsoft the monthly console sales crown, it's been a Wii world almost since the console was released last year. So everyone and his grandma must be cheering the success of Nintendo's little white box, no?

Well, that "grandma" thing is what's causing the problems.

While Nintendo has insisted all along that it remains committed to the so-called hard-core gamer – and points to Wii versions of Metroid and Zelda as proof of that commitment – there's no doubt that casual gamers, lapsed gamers and never-been gamers are the biggest piece of the Wii's success.

In other words, the Wii is grandma's console, and she doesn't want to play Metroid. She wants the simple, colorful, partylike gaming fun of Wii Sports, Wii Play and Mario Party 8.

Which is why those titles have sold extremely well despite middling review scores, a point noted recently by Austin resident Bill Harris both on his personal game blog, Dubious Quality (dubious quality.blogspot.com), and on a guest post on Newsweek's Level Up blog.

So the rabid, longtime gamer who lives and breathes epic, 30-hour-plus games with complicated controls, sophisticated graphics and intricate storylines is looking at these collections of minigames and snorting in derision.

A lot of the comments on message boards from those gamers revolve around the issue of whether the Wii is a fad destined to fade in a year or so as casual gamers get bored and move on to something else and hard-core gamers become ascendant again.

I don't think that's going to happen.

The sales numbers for the Wii are just too huge, and I still get more questions about the Wii from my co-workers who don't play games than questions about the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined.

But I do think the game market is splitting. With all the success it's enjoying with the Wii, Nintendo is never going to go back to relying on the hard-core crowd.

The company's next console (at least five or six years away, I'd bet) likely won't be much more than a souped-up version of the Wii, probably with support for HD graphics and maybe slightly more accurate motion sensitivity.

Sony and Microsoft, on the other hand, seem more intent on battling for the hard-core gamers who prefer to see alien brains splattered all over the floor than teaching fluffy puppies to jump and heel.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. If the market is big enough to cater to every type of gamer, that's only good news.

If you want your ultra-high-def, shoot-anything-that-moves thrill, Microsoft and Sony will be there. And if you want to train your brain in minutes a day, Nintendo will be there.

It's not the good old days, which a lot of gamers seem to miss.

It's the good new days, which everyone should be able to enjoy.


XBOX
Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off Xbox Live, its online game service, in 2002 with ambitions of one day seeing millions of players compete online.

Today, more than 8 million people -- about 1 in 5 Xbox and Xbox 360 console owners -- subscribe. Many pay $50 a year for a souped-up version of the service, giving Microsoft a steady revenue stream as it seeks to post its first annual profit in the video games division after investing more than $6 billion in the business since it launched the Xbox in 2000.

Those subscribers have logged 3.2 billion hours playing games on the service, equivalent to more than 365,296 years of alien-zapping, grenade-tossing and general time-wasting. Lately, they've also rented movies and bought TV shows such as "South Park." In December, players also will be able to download games such as "Halo," "Psychonauts" and "Fable," which were previously available only as boxed discs.

Microsoft has made some progress in broadening Xbox Live's appeal beyond young males. About a quarter of its players are female, up from 10% in 2002.

Microsoft wasn't the first to introduce online gaming on the console. Sega of America had offered Internet-connected players the ability to chat and find opponents through its Dreamcast console in the late 1990s before pulling the plug on its hardware business in 2000. But the Redmond, Wash., software giant can claim to be the most successful at it so far.

Sony Corp., Microsoft's arch nemesis, isn't sitting still. Its PlayStation Network has more than 3 million subscribers, and the Japanese company plans to substantially boost that number next year when it unveils a sleek online look called Home, a graphically rich virtual world that lets players create realistic avatars, hang out with friends, watch movies and play games.

Robbie Bach, the 45-year-old president of the division that runs Microsoft's games and music business, talked with the Los Angeles Times before the five-year anniversary of Xbox Live.



When Microsoft introduced the Xbox, some saw it as a Trojan horse, a gateway into consumer's living rooms for other forms of digital entertainment such as movies and music. How has that panned out?

