Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
I personally don't think the DR1000 is a successor to the iLiad. I think they are two product lines that will continue. They have different markets.
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I see them as two separate lines also, pilotbob.
I think it's really easy to fall into the logical trap of viewing every device in terms of the purpose for which
I want it. I.e. if I'm looking for a reading device, I tend to evaluate everything in terms of how suited it is for that purpose. Another example is the way Gizmodo sometimes seems to think everything should be a cell phone or a laptop, and deride devices for not matching those parameters.
It seems to be difficult for folks (and I firmly include myself here) to look at a device in terms of its actual features and consider what that feature set is
aimed at.
In my view, the DR line is not at all aimed at casual reading. It's too big, it's too expensive, it's battery life is (maybe?) too short for that pursuit, and it has a lot of features (note taking, web browsing?, ppt support for crying out loud!) that are just so much bragware when I sit down to read a book. Sure it
can read books, but so can my desktop PC. That doesn't make it a book reader any more than a quad-core pentium with a 30" monitor is a book reader.
I see the DR line as being aimed at being a professional device. It's suited for handling documents that are in a "standard" business size: Letter/A4. It supports reading and marking up those documents, it supports taking notes in meetings, it supports connecting back to a PC wirelessly to get the document I just realized I need in this meeting. Those aren't "reader" functions. In my view they really should call this thing the "Document Reader" rather than "Digital Reader" -- "digital" is so blatantly obvious as to be redundant, but "document" would tell you something about the device's intended purpose.
You could make some of the same arguments about the iLiad's suitability as a reading device, of course. I find the wireless and Wacom to be bragware for my reading purposes, they're better suited to a professional device. Strip out those features and leave the rest and I think you have a much better reading device ... well, it still needs better battery life.
Another point: iRex has
never made a secret that their primary aim is
B2B, not consumer, and they really only sell directly to consumers because those consumers raised such a stink. In the earliest stages, they actually required a formal, written acknowledgment from individual customers that the device wasn't meant for consumer use, and was still in their estimation a beta device.