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Originally Posted by vranghel
The high price is justified by iLiad being beleeding edge technology.
Also R&D costs so they have to get some money so they can continue research and developing new improved products.
The price is quite high, as stated on their website the device is for businessmen primarily.
I just hope that the friendly neighbourhood hacker will develop new apps to offset the cost of the device a bit.  |
Prohibitive pricing will not recover iRex's R&D costs. Landfills the world over are strewn with artifacts of good ideas intended for sale to that holy grail of conspicuous consumption, the affluent businessman. But even businessmen with deep pockets are a conservative lot. They'll spare no expense when it comes to established goods -- laptops, watches, cars -- but require more persuasion to buy new products than would teenagers (e.g. iPods, PSPs, Sidekicks), a demographic with, counterintuitively, more discretionary income than the former.
If iRex intends these devices for the vertical market, that space it too crowded with specialized handheld devices where E Ink adds little value. Would warehouse managers really care what kind of displays their employees have? This is one market where I can imagine Origami actually making serious inroads, since it would leverage the vast pool of extant Windows business software. I'm convinced that for E Ink readers to succeed, their initial appeal must be personal, not professional, particularly since justifying their purchase to corporate as a business expense would be an uphill battle.
iRex made a smart move by concentrating on supporting open file formats like XHTML natively. They probabably had no choice, given Sony's intent to license thousands of mainstream titles for distribution through an iTMS-style nexus. It also relieves them of having to license a DRM solution or develop one in-house. But I think they made a serious mistake by adding wireless ethernet, which only makes the device unattractively expensive. There's no way I'm going to pay an extra $300 over what Hanlin and Sony are offering just to avoid an occasional USB connection.