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Right in this thread you can see the challenges faced by a design team. Take the built-in dictionary function. Several of you said you could care less. My wife and I both would want it. Yes, I do carry a dictionary in my Palm TX. And I keep dictionaries next to both home and work PC's.
If you haven't come across a word you didn't recognize in weeks of reading you probably should elevate your choice of authors. More likely you assumed a meaning by context and couldn't be bothered to look it up. Which brings us back to the value of an instant look-up function.
Even though instant look-up does not require a keyboard, using word selection, I do believe a keyboard of some sort is necessary for all the 'missing' functions we'd like. Annotation is make-or-break deal for many people. If you don't need it I understand you really don't give a rat's butt about it.
Which brings us back to the compromise of device design. They must have a target consumer in mind. Did they hit the mark? Sony claimed sales exceeded expectations, right? So they hit their mark.
I'm hoping the Kindle lights a fire (ha, ha) under Sony to give us their NEXT design, targeting a wider audience.
On a side note to previous question in the thread, yes, I'd give up 30% of 7500 page turns to cut the turn time down. But more important, battery power density seems to be improving at around 20% per year. So a year from now we would not have to make that compromise. Or why not offer a scalable clock frequency (or voltage, me not understanding e-ink's driving factors) to the user today?
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