But let’s be real, it wasn’t always frenemies uniting. We all had some some damned hard days in the crucible of that kind of competition, as Wired touched on, and I know I certainly had my fair share of lapses in judgment (like a boycott Gizmodo site, which I let myself get talked into by a particularly hateful former writer). Of course, it went both ways, too. Gizmodo and a lot of other sites were pulling shenanigans day in and out, with the traded barbs pushing everyone harder, thinning out mistakes which could turn into ammunition. The results were obviously felt as gadget sites got better, faster, and more accurate, but it’s a little funny, because that stuff all seemed so very serious then. Looking at it now, the storied rivalry retired, it’s almost kind of cute.

There was a line to be drawn, too, and to me that line was where real damage could be done. In fact, this May that line drew itself right in my inbox when a disgruntled former Gizmodo editor pinged me offering a tidy bounty: the full “back catalog of classified Gizmodo emails, some discussing Engadget,” as well as “access to Gizmodo’s tips account [that'd be where you could get all of Gizmodo's scoops, or even turn over their tipsters to the companies they're leaking about]” and the “master list of Gizmodo online sources, which is a great aid.” Without hesitation, I turned this person (and any data that could be made use of) over to Brian and owner of Gizmodo / Gawker Media, Nick Denton, for them to deal with as they saw fit.

Of course, Engadget (for whom I still write and advise) and Gizmodo wage on, trying to out-scoop each other every day of the week. There’s no doubt in my mind that Brian was an adversary so worthy I had to make him an ally — but he’s also a good friend, and someone who knew exactly all the kinds of crap we pulled with each other. But I think ultimately we’ve both spent enough time doing this stuff to know that tearing things down won’t ever be as productive or positive as what comes next: where we unite and build.

It’s been a year since we hung up our mics at Engadget, but we’re finally back with our new gadget podcast, gdgt weekly! The first episode’s already up, so head over to gdgt to grab it / subscribe. Oh, there’s another bit, too.

We’re also announcing our first two advisors to gdgt, two good friends of mine: Josh Topolsky, editor of Engadget, and Brian Lam, editorial director of Gizmodo. Yeah, I know, just blew your mind: people from Engadget and Gizmodo collaborating on something. Together. Of course, the reality isn’t all that weird when you think about things.

It may not have shone through in the various articles trumping up the Engadget / Gizmodo rivalry, but believe it or not, Brian Lam and I are actually pals outside of work — have been for years. In fact, a side story neither of us ever told publicly was that I actually tried to hire Brian when he was on his way out of Wired, just before Gawker snagged him for Giz. I pitched hard, but in the end, as he put it recently, “It wouldn’t have been as much of a challenge.” Of course, he was totally right — he accepted the greater challenge and put Gizmodo back on the map.

Josh, of course, is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met — someone with a natural eye for content and gadget world, who I’m totally proud to have take over as Engadget’s editor in chief. So maybe it’s time to look at this space a little more holistically; or, as Brian said, get some Voltron action going on.

At the same time, Peter and I are also really looking forward to launching our new company. Having tackled the news thing, we’ve spent a long time dreaming about the kind of gadget site we might like to make next. So you can expect we’ll be hard at work behind the scenes hammering it out — more on that soon enough!

Without question, this has been the hardest decision I’ve ever made, but I know it’s the right one. And as much as I’m looking forward to new challenges (and grateful they’re not Motorola-related), I’m also really excited to see Engadget continue its evolution with Josh at the helm, and as part of the AOL Tech network (where I’ll continue to play an advisory role as editor-at-large). Pete and I are both pretty happy with how things worked out, and are definitely looking ahead. (You’re following us on Twitter, right?)

As much as wish I could, for the time being I really can’t talk very much about the details of the new company (which does not yet have a name). I’m pretty stoked though — promise, you’ll hear more soon.

What I will say — and it’s the same thing I told Mike earlier today — is that, as I enter my fifth year at Engadget, I’m still totally focused on it, our team, and living up to the enormous level of trust our readers place in us day in and out. (As I’m sure Veronica would tell you, I’m probably actually too focused.) I can also say that I had no idea until today that I owned 39+ domain names, but that’s pretty awesome.

