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Tuesday February 10, 2009
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Perhaps I posted too soon. Moments after I spent a few paragraphs lamenting the lack of a color screen on the new Kindle, our editor-in-chief sent me a link to a news piece about Fujitsu's new ebook reader. The new reader features a much larger screen--about the size of a standard screen. Better still, the thing's in color.
The device is based on Fujitsu's FLEPia technology, utilizing wireless data management. The reader is a skinny 12-mm thick and features Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, an SD slot, speakers, Windows CE5, 50 hours of battery life, and a touchscreen instead of a keyboard.
This device seems to trump the Kindle 2 in every way, except for one key point: price. The Fujitsu e-reader will run you around $900, which make the Kindle's steep $360 price tag look like chump change. Looks like I won't be reading comics on it any time soon.
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February 12, 2009 2:15 PM
At a glance, Kindle 2 looks better than predecessor By Edward C. Baig,USA TODAY
h ttp://tophit.exteen.com
September 27, 2009 6:16 AM
Look, folks.
In front of me is a little ASUS eee PC 'notebook' computer, for which I paid £225. That's for a standard computer from off the counter in the store, with Windoze and all the gear.
On its screen is an e-book, wholly in colour, and wholly pictorial (appropriately, in view of your article above, it's indeed a comic-book) called NERVOUS SYSTEM, by Andy Roberts. As I say, it's wholly in colour -- which means, ordinary PC screen-type colour. It even contains animation.
At around 150 pages, it occupies a little over 1 megagbyte in total including its own, built-in reading software. It got onto the ASUS from a diskette -- remember those? It's nicely readable, in exactly the same brightness and contrast, etc, as any other PC screen.
I have twenty similar ebooks on the ASUS. All of them are in colour, and a pleasure to read.
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Why, in the nine billion holy names of god, would I want to spend a thousand dollars on a piece of kit like the FLEPia, which is a fairly nice -- but not brilliant -- piece of prototype kit which should have stayed where it belongs, in Fujitsu's development labs?
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When someone brings out an ebook reader which:-
(1) Is in colour as good as I see on a PC screen
(2) Costs less than $50 retail, and
(3) Most importantly, doesn't need access to an electrical wall outlet to recharge its batteries -- so that it can actually be used by anyone anywhere in the world,
-- give me a call.
Until then, I'm not really interested.
Cheers,
Martin Woodhouse