The irony of this is that it wasn't the way we thought about things back then. When we were starting with Xbox in 2000, the team was very focused on producing a great gaming experience. When Xbox Live became more successful than we ever planned, it opened a lot of new opportunities. We realized we had something bigger than games. If it's a Trojan horse, it's with hindsight, not foresight.



How has Microsoft expanded the reach of Xbox Live?

In a number of different ways. Demographically, when we started, you would say that it was a place for serious gamers. That has changed a lot in the last five years. It's now become a great place for casual gamers. When one of your leading games is Uno, you realize you've reached a new type of customer. Secondly, it's expanded from being a gaming service to . . . an entertainment service with a social network. We have now expanded into the world of movies and TV shows. It's become a much broader place for people to experience entertainment.



When will Microsoft sell music on Xbox Live?

We have a broad long-term vision for connected entertainment across all platforms. That includes music, video, television and gaming. You're going to see pieces of that roll out over time. We're not ready to talk about the specifics.

For now, we're focused on aggressively pushing the music scenario on Zune [Microsoft's portable digital music player].



Are you worried that Sony's revamp of its PlayStation Network will eat into your lead?

It's fair to say that Xbox Live is clearly head and shoulders above anything anyone else has tried to do. We don't have competition. Sony has done some things online, but nothing that can be called a service. We have a big advantage and we're going to keep pressing that advantage.

We have a very strong, very powerful computer network that provides the backbone for our service. We have game demos that can be downloaded, video downloads and game downloads. It's a broad cross section of consumer services. Perhaps the most important thing we have is over 8 million passionate members who create and define what Xbox Live is. It's a tough thing to create, and we're going to continue to nurture it.



What's Microsoft doing to cut down on the smack talk and rude behavior of players on the service?

When we started Xbox Live, we thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could play with someone halfway around the world?" In reality, most people on Live like to play with friends they already know offline. For families with younger children, my advice is that you want to match them up with people they know, whether it's family or friends at school.

As far as policing bad behavior, we have a reporting system. And we follow up on those reports. We have banned people from the service. We also have sky marshals who play on the service. It is a social community. There's no silver bullet, no magic to that. It just takes hard work. By and large, the community polices itself.



What's next for Xbox Live?

We're introducing some parental control features such as the Family Timer that lets parents assign how many hours their kids can play on the Xbox 360. And we'll be introducing some new downloadable content. When you look longer term, there are places where we can expand the social spaces and the content that people have access to. There are new aspects of how people interact with each other that we want to explore.

