Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
And the reason those features are not in those products and won't be in them any time soon is that there is no free lunch; to do them right you need a real computer with a full-power OS and app base, not a beefed up cellphone platform; you need a high power battery-eating CISC processor, lots of RAM and storage, you need an expensive transflective screen.
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non sequitur: aside from transflective screen not being the norm, mobile devices today have hardware power far beyond the dreams of most desktops from the beginning of the decade. Yes, from the time where wacom drawing tablets were all the rage. And CPUs today are pretty much all RISC with a CISC emulation layer if at all.
Fact is: progress never stops and there's no such thing anymore as special purpose CPUs to justify a device doing a thing alone. Even a embedded special purpose processor these days would be so powerful that it'd have power to spare for side tasks, like decoding mp3 streams.
Once bistable, transflective color screens with good refresh rates are the norm among all mobile hardware, it'll be difficult to justify the cost of single-purpose devices for reading alone as opposed to an all-in-one, unless the single-purpose ones are as cheap as a magazine.