Re: future of the Amazon Kindle

--- In [email protected], Bill Janssen wrote:

> The key question is whether they can actually close 
> the deal with the consumer without making the Kindle 
> a full-fledged Web tablet.

Yes - a key point. One can see the Eee as a much greater threat to 
the Kindle than the Sony reader ever will be.

On that note - check http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/over-past-six-
months-or-so-asus-everex_24.html to see a growing list of small form 
factor, light weight devices. These are all computers, but some of 
them cut below Kindle's price point.

Battery life is the current problem with almost all of them. For 
devices like these, though, there is a killer component now shipping 
than could make this group into Kindle-killers in a heartbeat - the 
OLPC screen. The OLPC screen lets you operate in a high-contrast 
greyscale WITHOUT the backlight. I expect that right now, a huge 
chunk of battery budget is powering the backlight on the small PCs.
(See http://www.grc.com/pda/palmpower.htm for a technical discussion 
of small device battery, processor and screen power handling - 
prompted by the authors desire to read SF ebooks.)

With that power drain gone, it becomes worthwhile to run the 
processor in ultra-slow power sipping modes. And if you design your 
OS to handle that, you can get into some serious power savings and 
run-time increases. I estimate that these two changes alone could 
allow run times to climb to about 25 hours.

That's still not the "thousands of page turns" of e-ink, but it's 
enough to make a dramatic improvement in the ebook reading 
experience.


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