Quote:
Originally Posted by wyndslash
i hope not. i like having a dedicated e-reader that does its job well rather than paying a lot more for features i won't be using and will just be a distraction
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Truth.
If there's ever a tablet with the weight, battery life, and portability of my Sony PRS-505, I'll save up for one ... though, of course, I could buy several ebook readers for the price. But I don't
need a tablet (of course I want one, I want every cool gadget; I just know I don't need one). I do need my 505, unless I want to give up certain types of reading.
Look at it this way: I have a car. It's a small, elderly Honda. You can't go off-roading in it. You can't sleep a family of four in there. You can't tow your boat with it. You can't even realistically put more than two people in it unless the ones in the back seat have stubby legs. But that car does exactly what I want: it gets me and a reasonable amount of stuff from point A to point B, uses very little gas while doing so, and cost me about what a couple of months of car payments cost the people with much bigger and newer cars. In other words, it fits
my needs exactly. Tablets are like SUVs: you can take a SUV off-road (though very few people do ... they might get their paint dirty!), you can sleep in it, you can tow with it, and you can fill it full of people, and if it's a Ford Excess, you can probably even put my car in there. But you pay a price for that: many thousands of dollars of initial expense, and about a third (or less) of the MPG that I get, which for the sake of discussion you can equate to battery life.
There's a place in the world for SUVs (though I suspect not as big a place as many of their owners seem to think). There's a place in the world for shabby little Hondas. Neither one is going away any time soon, for that very reason.
The same is true of general-purpose tablets and special-purpose ebook readers. They both fill specific niches. Tablets are Swiss army knives; they can do a little of everything. But most people aren't going to want to replace their kitchen knife set, or anything in it, with a Swiss army knife any time soon.