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Originally Posted by CommonReader
There is this company that sells this gadget that costs twice as much as a netbook despite being less capable. It has almost no interfaces and you can only buy software through the manufacturer's platform. It doesn't even support ubiquitous standards like Flash and it has a daft name being called "iPad". This thing just has to be a market failure.
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The iPad has an advertised 10-hour video-watching life, longer than any laptop on the market. It's small compared to a laptop, yet has a screen larger than most netbooks. It's terrific for *looking at* things, or listening to them, and is good for flash-like games. It's tolerable at limited input abilities--text, email, touchup some documents.
It's not aimed at *me*, but I can see that it's terrific for its niche: people who want to watch videos and play games for longer than most portable devices allow, and don't care about full computer abilities. There's a *lot* of people like that.
"Readers" are not a large group to start with. "Readers who want the convenience of an electronic reader, for only 5 books at a time" is a much, much smaller group.
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People upload stuff from their smartphones all the time, e.g. photos to Facebook and Twitter. Pushing a book over to the reading device via Bluetooth is hardly a major challenge.
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If the thing allows you to push web articles, photos, your twitter feed for the last 8 hours, and online magazines to its ereader, I will happily admit myself mistaken. The market for those isn't as huge as the market for video game apps, but it's not small, either.
I was under the impression that it only worked on ebook-formats: epub, maybe mobi, probably some pdfs. And the people who want to read just those, *and* don't mind a 5-book limit and whatever bluetooth filter-time problems arise, is a very small group.