Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

The original nook was a great response to the Kindle. It runs Android has a few apps and got hopes really high that it would be the open device that would drive innovation in eBooks. One year went by, BN did nothing to help developers make apps, made new versions that annoyed the nook hacking community for a few months. There was no app store, no developer friendliness, nothing. Let’s hope the next software release that is coming in November is better. The nook is a great device for reading but organizing books on it sucks. For a device that can store thousands of books, that is a very crucial feature.

Yesterday’s Color Nook launch just proves the point that Barnes and Noble just doesn’t get it at all. Us readers don’t want a 7″ tablet, an underpowered one at that with poor battery life at that. There are already lots of those floating around (Archos 70, Cheapo Kmart tablet, Cheapo Walgreens Tablet). We don’t want an LCD based reader either  - see failed ones – Pandigital Novel, Sharper Image Reader -  because thats not a reader, thats just a crappy tablet.

What the Color Nook should have been is something like the upcoming Delta Vivitek  eReader, which has a color eInk screen. Or if they couldn’t manage a color eInk or Mirasol, at the minimum the device should have had a Pixel Qi 3Qi screen.

The current nook is a disappointment and the market has shown that with the lack of reaction to the announcement.

Disclosure: No positions in any stocks mentioned.

I’ve been following the Apple “Back to Mac” event live on blogs and news sites and just saw the new 11.6″  Macbook Air. It is a small notebook and starts at $999 – which is the price of the current lowest end Macbook. So it meets my definition of netbook – a small and light notebook that is available in the price range of a low end laptop.

I was disappointed that OS X Lion will come Summer 2011. That is a long way away. But the app store coming in 90 days is good news. If you’ve been following my Apple posts, I sold a third of my Apple stock when it reached $280 and I plan on selling another third at $375.

With the way Apple has been performing, I would say the stock is currently a buy but I’m uncomfortable with being so heavily invested in a single company. So I’m not adding to my Apple holdings anytime soon.

Bank of America recently acquired our mortgage from Everhome. We refinanced with Everhome in July from VHDA. Both VHDA and Everhome let me setup automatic recurring payments and they let me pay until the 15th of the month without any problems.

Here is the table of payment options from Bank of America:

	Mortgage Pay on the Web	Bill Pay	Transfers
Who it’s for	Anyone with a Bank of America mortgage	Bank of America mortgage customers with a Bank of America personal checking or savings account	Bank of America mortgage customers with a Bank of America personal checking or savings account
Fees per transaction	$0 – $6.00, depending on payment date (never a fee if paying from a Bank of America checking or savings account)	None	None
Payment cycle	One-time payments	Make both one-time and recurring payments	Make both one-time and recurring payments
Payment date(s)	Same day1, up to 30 days in advance	Set up same-day, future-dated or recurring payments	Set up same-day, future-dated or recurring payments
Pay From account	Checking or savings account at any financial institution	Bank of America checking or savings account	Bank of America checking or savings account
Payment flexibility	Must make at least the minimum payment due2 You can also add additional principal, escrow or other fees to your payment	Must make at least the minimum payment due2	Must make at least the minimum payment due2

If you notice the above table says that recurring payments are only available if you use a Bank of America checking account, which I do not have and have no intentions of opening another account to complicate my life.

Also to make matter worse, Bank of America does not let me schedule multiple payments at the same time. Since I have one pending payment now, I cannot schedule my next payment. I cannot also modify my current payment without cancelling it and rescheduling it.

The table also implies that there might be a fee for paying from your regular non-BOA checking account depending on your payment date. Here is the fee schedule:

If you are paying from an account at a bank other than Bank of America, this service is available at no charge when scheduling your payment to be deducted on available draft dates during the first 1/3 of your grace period or before. When scheduling your payment to be drafted during the second 1/3 of your grace period, you will be charged a $3.00 fee that will be included at the time of your deduction. For the last 1/3 of your grace period or after, you will be charged a $6.00 fee that will be included at the time of your deduction.

This is provided in a table when I try to schedule a payment:

So in short, Bank of America Mortgage Sucks. I don’t want a Bank of America checking account and I want to be able to pay on the 15th like I always have before and I want to be able to schedule these payments automatically like I always have.

Motorola just filed a very important, in my opinion, lawsuit against Apple premtively defending itself from Apple patents. I think this is the kind of lawsuit that needs to be filed agains most companies regularly to try and get as many patents invalidated as possible. The current patent scenario in the mobile world is beyond ridiculous and in most other industries it is getting there. A lot of mostly worthless patents are being awarded for software some of which are not only obvious to people in the industry but to anyone else who uses phones and software.

Apple is suing HTC, Nokia (Phone tech patents)
Nokia is  suing Apple (Phone tech patents), Qualcomm (Anti-competitive practices, phone tech patents), Hitachi, Toshiba, LG, Sharp (LCD price fixing)
Qualcomm is suing Nokia (Phone tech patents)
Motorola is suing Apple (Phone tech patents)
RIM is suing Motorola (Anti-competitive practices, phone tech patents)
Microsoft is suing Motorola (software patents) (also successfully collects licensing from HTC on Android phones too!)
ELAN is suing Apple (multitouch)
Kodak is suing Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Apple, RIM (patents related to images)
Sony-Ericsson is suing Kodak (patents related to images)
Oracle is suing Google (java patents)
HTC is suing Apple (phone tech patents)

Here is an image from Informationisbeautiful about this:

What does this mean for us. Nothing at all. We get to enjoy new phones which are probably a few cents or dollars more expensive than they should be because some money that should have been exchanging hands between these tech companies is now going to lawyers. So far amongst all the parties sued for something other than price fixing, Google is the only one who has not sued anybody else. Maybe they are really not evil? Maybe since a lot of these lawsuits are being brought against Android providing manufacturers, they should start trying to invalidate worthless patents.

Disclosusre: Long AAPL, GOOG