The Guardian has a review of the oddly named Txtr beagle e-reader. See if you can spot the minor snag.

the Berlin-based firm behind it, announced plans to sell the device for just £8 (yes, really) – that’s £61 less than the current entry-level Kindle.

Not sure how they’ll manage that price-point, but OK. This could potentially open ebooks up to loads of people.

Its plastic moulded body feels surprisingly solid in the hand.

So it doesn’t feel awful, despite being really cheap. Sounds good.

The screen is a 5in eight-level greyscale E-Ink display with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. That compares with the entry-level Kindle’s 6in 16-level greyscale E-Ink display [with a higher PPI than the Kindle]

This really is sounding too good to be true. Man, I hope this idea doesn’t somehow slam headlong into a wall.

[It’s] more than 20% lighter than the Kindle.

Cheaper. Brighter. Sharper. Blimey.

The beagle offers 4GB of internal sold-state storage.

Like the Kindle!

The Kindle beats the beagle because although both support digital book formats (ePub for the beagle, AZW for the Kindle) and PDF documents, the beagle stores and displays ebooks and PDFs as highly rendered bitmaps – it’s essentially a bitmap viewer.

Like the— Hang on. What?

 the beagle stores and displays ebooks and PDFs as highly rendered bitmaps

I. Um. OK.

Unlike the Kindle […] the beagle doesn’t have a built-in battery. Instead it is powered by two AAA batteries housed along the rear of the device.

*SLAMMING INTO WALL ALERT KLAXON*

The beagle eschews many of the features the Kindle has, such as Wi-Fi and optional 3G, or a wired connection of any kind. But the lack of connectivity options are why txtr costs so little.

No connectivity. So… how do you get books on to the thing? Magic beans? Psychic powers?

every beagle requires the user to have a smartphone, whether an iPhone, Android, or Windows 8 phone. The beagle’s only connection to the outside world (or other devices) is via Bluetooth. Book management, transfer, and even setting the font size is done through the free txtr app on your smartphone. According to the company, this leaves the beagle to do what it does best: displaying words for you to read.

*SLAMMED INTO WALL ALERT KLAXON*

So, someone’s created a device that’s cheap, light and has a great screen, which could be hugely disruptive, but in order to use this cheap, light device, you need to already own an altogether hugely more expensive device. And not only do you need said device to fire over books (in bitmap form, meaning you can’t fit nearly as many on the device as you could if it accepted text documents), but you even need it to change the font size. This is mental.

Still, at least there’s not another catch, right?

The txtr beagle can be offered at such a low price because its cost will be subsidised by mobile carriers. The beagle itself won’t be sold individually; you’ll only be able to get one is by purchasing it when you sign up for a mobile phone contract on specific carriers.

*SLAMMED INTO WALL, REVERSED AND SLAMMED INTO WALL AGAIN KLAXON*

Oh my. This is a patent by Microsoft that enables content distribution regulation by viewing users. What does that mean in plain English? Well, as Kotaku Australia noted:

Basically, when you buy or rent something like a movie, you’ll only be granted a “license” for a certain number of people to watch it. If Kinect detects more people in the room than you had a licence for, it can stop the movie, and even charge you extra.

Just when you thought downloadable media rights restrictions couldn’t get any worse or more stupid, here comes another patent to prove us wrong. Next: a patent that will listen for anyone in the room whistling their favourite pop song and then demand performance royalties or repeatedly punch them in the face with an ‘iFist’.

Microsoft head honcho Steve Ballmer’s recently come in for some flak, due to saying some slightly odd things about the current state of technology. In a video on CNBC, he uttered:

I don’t think anybody has done a product that is the product that I see customers wanting. You can go through the products from all those guys … and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point. (Transcription: AllThingsD.)

Despite Ballmer setting the BWUH? level to 11, I let this slide. On Twitter, I simply pointed out that no-one really admits when their rivals are doing well, as evidenced somewhat by Apple’s oddly defensive ‘attack’ on the Nexus tablet during its recent keynote. But a Wall Street Journo piece today makes me wonder if Ballmer has his own Microsoft intranet, on which he can only visit the websites MicrosoftIsReallyFuckingGreat.com and MicrosoftNewsStevieWantsToHearGodammit.net:

In every category Apple competes, it’s the low-volume player, except in tablets.

In every category apart from tablets? So presumably smartphones are tablets? And music players are tablets? Still, Microsoft might have become the high-volume player in screaming bullshit, if Ballmer keeps this up.

Hat tip: The Loop.

John C. Dvorak, for ITProPortal.com:

Just imagine the scene if Apple had projected “$179” onto the screen during its announcement (and priced the UK model at £149). Apple stock would have rocketed

Yup. Right until the next financial quarterly results came in, showcasing how Apple’s profits had plummeted, at which point the stock would have followed suit.

Perhaps Apple has misjudged the market. Maybe the iPad mini won’t sell that well. If that’s the case, there’s nothing to stop Apple adjusting its price-point later. But people have in the past argued against Apple’s pricing decisions regarding mobile products, and yet all the devices have flown off the shelves. It’d be a brave or stupid tech hack that would bet utterly against that happening this time round.

PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy has an interesting piece up about long-form online content. The short of it is that readers seemingly flock to longer pieces online, and they have a greater shelf-life, too. The problem: industry conditions (i.e. churn-oriented writing) have ‘trained’ newcomers to prioritise speed over quality. Editors are therefore finding it increasingly tough to find new talent, and tend to use freelancers they already know well; additionally, newcomers aren’t being trained in how to write and research.

This more or less matches what I’ve heard from editors, but Lacy leaves out some important points. First, money is almost glossed over in her article, and that’s the main thing that’s impacted on quality writing. I’ve been writing professionally since the late 1990s, and in all that time magazine rates have only risen in a few cases; more often, rates have dropped or ‘transferred’ over to internet rates that are lower than print ones for essentially the same content. This situation forces even seasoned writers to speed up, or to work extra hours and reduce their quality of life.

Secondly, there’s the issue of a support network. Although I pride myself on rigorously editing and proofing copy before I file it (something that, I’m told, is surprisingly not ubiquitous among freelancers), I’m overjoyed when my work is filtered through the lens of a great sub-editor. There’s always a slight jolt on reading something and thinking “that’s not what I wrote”, and then a warm glow when I realise what the sub’s created is better. Usually, the changes are subtle, but when subbing is done well I hugely appreciate it. But subbing costs money, and support networks have in recent years been obliterated, especially online. In part, speed is to blame: getting things online quickly has been more important than accuracy or finely honed writing. But also there’s the problem that good subs cost money and are wrongly often considered unimportant in the scheme of things.

Thirdly, some writers don’t realise that long-form writing isn’t about churning out thousands of words. Every sentence—if possible, every word—should matter. If something’s superfluous, get rid of it. That doesn’t mean removing character from writing (humorous asides, for example, can be wonderful when used sparingly and with care), but nonetheless recognising when it wouldn’t be detrimental if a paragraph or two happened to be removed. So often, I read long-form articles online that could have easily been written in a third of the space. There’s a lack of discipline evident in the industry, and although that in part comes from the things Lacy mentions—an emphasis on speed; a lack of mentoring—it’s also down to a lack of money and a reduction in the support network for writers. Until all of these things change, I don’t see a rosy future for widespread long-form writing online, only for those publications and writers already making a good job of it.