AMD lets Spider platform out for holiday season

AMD has unveiled its new platform codenamed “Spider”, with quad-core processor supporting scalable graphics. The AMD Spider platform combines the introduction of AMD Phenom quad-core processors, ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series graphics processors with Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support, AMD 7-Series chipsets with CrossFireX and AMD OverDrive software.
AMD on Monday announced its "Spider" platform centered on the Phenom quad-core processor, the desktop follow-on to the "Barcelona" Opteron server chip. The Phenom, like the Barcelona before it, will initially be available at clock speeds lower than expected. In this case at a top speed of 2.3 GHz. The Phenom line had been expected to initially achieve 2.4 GHz (or even 2.6 GHz according to some reports). Some resellers are showing availability for the 2.3-GHz part but long lead times for the 2.4-GHz version. Phenom 9600 (2.3-GHz) and 9500 (2.2-GHz) processors are available "now" for $283 and $251 respectively in 1,000-unit pricing, AMD said. The Phenom-based Spider platform integrates the ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series graphics processors--introduced last week--and AMD 7-Series chipsets. One of the platform's salient features is support for multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) based on AMD-ATI CrossFireX technology. "Running four graphics boards in one system...could be a nightmare for a system builder to get all those graphics cards proper airflow...[But] AMD has made massive multi-GPU performance easy to build, and affordable," said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest, a high-performance PC supplier. The Phenom, like Barcelona, uses an integrated memory controller designed to support memory speeds up to DDR2 1066, 128-bit floating point units, and a shared L3 cache. AMD said it surveyed consumer and commercial users to measure power consumption and found that AMD Phenom processors with Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 technology rated at 95 watts TDP (Thermal Design Power) can consume an average power of 32W for consumers and 29W for commercial users. Other features include support for split power plane motherboard designs and the ability to set independent core frequencies. The AMD 7-Series chipsets are designed using 65-nanometer (nm) process technology, bettering standard chipset process technology that is typically based on older 90nm processes. Initial testing: PC World said the Phenom-based configuration they tested used two HD 3850 graphics cards, an MSI motherboard based on the 790FX chipset, and 2GB of DDR2-1066 RAM. "AMD's test system scored a 105 on PC WorldBench 6 beta 2, which is significantly faster than...[a system with a] 3-GHz Athlon 64 X2 6000+, though not nearly the 32 percent gain touted by AMD. That's an impressive boost over AMD's previous CPUs, but it's nowhere near enough to make Intel sweat.
With a fresh cash infusion of between $550 million and $700 million from Abu Dhabi’s Mubdala Development, AMD is rolling out its “Spider Platform,” which includes the new Phenom processors (desktop versions of the quad-core Barcelona), HD3800 series graphics (rolled out last week) and the new 790 chip set.
With this platform approach AMD hopes to have a hot holiday season with PCs for gaming and entertainment, delivering HD, multimedia content in a more quiet, energy efficient and less costly system than the typical ultra-gamer boxes, according to Patrick Moorhead, AMD vice president of marketing. “People want to bridge the gap between gaming and the PC with HD,” he said. The platform supports enhanced HDMI connectivity with integrated HDCP and audio for HDMI video.

Rick Bergman, general manager of AMD’s graphics group, said a key to the platfrom is the CrossFireX capabilities, which supports up to four graphic cards on a single system and up to eight displays. A “Fusion” chip that integrates a CPU and GPU on a single die is slated for the end of 2008 or early 2009.

The Spider platform turns a PC into a real-time 3D rendering machine. “It begins to bridge the gap to final film quality with real-time graphics,” Jules Urbach of Otoy told me. He was demoing his software, which does cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser, on the Spider platform during AMD’s press tour. “Eventually we will see films rendered in real-time and they won’t look any different [from films that require hours per frame to render].”

AMD’s new Overdrive console (below) give users lots of control of the system, with overclocking of the CPU, memory and chip set as well as voltage and memory tuning. It also features a novice mode for the uninitiated and autoclocking mode that improves system performance based on trial and error. “It the first time this much control has been available from a hardware company,” said Phil.Eisler, senior vice president and general manager, Chipset and Notebook Business Unit at AMD.

The combination of elements in the Spider platform could add up to solid win for AMD in one of its core markets and provide validation of its ATI acquisition. Now that OEMs are bringing Spider systems to market we’ll see if the price/performance claims hold up and whether enthusiast buyers open their wallets.

Russian space agency Sunday launched a telecommunications satellite into orbit

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Russia launches telecom satellite

The Russian space agency Sunday launched a telecommunications satellite into orbit from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.

A Proton-M carrier rocket launched the Sirius 4 Ku/Ka-band satellite, which has a 15-year service life and carries 54 active transponders covering Europe and Africa, RIA Novosti reported.

"At the designated time (10:53 a.m. Moscow time), the foreign spacecraft separated from the Briz-M booster, went into orbit and control of it has been transferred to the customer," the Russian space agency Roskosmos said.

The launch followed the lifting of a ban imposed by Kazakhstan following a Sept. 6 crash of another Proton-M rocket.
The Baikonur space center is the oldest and largest operational space center and leased by the Kazakh government to Russia until 2050.

