Quote:
Originally Posted by Teddman
There are rumors that Amazon has an exclusivity window on the eInk Pearl screens for at least six months.
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This is quite possibly true. However, I seem to remember reading a forum post by a Ukrainian reseller of Hanvon products a couple of months ago. The guy was complaining about Amazon
and Sony getting preferential treatment from eInk (i.e. exclusive rights on Pearl in 2010). Just today the same reseller
boasted of Hanvon having sold 600,000 units in China over the past 6 month period, thereby gaining the same priority level from eInk as enjoyed by Sony and Amazon. His info comes from his Chinese contacts, and he is not always wrong with his predictions.
So, it seems that Amazon may not be the only game in Pearl. Amazon, however, was able to get its devices ready in practically no time, and it remains to be seen if Sony in the end is able to capitalize on possible Pearl exclusivity.
If all Sony planned on doing was to replace the screens in the Readers, I don't see why they wouldn't try to counterstrike at this time with pre-announcements of their own. To try to limit the damage. I would suspect that Sony may have been caught a little off guard by the price war between Amazon and B&N while in the process of getting ready its own new technology (hopefully, a line of connected readers with less crappy touch screens?). I don't see replacing Vizplex with Pearl as something that requires any significant development effort.
There seem to be these distinct possibilities:
- Sony is no longer planning to attack the U.S. market. The Sony Reader is done
- Sony doesn't have rights to Pearl, so there is no point in trying to release anything new before the end of the year (Sony is majorly screwed)
- Sony would like to sell new Readers, but the channel is overstuffed with the last years models (Hopefully, the dumping that's going on right now will help with that)
- The new lineup is still not ready, will not be ready until later in the year (Makes sense knowing that Sony never seems to have sufficient resources working on the Readers)