This is Engadget when Apple launches a new iPhone. Any questions?

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by today to read our coverage of the iPhone 3G launch — it’s always an extraordinary amount of fun and a real honor to be the go-to place for big news in the gadget world.

And yes, I was fortunate enough to play with it and definitely can’t wait to really put the spurs to one.

Among other things, our long-standing editorial policy at Engadget strictly prohibits junkets — paid airfare and accommodations to visit a company and engage their staff — of any kind. Since the event is on behalf of a major trade show, what’s proposed is not technically a junket, and they do appear to be sensitive to editors’ need to steer clear. But there are aspects that certainly feel a bit like it is: CE companies make up the governing board of the trade show, and the offer is to pay my way to Spain to stay at a four-star resort for three days, as well as speaker’s fee (a few thousand) to be on a panel and “share my perspective on US trends” in consumer electronics. (The audience would be comprised of journalists and execs from tech companies participating in said trade show.) There are no expectations of coverage on Engadget, although there will likely be something there worth covering.

Some other big names in the space have apparently received and accepted the offer under what may be different terms. My take? I’m leaning on the side of passing — there might be too many red flags and too much ambiguity. What do you think?

On a personal note, I feel kind of bad for T-Mobile US on this whole thing. I’ve always had a really positive relationship with their teams and they’re the ones really feeling the blunt end of this reddish-purple-hued fiasco, certainly not their clueless parent company Deutsche Telekom, which initiated it. (And yes, there is a difference between T-Mo US and Deutsche Telekom, just like there’s a difference between Engadget, AOL, and Time Warner.)

P.S. -Not an April Fool’s joke. (Still!)

Anyhow, Saul Hansell wrote up a piece on the high-flying performance of Engadget and other blogs at AOL — the only problem is that he used Nielson numbers to back it up. For those not in the know, professional traffic metrics business like Nielson and Comscore (and to a lesser extent Alexa, Compete, etc.) make use of panels and cross-sections to estimate traffic and usage relative to the rest of the internet. Unfortunately these panel-based metrics are not only notoriously inaccurate, but they’re also frequently passed off as cold, hard numbers (as in the case of the NY Times piece, as well as a follow-up bit by Silicon Alley Reporter).

Just how far off are the numbers? As it turns out, somewhere in the range of 6x! In February of this year, over 12 million unique readers visited Engadget (not including RSS users or Engadget Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish), and in January it was over 14m. (January is always tech news’s biggest month of the year, thanks to CES and Macworld.) As usual, I’m not going to get into page views, RSS readers, and all the other methods of measurement, but the bottom line is that — specific numbers aside — in the last year and a half we did, in fact, add more readers than any time in our history, and we’re continuing on a rate of acceleration that tends to astound even me!

P.S. -And no, Saul did not get in touch to fact-check this story. He also did not update his post despite an email I sent providing him the more accurate numbers. Go figure!

Update: Saul got in touch, turns out he didn’t receive my email. His take on the numbers is in comments. Thanks for clarifying, Saul!

See also the 6,000th post and my 5,000 post milemarker. Ok, back to it!

In celebration of the holiday season Belkin has made a donation to One Laptop Per Child on your behalf. OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education.

I’m not sure how many press / analysts Belkin did this for, or whether this donation actually constitutes a small cash donation or actually sending a child an OLPC, but in the interest of full disclosure and gratitude: thanks, Belkin! We normally don’t accept gifts from companies, but I think I can skate by on this one.

Of course, it wasn’t all grins of pride. Despite a stellar CES performance and an equally stellar Macworld run-up, we had some major hiccups on the site today. Post-mortem on that coming ASAP — don’t worry, it’ll be the detailed-as-I-can-give kind which I’ll try not to vet with our lawyers first. It’s still nice to know that even despite having major outages throughout the busiest two hours of the entire year, we could best our closest competition on the order of millions of pages. (Not that pages are really any metric to go by anymore, but you know.)

