Color No future for this device

[joblack]

I do like the JBC. Especially the hardware is fine.

The software is another issue. It's far from really having a good usabily.

There are people who would buy the JRC for its language translation capabilities alone. I can see how this device would be useful to the military. The pictures of the screen resolution in one of the early posts what disappointing, but I noticed that the not only was the background dark, but the letters themselves were blurred. That seems like it's probably an artifact of the camera and not a property of the device. Also, it's sort of a myth that your eyes need extreme contrast or lots of light. My concern is whether or not it will be "adequate," meaning about the same as my Kindle 2. The ability to display color is actually pretty critical for their customer base, and it's an information rather than an aesthetic function. A graph rendered in gray scale can't convey the same information as one in color, even if the color is pretty washed out or drab.

There are lots of very useful apps for academics and students. The language capabilities alone are very nearly worth the price. I haven't priced Rosetta Stone in awhile, but I spent a lot on learning Arabic sitting in front of a computer screen. And these are even more valuable to education, the military, and some forms of civil service.

One of my big disappointments is to watch the book market head off in the direction of videos, even to the point of creating a 16x9 aspect ratio, practically useless for reading papers or journal articles. I *would* however love to see a screen with a whiter background. But it wouldn't necessarily be easier on my eyes.

I'm really glad to see that *someone* is targeting this market, finally. The displays will have to get better but I wouldn't hold my breath about it happening any time soon.

I'm really pretty impressed with the device, at least in terms of potential. But when I purchased I did so making a couple of assumptions. The first was that since they were targeting the academic field they'd have at least some idea of what they were doing, and would know how to deliver functionality.

I don't mind the graphics. I'd call the display something like "implied color" or "virtual color" or perhaps "whispercolor." It's not very aesthetically satisfying, and not really the sort of color produced by ink or paint or any conventional color reproduction method, but as a functional color reproduction for graphs and other information content it's OK. The background is murky, but in decent like it's as good as the old original Kindle (or almost). And it's definitely easier on your eyes than a bright LCD display whether it's called "retinal" or not.

It's an impressive piece of tech. The production quality is quite good, though not as polished as the Amazon or Apple products. But that's fine, because I'm an academic not a kid who wants to watch videos. I want to read papers and books. Which brings me to the real disappointment.

In what universe is a eReader produced for the academic market that doesn't have the ability to make annotations (notes) as you read? It's like presenting you with a fantastic meal and then tying your hands behind your back. Moreover the conventional hypertext functions don't even work on ePub documents, and barely work in *some* pdfs. But I could even like with that for the time being if there were *some way* to take notes or make annotations. And no, drawing pictures in PDFs isn't the same. There's no way to organize drawings that are actually printed text, and the writing in longhand is generally unreadable because the graphics processing is so slow. It can't even keep up with slowly printed text let alone longhand. And again, what do you do with notes that aren't *really* text, especially if you can't make hypertext references to the drawings someone in an index.

So, I think for academics and people in similar fields about the only real option you have for reading papers and pdf documents is a tablet like the iPad. And Ectaco is soooo close!

[lorenzoens]

What? An Ectaco employee owns a Kindle?