Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Once reason I'm not interested in a dedicated reader is that current dedicated devices mostly don't do color, and I need color support. Among other things, I collect illustrated editions, and have ebooks with drawings or paintings by people like Caldecott, Rackham, and Wyeth. Grey scale conversion of work originally in color is not acceptable.
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OK, I have an iPhone 3G. It has a lot of functionality. But to be honest, it's sub-par at a lot of them vs. other dedicated devices. Yes you can read eBooks with it. But the Sony Reader PRS-505, & PRS-650 are both much better at it. The 3G has a camera but my Fuji digital camera blows that away. Yes, it can play games, but to be honest, you can do better on a Nintendo/PSP. The 3G can play music, but that's not all that wonderful because Apple lost focus and put in cheap hardware for the audio. My Rio Karma blows away the iPhone in terms of audio quality.
What has happened is that as some devices go multifunction, a lot of those functions get dumbed down/made worse. The iPod when it first came out was a good MP3 player. It wasn't wonderful, but it was good. it got better as newer models came out. Supposedly the iPod 4th generation is really good. But Apple then decided to add more features and cheapen the components used in the audio part and they lost quality/focus.
Sometimes a multifunction device just doesn't do well enough because it's doing too many things and cannot do any one of them them better then a stand alone device.
Even the iPad has problems. The version of Safari on their has a number of bugs and really needs a rework from the ground up. I've seen too many websites where you cannot type in the text box using Safari on the iPad (for example) and Apple has not allowed Flash so out go a large number of websites that you can use with the iPad.
So really, it's a matter of do you take the dumbed down multifunction device (this does not include netbooks, laptops, or desktop computers) or do you get better functioning stand alone devices?
Even my GPS is better then the iPhone if nothing else then because the batter lasts longer.