Thanks again to everyone who stuck by us during the insanity today, and for dealing with our overly-obsessive wall to wall coverage over the past couple of weeks in general. But more than anything, I again have to thank the team, who make and re-make Engadget every single day of the week, rain or shine, uptime or downtime, without fail. Everything good about Engadget I owe to them, as does every reader of the site.

P.S. -Just for further blog-record-keeping of this crap, keep an eye out for appearances on TWiT, CNN.com, Xbox Insider (on the 360 Dashboard), G4, and Irish Newstalk Radio. (Am I missing any?)

Be sure to check us all in action tomorrow with our live coverage tomorrow from the Stevenote — not to be missed!

-Start-

By all accounts, between all the (HD)TV, bittorrented movies, blogs (ahem), and other media we consume today, we’re all spending fewer hours reading books and print than ever before. So why, then, is Amazon’s Kindle causing such a stir? Is the Kindle actually poised, as Jeff Bezos hopes, to take the humble book into the digital age? We can’t quite put our finger on it, but if Kindle’s launch feels at all to you like the act of reading has just turned a major corner, we’re on the same page. But things are still far from perfect. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading on the Kindle; click on for the review.

The hardware
We’ll save the Benjaminian critical-theory debate; we’re sure the classical critical theorists are already rolling in their graves — our degenerate culture has torn books from paper! We’ll be honest, we’ve no particular attachment to books-as-cultural artifacts, and have spent many a year waiting for the perfect e-book reader to come along. But any first generation product, especially those from a company that’s never made consumer electronics before, is bound to be fraught with issues. As many things as Amazon got right with its first piece of hardware, it seemed to get wrong — which bodes well for the “highly evolved” book.

If you’ve ever looked at an e-ink display before, you know what you’re in for. (If you haven’t, well, it does actually look a lot more like a piece of paper than any traditional display.) The Kindle uses the same 6-inch 600 x 800 e-ink Vizplex display as Sony’s latest reader, the PRS-505, although the devices are tuned slightly differently — the Kindle only has four shades of grayscale to the Sony’s eight. E-ink display can be tuned to refresh faster and have greater contrast with fewer shades of gray, but we didn’t notice much difference. Both devices have the same look of the slightly-grayish paper tone you’d find in your average paperback (although Sony’s display seemed a bit brighter); the text is dark and easily legible, although just like any book, without enough light you’ll strain your eyes. Yep, we’re already on hold for backlit e-ink.

While no one should be that surprised by the Kindle’s shape (since we did, after all, reveal Amazon’s plans for it way back in 2006), it wasn’t until launch that we got a good, long look at the thing. The iPod made white consumer electronics synonymous with friendly and fashionable, but the Kindle is at once symmetrical and amorphous, both angular and curved. Quite in fact, our biggest complaint with the hardware might be that the form factor is just simply too sculptural to be practical. The left edge of the Kindle is roughly twice as thick as the right, the screen slopes downward, then tapers off even thinner; the keyboard also slopes down at its own angle, as well. Hell, it’s ugly. There, we said it. Then again, an e-book reader doesn’t have to be beautiful. [Keep in mind, I wrote that stuff before Starck and the rest of the internets started bullying the thing for its ugliness. Still, it's true.]

To Amazon’s credit, the next / previous page buttons aren’t only the largest such buttons we’ve ever seen on an e-book reader, they may actually be the largest buttons we’ve ever seen on a device of this size, bar none. The next page button on the right is simply enormous, taking up 2/3rds of edge of the device. That’s really exciting in theory, but as we mentioned, that right edge tapers, making the next page button feel not only feel flimsy, but causing it to be triggered far too easily, especially if the book is resting on its side (should its owner be reading in bed, for example). The back button on the right side is also awkwardly placed, and doesn’t function as a previous page button. Amazon clearly over-thought the page forward / back buttons and went a little too far. You simply can’t grip the device (except but from the bottom, on the keyboard) without hitting a previous or next page button. Even with the screen locked it’s still horrendously irritating. Speaking of which, the screen locks after ten minutes without interaction. This is less to save power on the e-ink display (which only draws power during refreshes), and more because it’s impossible to pick the thing up without hitting a page forward/back button.

