TomcatA smart mouse, the flesh-and-blood kind with a bin Laden-level talent for evading capture, has been scurrying and squeaking in the innermost sanctum of the TeleBlog.

Dear readers, what are your extermination tips, beyond the obvious wisdom? We’ve been using Tomcat traps—sleek, black and ineffectual. The instructions say no cheese; the traps instead use supposedly mouse-tasty glue. Carly and I may resort to cheese and perhaps less modern traps. Is the mouse Disney’s revenge for the TeleBlog’s grumblings against copyright-term extension? Help! Will Tomcats at least work on Capitol Hill?

Of Sony and mousetraps

E-book customers can be as hard to catch the TeleMouse, but could Sony have actually devised A Better Mousetrap in the Sony Reader.

I’m no fan, at least not with the price tag still at $350; Sony wouldn’t even subject the machine to The Carly Test. But an AP interview with CEO Sir Howard Stringer says: “U.S. sales of the Sony Reader, an electronic book reader, is also doing better than the company expected, Stringer said. Sales of downloadable e-books are exceeding the sales of music on Sony’s online Connect Store.”

Hmm. Does this mean disastrous music sales and just slightly better e-book sales? Or success? The year 2006 was nasty to Sony, so here’s hoping that it will do better, ideally aided by a less proprietary approach for the Reader.

New Reader on the way: Will the Osborne Effect kick in?

Meanwhile AP also reports: “A new Reader model, likely adding wireless capability, will likely appear within the year as new rivals, namely Amazon.com, are expected to enter the market, he said.” OK. But will this kill sales of the existing reader? Will the Osborne effect—a sales slump when a new model is revealed—kick in?

iPhone fuss

As for all the fuss over the Apple iPhone, I’ll be most interested in seeing how Apple addresses the e-book issue, there or in other products. Will Apple do an e-book format that can run on everything from a phone to a desktop with a 28-inch monitor? Remember those earlier rumors about Apple working with publishers to do an iPod of e-books? I wonder what Sony will do to compete against the real iPodders. And what effect could Apple’s prices have on Sony’s? Not to mention the issue of content-providers’ power vs. that of tech companies. Will Apple diminish the influence of the publishing conglomerates? Or maybe expand it, with special agreements for Random House and the like? Finally, and perhaps most importantly as Bill Janssen would see it, we know that the iPhone will be able to read e-books files posted on the Web. Will this be a setback for the download approach?

Related: Wikipedia entry on the iPhone.

(AP item trapped by our friends at MobileRead.)

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Here’s David Pogue’s take on the iPhone’s Web browser:

    The Web browsing experience is incredible. You see the entire Web page on the iPhone’s screen. You double-tap any spot to zoom in. Or you use the two-fingered spread-apart gesture to “stretch” the image larger, or pinch your thumb and forefinger on the glass to zoom out again. The manipulation is seamless, smoothly animated—and useful. Using Google Maps to get you driving directions and maps, for example, is just light-years simpler and more powerful than on any other machine, thanks to this “rubber Web page” stretching technology.

    time.com, on the other hand, puts it this way:

    The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

    Sounds like it might be what the Nokia N770 or the PepperPad could have been.

  3. I helped someone get rid of an invasion of mice in their house by attaching a piece of dog food onto the traps (I used thread, but you can also use super glue.) It eliminated the problem–that, and patching up the hole in the laundry room wall where they gained entrance! After you catch your invader you’ll need to figure out how he got in!

  4. When mice roamed my appartment, I tried traps first. Did not work. So I called in a exterminator who placed small boxes with poison around the house. That worked, but as a result the mice would come out and die in the middle of the floor, right in front of me, while coughing up blood.

  5. In watching the keynote this morning, I’m wondering if the next major hardware innovation from Apple is going to be the long-rumored tablet.

    The multitouch interface would be great for navigating through a book, IMHO, and it seems like now that they have the GUI already built for the iPhone, it’s a logical step to make a larger form piece of hardware like a tablet.

    Since it’s all gesture based, you could maximize the screen space, and still keep the physical size of the thing small enough to easily manage and carry around.

    I, for one, am crossing my fingers.

  7. So far the n800 looks more attractive to me than the iPhone as a browser and reading device.
    While the iPhone’s interface is snazzy and in some ways (pinching and zooming) innovative, you still have to hold a device. The Nokia’s larger width, with a perimeter where fingers can rest without covering content, and dedicated buttons suggest a better ergonomic experience.

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