|
If you let me get really dreamy, I want the device in Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance, which was essentially a blob of smart clay. You could stretch the blob out to make a huge screen, or compress it to a size convenient to pocket. It could handle audio and full-motion color video, it could communicate with other devices and servers, and to charge it you just flattened it out and let it sit in the sunlight.
If you confine me to the mundane realm, I'll take a Pixel Qi reader, which promises to be inexpensive, color- and video-capable, pretty good battery life, capable of self-lighting, sunlight-readable, and of decent size. I don't need weeks-long battery life, since I'm never away from power for that long; if a unit lasts 15-20 hours, it's fine. Self-lighting trumps e-ink with me. I'd like it capable of handling multiple formats and loading wirelessly, but I'm used to converting files and loading by USB cable, so I could live with that. And portability isn't much use to me, since I rarely get out, so a large screen that could easily display A4-sized PDFs would be useful, if the unit weren't too heavy.
|