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Kobo Releases the Elipsa 2E to Rival the Kindle Scribe

Kobo’s second-generation Elipsa features a redesigned stylus and costs $399.

Kobo is improving the Elipsa, its flagship E Ink tablet. The Amazon Kindle rival launched the Kobo Elipsa 2E, the second generation of E Ink tablet that lets its users write directly on Kobo books, as well as PDFs and ePubs. The Kobo Elipsa 2E costs $399 and is available for preorder starting Wednesday and will be released on April 19.

The Elipsa 2E retains many of the features of its predecessor –such as its 10.3-inch E Ink display with adjustable warm and cool lights, as well as its 32GB of storage –but adds a redesigned stylus to improve the handwriting experience. The new stylus on the Elipsa 2E is also now rechargeable, comes with an eraser on the back and connects magnetically to the Elipsa 2E.

The original Elipsa will still be available and will also cost $399, though it will include both the stylus and a case. The case for the Elipsa 2E is sold separately for $70.

This news comes on the heels of the new Kobo Plus ebook subscription in the US, a rival to the all-in-one Kindle Unlimited subscription plan. 

While Kobo Plus offers an almost identical service to Kindle Unlimited, the Kobo Elipsa offers a feature that the Amazon Kindle Scribe lack: the ability to handwrite notes directly on the page of an ebook.

That’s because Kobo is currently the only company that lets its users write directly on all ebooks in the Kobo library. Elipsa owners can mark up any page of a Kobo book or library book just as if they were writing in the margins of their books at home. 

This is in stark contrast to Amazon’s treatment of its vast ebook library, where this practice is not allowed. Instead, users have to open a sticky note application to jot down their thoughts. The notes are aggregated in the Notes and Highlights section and do not appear on the page as you read. 

«We understand that, for many of our valued customers, reading is more than words on a page. It is about engaging with ideas. Marking up, highlighting, capturing inspiration in infinite notebooks of almost magical capability using a versatile, intuitively-designed stylus – these are essential for capturing the thoughts and ideas that reading inspires,» Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Rakuten Kobo, said in a press release on Wednesday.

While the original Elipsa was great for annotating books, its notebook functionality was limited. When comparing the top E Ink tablets, CNET found that the stylus experienced some lag when handwriting notes and we wished there were more note-taking templates. Kobo has yet to announce any additional notebook functionality, so we’ll have to wait to see if the new device addresses some of our initial complaints. 

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Bill Gates Has Published the Original Microsoft Source Code

It’s «the coolest code I’ve ever written,» the Microsoft co-founder says.

If you want to see the original source code that started Microsoft, Bill Gates is now sharing it. On Wednesday, the Microsoft co-founder posted it on his Gates Notes blog, reminiscing about the company’s early days for its 50th anniversary. Gates has written plenty of code in those five decades but he called this «the coolest code I’ve ever written.» 

Sharing a photo of himself holding a huge pile of paper showing the code, Gates wrote that he was inspired by the January 1975 copy of Popular Electronics magazine. The magazine had featured a cover photo of an Altair 8800, a groundbreaking personal computer created by a small company called MITS.

The 19-year-old Gates and his Harvard pal Paul Allen reached out to Altair’s creators and told them they had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on. Such software would let people program the Altair.

«There was just one problem,» Gates wrote. «We didn’t.»

Micro-Soft is born

Gates said he and friends «coded day and night for two months to create the software we said already existed.» Gates and Allen then presented the code to the president of MITS, who agreed to license the software. «Altair BASIC became the first product of our new company, which we decided to call Micro-Soft,» Gates wrote. «We later dropped the hyphen.»

And the rest, as they say, is software history. You can download that 50-year-old code from Gates’s post. «Computer programming has come a long way over the last 50 years, but I’m still super proud of how it turned out,» he wrote.

Read more: Best 16 Xbox Games Right Now

Melinda Gates: new book

Also making headlines this week was Gates’s former wife, Melinda French Gates, whose new book, The Next Day, comes out April 15. As that date approaches, she’s opening up about the end of her marriage to Gates.

The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years and three children. According to People magazine, Melinda French Gates wrote in the book that in 2019 she was «having nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing all around her — and then waking up in a panic night after night.»

She acknowledged what Bill Gates has publicly stated — that he wasn’t always faithful in the marriage — and said she was also disturbed by Gates’s meetings with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Gates has since said he regrets meeting Epstein.

Melinda French Gates said her bad dreams would eventually change into images of her family on the edge of a cliff where she «plummeted» into a void. «I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision — and that I was going to have to make it by myself,» she wrote, according to the People article.

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The Zelle App Has Shut Down. Here’s How You Can Still Send Money Digitally

The digital payment service has killed its free app, but many banks still support sending money with Zelle.

There are tons of digital payment apps for sending money to friends, family or for paying for services, but if you’ve been using the Zelle mobile app, you’ll need to find something new. The service decided to shutter its free app on April 1.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use Zelle altogether. Zelle has only discontinued its standalone app, so you can still send money using Zelle if your bank belongs to the Zelle network. You’ll just need to do it through your bank’s app or website. You also have other services to choose from. Here’s what you need to know about this change and your options moving forward.

TAX SOFTWARE DEALS OF THE WEEK

Deals are selected by the CNET Group commerce team, and may be unrelated to this article.

Why the Zelle app is shutting down

When Zelle launched in 2017, only about 60 US financial institutions offered the service by the end of that year. Today, that number exceeds 2,200. As a result, less than 2% of Zelle transactions occur through the standalone app. Zelle has been phasing out the ability to make transactions on its mobile app since October 2024.

«Today, the vast majority of people using Zelle to send money use it through their financial institution’s mobile app or online banking experience, and we believe this is the best place for Zelle transactions to occur,» Zelle said in an October 2024 press release

In December, Zelle was in the spotlight when the Consumer Financial Protected Bureau sued the company and three of the largest US banks for failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud on the peer-to-peer payment network. The lawsuit has since been dropped.

Other ways to send money digitally

You can still use Zelle through your bank’s app or website if it belongs to the Zelle network, which includes Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, TD Bank, PNC Bank and Citi.

You can also switch to another digital payment app, such as:

  • Apple Wallet
  • Cash App
  • PayPal
  • Venmo

Take some basic precautions when using Zelle or any other digital payment service. These apps are a frequent target for scammers, and Chase Bank has started blocking some Zelle payments it believes could be fraudulent. Only send money to people you know and trust, and watch for red flags like an urgent message claiming to be from your bank or an online ad for concert tickets that seem impossibly cheap.


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Nintendo Switch 2, Doom Previews and the Game Developers Conference | Obvious Skill Issue Ep. 1

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