Quote:
Originally Posted by redbaron101
I suppose when it comes to pricing there are a lot of different factors - remember if the device is in a saturated market a lot of manufactures sell their devices at a loss to try and get a market share/presence. With e-readers its a pretty new market - yes, I know they've been around for donkeys - but look how long its taken them to come to the uk for example, and only a few models / high street retailers at that.
I guess with time as the ereader market matures and if more companies/factories start producing the actual eink screens that all the readers use, we might actually see the price drop. Although with the current financial crisis most countries are in, it may take a while.
For my two cents, i think as sub notebooks are becoming more popular, we may possibly see a shift in ereaders moving away from say ARM processors to Atom based e-ink devices. If this happens, and as the ereader market matures, only then will we see a significant drop in the price for e-ink ereader devices.
|
I'm thinking that the lowest 800Mhz Atom processor still is too powerful for a reader device.
besides, according to this page:
http://ark.intel.com/cpugroup.aspx?familyID=29035 the lowest Atom processor any manufacturer would probably choose is the Z510 on 1,1Ghz, due to it's +7years availability.
I suspect ARM processors are in-line processors like the Atom processor.
that would make the slowest Atom about 5 times faster than current processors used, not to mention the many multimedia benefits it has over ARM (MMX, SSE 1 2 & 3), that would be left unused in an ebook reader, unless they find ways to accelerate the e-ink display speed upto 25-30fps for video applications, and maybe add a webcam.
I found a remarkable comparison between current ebook readers and camera's!
The current ebook reader is capable of displaying ebooks, and playing back audio like an mp3 player. Some are taking on the job of internet browsing as well.
It's a bit like photocamera's and video camera's
both can be used to take pictures and film, but they're only good at one of the two jobs!
I wonder if there will be ever a time, when we'll have our all in one!
E-ink display, 8MPix photo cam & video cam., MP3 player and internet device, all in the size of a cellphone!