iPad presentation crushed a lot of people’s expectations, that’s for sure. Some of us were waiting for something a bit more powerful. I was also hoping for a viable platform for book reading. Apple instead seems more interested in offering a bigger device to offer new kinds of applications.
I’ve been on the fence on ebook readers for awhile. I still think books are a terrible thing of the past and we should gracefuly go past that to read written informations elsewhere. One way to do that are e-ink readers like the Kindle. Those are are good at doing just one thing. Then there are devices with lcd screens. A lot of people are reading pdfs on netbooks: they cost as much as a Kindle and can do a lot of other stuff (I run my rails developement server on mine). Still, reading black text on a white background is not exactly pleasing and the whole thing might be smaller than a proper laptop but it’s still pretty clunky for reading. So, a solution could be tablet-like netbooks (Acer and HP are working on something like that). But the screen? how do you fix that? well, enters Pixel Qi, a new company that is currently manufacturing screens that can switch between a full color lcd mode and an high contrast, high refresh mode for reading (even under sunlight) in this mode, the lcds also consume less battery. This is a very interesting technology, too bad Apple is not gonna use it.. at least not in this generation of products.
La materia non è solida 