The scroll wheel is, however, by e-book interface standards, a work of art. Instead of those annoying static 0-9 buttons on the side or bottom of the display, the Kindle uses a dynamic negative white pneumatic-LCD to display a mirrored cursor of varying size which moves and rolls up and down the right side. (We would have traded the mirrored on white cursor for a white on black or black on white — but we’ll live.) The cursor interacts with text, menus, and serves as the primary tool of navigation. But there’s one thing you’ll inevitably catch yourself doing again and again: attempting to scroll through text. Of course, e-ink displays are far too slow to refresh to make computer-like scrolling feasible just yet (hence being stuck with next / previous page buttons). Hard to blame Amazon for that, but we have to wonder whether it would have been smarter to make the nav strip touch-sensitive instead of using the somewhat misleading wheel.

The keyboard is minimal and expertly done. The keys are very low-profile with exactly the right amount of clicky tactility, and have a playful, yet not at all distracting layout. There are few symbol keys, but no home-key ridges (which makes touch-typing is pretty much out of the question). While you won’t be using the keyboard too often, despite the surface space it consumes on the Kindle, you’ll be very glad it’s there. More on that in a minute.

The bottom and rear don’t feature much of interest: on the bottom, a 3.5mm jack for playing back music (MP3 and Audible) and a volume rocker, a USB port for accessing the 180MB user-accessible storage (yes, it also charges via USB!), a power jack, and a charge indicator; on the rear, a small speaker for playing back audio should you not have headphones plugged in, on / off switches for EV-DO and the device itself, and a rubberized back plate, which, when removed, reveals its user-replaceable 1530mAh battery and SD (not SDHC) slot. Under the hood of the Kindle is an Intel Xscale PXA255 400MHz CPU with 64MB of RAM running Linux 2.6.10. (Let the hacking begin.)

The system
Though e-book readers have been around in one form or another for years, as a device category they are still nascent, and to date Sony’s been the only company to put any real muscle behind their line. This, of course, means Amazon got to build its interface largely free from paradigms, which it did. Compared to the 0-9 hard button interface on the Sony Reader series, the Kindle’s penumatic-LCD scroll bar feels fresh and welcome. Menus aren’t by any means instant, but this is more to do with limitations of e-ink refresh rates, not the device or its snappiness.

Navigating the system is fairly simple: click on menu with the scroll wheel to access basic functions (go to Kindle store, go to cover, table of contents, add bookmark, add notes / marks, etc.); when reading, if you scroll up to a line and click it, the Kindle can display all the dictionary definitions of the words in that line (as well as add highlights and notes). The Kindle also has hard keys for commonly used nav, like a home key (to hit the home screen, duh), and possibly our favorite key, search, which displays entries not only from texts on your book (Kindle automatically indexes all the content it loads), it also gives quick links to search results in the dictionary, Wikipedia, on the web, and the Kindle store. As soon as you start using search you’ll realize what the killer e-book app really is. Any other future reader without built-in search simply won’t be taken seriously — if you want to talk about things that redefine the book reading experience, this is one of them.

Simple tasks like changing font sizes are extremely easy, but since an book that doesn’t have a fixed font size can’t use pages, it uses a series of dots on the bottom to display progress (which are also shown on the front display), and “locations” to display your exact spot in the book. Unfortunately, no one at Amazon could actually tell us what a “location” really is, besides a seemingly random sequential number on the bottom of the screen that doesn’t appear to correlate to anything in particular (like, say, paragraphs, sentences, lines, etc.). Bookmarking is automatic, but you can still easily dogear a page, as well as save lines or pages as text clippings. Removing content is also fairly easy — just hit the media manager, select what you’d like to move or remove, and you’re all set.

Whispernet: Fast service, decent prices, passable selection, but converting your texts to Kindle format is garbage and a cop-out instead of it just being able to read RTF, PDF, and other open document types. Also: the DRM is a bad joke and flies against the nature of books as mediums for sharing ideas.

Extra apps / easter eggs: Hooray! So. How long until they shut down the goodies that require internet access, like the browser, etc.?

One line wrap-up: A seriously flawed but totally original take on e-book readers — and our favorite to date.

-End-