Iran commissions Russia to build telecom satellite
Iran has signed a deal with a Russian firm to build a telecommunications satellite at an estimated cost of $132 million, newspapers said on Monday. The Zohreh (Venus) satellite, scheduled to be launched within 30 months, will improve radio and television coverage, assist communications in remote areas of the country and enhance Internet service, the Sharq newspaper said. “Russia’s Avia Export Company will build the satellite,” the newspaper quoted Communications and Communication Technology Minister Ahmad Motamedi as saying. Specific details of the satellite were not disclosed and the paper did not say where the satellite would be launched from

Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off Xbox Live, its online game service

Xbox Live hopes to press more players into service


Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off Xbox Live, its online game service, in 2002 with ambitions of one day seeing millions of players compete online.

Today, more than 8 million people -- about 1 in 5 Xbox and Xbox 360 console owners -- subscribe. Many pay $50 a year for a souped-up version of the service, giving Microsoft a steady revenue stream as it seeks to post its first annual profit in the video games division after investing more than $6 billion in the business since it launched the Xbox in 2000.

Those subscribers have logged 3.2 billion hours playing games on the service, equivalent to more than 365,296 years of alien-zapping, grenade-tossing and general time-wasting. Lately, they've also rented movies and bought TV shows such as "South Park." In December, players also will be able to download games such as "Halo," "Psychonauts" and "Fable," which were previously available only as boxed discs.

Microsoft has made some progress in broadening Xbox Live's appeal beyond young males. About a quarter of its players are female, up from 10% in 2002.

Microsoft wasn't the first to introduce online gaming on the console. Sega of America had offered Internet-connected players the ability to chat and find opponents through its Dreamcast console in the late 1990s before pulling the plug on its hardware business in 2000. But the Redmond, Wash., software giant can claim to be the most successful at it so far.

Sony Corp., Microsoft's arch nemesis, isn't sitting still. Its PlayStation Network has more than 3 million subscribers, and the Japanese company plans to substantially boost that number next year when it unveils a sleek online look called Home, a graphically rich virtual world that lets players create realistic avatars, hang out with friends, watch movies and play games.

Robbie Bach, the 45-year-old president of the division that runs Microsoft's games and music business, talked with the Los Angeles Times before the five-year anniversary of Xbox Live.



When Microsoft introduced the Xbox, some saw it as a Trojan horse, a gateway into consumer's living rooms for other forms of digital entertainment such as movies and music. How has that panned out?

The irony of this is that it wasn't the way we thought about things back then. When we were starting with Xbox in 2000, the team was very focused on producing a great gaming experience. When Xbox Live became more successful than we ever planned, it opened a lot of new opportunities. We realized we had something bigger than games. If it's a Trojan horse, it's with hindsight, not foresight.


How has Microsoft expanded the reach of Xbox Live?
In a number of different ways. Demographically, when we started, you would say that it was a place for serious gamers. That has changed a lot in the last five years. It's now become a great place for casual gamers. When one of your leading games is Uno, you realize you've reached a new type of customer. Secondly, it's expanded from being a gaming service to . . . an entertainment service with a social network. We have now expanded into the world of movies and TV shows. It's become a much broader place for people to experience entertainment.


When will Microsoft sell music on Xbox Live?

We have a broad long-term vision for connected entertainment across all platforms. That includes music, video, television and gaming. You're going to see pieces of that roll out over time. We're not ready to talk about the specifics.

For now, we're focused on aggressively pushing the music scenario on Zune [Microsoft's portable digital music player].


Are you worried that Sony's revamp of its PlayStation Network will eat into your lead?
It's fair to say that Xbox Live is clearly head and shoulders above anything anyone else has tried to do. We don't have competition. Sony has done some things online, but nothing that can be called a service. We have a big advantage and we're going to keep pressing that advantage.

We have a very strong, very powerful computer network that provides the backbone for our service. We have game demos that can be downloaded, video downloads and game downloads. It's a broad cross section of consumer services. Perhaps the most important thing we have is over 8 million passionate members who create and define what Xbox Live is. It's a tough thing to create, and we're going to continue to nurture it.


What's Microsoft doing to cut down on the smack talk and rude behavior of players on the service?
When we started Xbox Live, we thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could play with someone halfway around the world?" In reality, most people on Live like to play with friends they already know offline. For families with younger children, my advice is that you want to match them up with people they know, whether it's family or friends at school.

