Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivian
I don't think it's been mentioned in this thread yet that e-Ink screens only draw power when turning the page. That is a super cool feature, and means that multipurpose tablets will have a job becoming as energy-efficient as dedicated e-readers, if they can achieve it at all.
That said, most people don't care about energy efficiency or even consider it, so it could well be that Kitabi is right and tablets will become the preferred mode of e-reading.
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The screen is the principal battery draw in a handheld device, so a screen that only uses power when redrawing a page is a significant factor in battery life.
The big question is how much you really care.
For instance, my ebook viewer is a multi-function device - a PDA. It uses an LCD screen that requires a constant trickle of power to maintain. I keep screen brightness set as low as possibly while still being readable (which on my device is about 10%) to conserve the battery. But in practice, I recharge it nightly, so I seldom see the battery drop below 80% charged.
Charging various devices like PDA, cell phone, and laptop is a reflex. I've never encountered a problem where the battery totally drained because I forgot to charge something, because I
don't forget to charge things.
So for me, extended battery life offered by an eInk screen is not a selling point, because I
don't really care.
An additional issue is that I need color support for a fair bit of what I do and read, and that's not available for eInk. There are promising low power color displays beginning to appear, but they haven't been incorporated in a dedicated reader yet.
And a multi-purpose tablet will probably perform functions that inherently use more power (like displaying video), so they
won't be able to match the reader's energy efficiency. If you're getting a multi-purpose tablet, you probably know that going in, and you don't
expect to get efficiency comparable to a dedicated reader. You'll want efficiency at least comparable to a laptop and preferably better, so that you can do things like use it on a long airplane flight without running out of power mid-way.
Everyone is concerned with battery life. Current tablets hitting the streets use ARM CPUs, and lower power consumption has been an ARM design goal from the beginning. Low-power color displays like Qualcomm's Mirasol are starting to get design wins for the same reason. And there is continual research to improve the efficiency of batteries.
But if you insist on a device than can go a couple of weeks without a recharge, a tablet isn't what you get. And if you need a device that does other things besides display ebooks, you accept a trade-off in battery life.
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Dennis