Sunday, September 19, 2010

A dream Kindle

I doubt it'll happen this way, but I can't help but think: man, a Kindle just like the Kindle 3, but with a touch-screen like the iPhone 4, high resolution, great in all ways. I could even live with it being greyscale. It would also be great if the device was yet a bit faster. Doesn't need to be very much, but all in all this would pretty much make it the ultimate portable reader.

 (My "artist's impression" of such a device. I took two photos and combined them. The tricky bit was coordinating the perspective.)

Of course you could go at it "from the other side" by "simply" shrinking an iPad. It would be a challenge to make it as light-weight as the K3, but I really hope somebody will come close soon, the Kindle 3's weight (10 oz/300 grams) is fantastic.

Or for that matter they could make a six-inch iPhone, as it were. (iPhone's screen is 3.5 inches, the iPad's is 9.7.) Again the weight would be the issue. I've heard the metal is needed to dissipate the heat.

Many engineering challenges in that, I'm sure, but it's only a question of time. Particularly how much time. A year? Five?

By the way, I would advice makers of eReaders to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. For instance I saw a review of Pandigital's Novel reader, and it has a lot of features I will never need, but then the screen is not very responsive (and not multi-touch), and the reader app only has four levels of text size. Not great.

In fact, the "Novel" seems on the surface to be just what I'm wishing for here... except it just is not very good.  Very slow, clumsy and unresponsive generally, poor screen, etc. So maybe I should have included "good" in the definitions, but in my world it pretty much goes without saying...

4 comments:

ganesha games said...

if it had a touch screen, I guess the keyboard would disappear :-)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Ssshh! I was hoping nobody would notice that!

Besides, you never know, it's mainly Apple who loves the minimal-physical buttons approach.

Though I have to admit that while I have not been its biggest fan, the screen keyboard on the iPad *is* actually better/faster than the physical one on the Kindle.

ganesha games said...

I had a kindle 1 since the first days and I think I may have typed 3 or 4 words total. I just used it as a reader (wifi was not working here) and just thought that the keyboard could be used for more screen space.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yeah, it's not needed often.
In the web browser, a little more.