As far as policing bad behavior, we have a reporting system. And we follow up on those reports. We have banned people from the service. We also have sky marshals who play on the service. It is a social community. There's no silver bullet, no magic to that. It just takes hard work. By and large, the community polices itself.


What's next for Xbox Live?

We're introducing some parental control features such as the Family Timer that lets parents assign how many hours their kids can play on the Xbox 360. And we'll be introducing some new downloadable content. When you look longer term, there are places where we can expand the social spaces and the content that people have access to. There are new aspects of how people interact with each other that we want to explore.

iPhone vs. e-books

Amidst all this hype about iPhone, isn’t it curious that none that of the technology reporters have mentioned using iPhone as a portable reading device?

I realize there’s no external memory, and that it’s so far a closed platform for application developers. But Apple is selling it as a kind of net-enabled tablet for reading. It won’t be long before early adopters tire of using the Edge network to turn a page.

Kindle Versus The iPhoneChief Executive Jeff Bezos has created a reason to switch from bound paper books to bits — a device with a wireless connection able to download digital books on the go. The problem: Low-cost laptops and smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone, coupled with a rich array of online content, may have already made Bezos’ $399 device obsolete.

In a breathless cover story in Monday’s Newsweek, Steven Levy profiles the device, which is the latest attempt to take the book industry into the digital age. Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), Matsushita Electric Industrial (nyse: MC - news - people ), Hitachi (nyse: HIT - news - people ) and Fujitsu are all trying to crack the market. Yet each has had only limited success. Now Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) will try with a device coupled with a wireless service, dubbed Whispernet, which will allow users to buy best sellers for $9.99, and older books for just a few bucks. Expect more details from Amazon later Monday.

Reinventing the book is a big challenge, but Amazon has been on a roll. Its shares are up 99% so far this year. Analysts say that’s in part thanks to Bezos’ success adding digital content, such as movies and music, to the mix alongside electronics and paper books. Kindle promises to build on that success.

The device has some real advantages over other electronic gizmos. To mimic the readability of a paper book, Kindle uses a system dubbed E Ink, developed by E Ink Corp., that is used in other electronic books, such as Sony’s Reader. Another edge: Newsweek reports the device will get 30 hours of reading out of a single charge. By contrast, the iPhone’s battery can sustain just six hours of Internet use.

Yet those advantages, plus the Kindle’s ability to tap into content from Amazon, coupled with its wireless connection, may not be enough to make it a winner. At $399 it’s not only pricier than a small library of used books, it’s more expensive than Asustek’s 2-pound, $299 Eee PC laptop. Another catch: Amazon, according to Newsweek, is going to charge subscription fees for blogs, magazines and newspapers. Yet most magazines and newspapers — and practically every blog — can be had online for free.

There are also big questions about the device’s wireless connection. The device will tap into fresh content via an EV-DO (Evolution-Data Only) wireless network. Will there be a monthly subscription fee? How much of the Web will users be able to surf? Newsweek’s Levy was able to download a copy of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House from Amazon for $1.99, but anyone with full Web access can get the same title from Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Book Search for free.

The ability to grab free books online points to the device’s real competition: not paper books but Internet-friendly laptops, tablet computers and smart phones. The amount of content available online is growing fast, and devices for accessing the Net are getting better and cheaper quickly. One such device is already here. It’s called the iPhone.

And Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs has a not-so-secret weapon when it comes time to load up the iPhone with content: Google. The search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sits on Apple’s board of directors. And Google has already fused online services such as maps, e-mail and its YouTube video service with the iPhone.

Google’s Book Search project has already pumped much of the world’s printed matter into Google’s servers. Downloads of classic titles, such as Bleak House, can already be had for free. Mix Apple’s iTunes content distribution smarts with Google’s vast storehouse of content, and you’ll have an instant competitor to Kindle — one with a touch interface and the ability to play movies and music, too.