Fly Or Die: The BlackBerry Playbook Vs. The Color Nook

Tablets and electronic book readers are on a collision course. In this episode of Fly or Die , ChrunchGear editor John Biggs and I discuss the pros and cons of the new BlackBerry Playbook and the Color Nook from Barnes & Noble. The PlayBook is fast and a solid effort from our much-beleaguered Canadian friends. But is it too little, too late?

If you are a BackBerry user and want a tablet that syncs to your phone, this could be for you. (In the video, Biggs keeps saying Android, but he means BlackBerry—too many Four Lokos before the taping). I actually like the PlayBook better than most Android tablets. But if it’s incredible apps that you want, the PlayBook’s choices are still pretty limited.

The Color Nook is a different story. It’s primary purpose is as a digital book reader and it’s main competition is the Kindle. But it is also a fully functioning color Android tablet. And just recently it added support for Android apps. So you can read books—including animated ones for your kids—browse the Web, and check out apps like Pulse and Pandora. Not bad for $250. Watch the video above to find out more, and check out past episodes here.

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Add a Blogroll to Blogger

Blogger in Draft (a pre-release version of Blogger) added an interesting widget that lets you display the latest posts from your favorite blogs. It's an enhanced blogroll that displays the recently updated blogs and snippets from the most recent posts.

You can manually add the blogs by entering their URLs or you can select from your Google Reader subscriptions. To add the widget to a Blogger blog, you need to go to Blogger in Draft, click on the Layout section corresponding to the blog and add the "Blog List" page element. You can't add the widget for blogs that still use the classic templates, like this blog.

Google Reader already lets you create a blogroll from any public tag, but Blogger's widget is more customizable.



In other Blogger-related news, the comment page make it more obvious that you can sign in using an OpenID and Blogger enabled pagination for posts with more than 200 comments.

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Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.


Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.

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