Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
Since 1997, we've been looking at eink struggle to come to market, struggle to produce a big screen that wouldn't crack in real usage, work on faster page response and color. It's not that I'm looking for a computer, but faster, flexible and even color screens do have uses (annotation, highlighting, etc.).
And its not just eink. Those of us who have been around for a while have struggled with many earlier iterations: CRT's, laptops, tablet computers, palm pilots, ebookman, newtons, rocket readers and more.
The thing is that when you look at the changes in personal and palmtop computing over the last 33 years since the Apple II is introduced, the progress on e-ink is quite disappointing. If my goal is a dedicated reading device, I would think it would be quite a bit simpler than some of the other things that were done with portable electronics.
|
The catch is that new technologies that do something drastically different take more time to mature. Look at the computer itself. It took 20-30 years to develop into something that you could even fit into your home. Another 10 to become mass-produced, another 10 shrink into something like a laptop, and another 10 to move into the ultra-portable space (the stuff smaller than a deck of cards we have today).
LCDs like are used today started back in 1972. It took 20 years to make it into products the consumer could buy and hook up to a computer (roughly). Another 10 to become cheap enough to completely replace the CRT.
The difference here is that a new display tech took 10 years to go from concept to real product. That's not bad. They found a market that can fund the development of the technology. That it was more mainstream than the market for a mainframe + a few dozen dumb terminals is also huge.
Integrated Circuits were absolutely huge, and involved 10+ years of work to produce transistors that allows consumer electronics to function, let alone the extra work that took that and developed it into a way to create the silicon circuits required for ICs.
So keep in mind that there has been a pretty big struggle behind a lot of the major developments that drove advances in electronics and computing.