Quote:
Originally Posted by valex
As far as major improvements go, there has been only a few innovations in e-ink area recently, namely flexible screens and color e-ink (HD is not new any more). Amazon experimented with color e-ink (Triton) in the past and wasn't impressed with the quality. I also think the primary audience for the color screens - magazine readers - is pretty much satisfied with tablets (and bought them already).
The flexible screens are much more interesting, but unless they can make truly revolutionary device with fully folding/rolling-up screen so the device when closed is the size of a smartphone/pencil - again I don't see that happening.
The Kobo Aura HD is kind of a signal that there is nothing really in the pipeline for the e-ink screens (ok, its dpi is higher) and the only "major" improvement could be the bigger size. Let us not forget that the Aura's screens are the batch abandoned by BN so they also both didn't have anything else (but size) to offer and didn't think that enough people would want to buy it.
Me, I am ready to jump my Kindle Keyboard ship, just waiting for the kindlepdfviewer to be ported to Aura HD  |
I love the new colour and paper flexible and portable screens. The colour screens with the new peacock technology are still going to be a ways off for ereaders. 10+ years is my guess since it's hard to make them high resolution, and it so recently was developed.
The flexible paper 5th element type screens will be awesome for cell phones.
I think the abandoned BN batch rumour was untrue since Kobo developed the new screen with e-ink. Either way I think the Aura HD has the nicest frontlit e-ink display atm.
I think we saw the future when Kobo came out with the Aura HD. It beat the other readers to the next gen era by 4-6 months. I will be surprised if the PW2 will be as good as the Aura since the Aura has so many things the PW2 won't have like a bigger screen, microsd slot, ect. I'll be surprised if the PW2 is has 1440x1080 resolution. The best thing the PW2 can have over the Aura is a lower price which would make it better than the Aura for me as long as it had a screen that was similar to the Aura's.