Quote:
|
Originally Posted by k2r
I'm aware if it but I don't think that the B2B market is big enough for iRex to sell a significant volume of iLiads yet.
|
Then, we don't know much about who the iRex B2B customers are. That air chart company ... that's probably one of them. Newspapers ... there have been several tests with e-Paper over the past year, some of which use/used the iLiad. Maps in general, perhaps ... they need high quality presentation (though they typically need colour, as well) ... and there are GPS receivers for CF: so isGarmin or Tomtom going to be first? (Or is colour so important that they'll wait until eInk launches colour ePaper?)
Books ... I'd be willing to bet that someone is doing e-Books on the iLiad. But not for general reading: books and documentation of reference. There are many cases where plain documentation is so voluminous that you need bookshelves on wheels (telecom industry, and probably aeronautics as well). Replace those with iLiads, and you have something. Or computers: would you buy an iLiad stocked with the full Windows reference documentation, and with the option of adding new volumes as they are published, for ... well, a fourth of the paper book price doesn't seem impossible? The cost of the device would be unimportant in such context. (This kind of scenario is partly where I think the current size of the screen comes from ...)
Or perhaps an alternative to those UPS thingies they want us to sign on?
Quote:
|
If the customer pays €600 for the device, he might want to do more with it than reading only a single newspaper or books from a single publisher.
|
Probably. But that's what early adopters are for: they are the people who ask to buy the device for the price. Would be silly to refuse'em. They are usually also few enough to be abandoned if it doesn't work out.
The current device doesn't make full sense to me except as an evaluation platform: Ethernet and WiFi, SD and MMC, and Wacom stylus to boot? Far too expensive for end-user units. So ... my guess is that there's a new and cheaper iLiad (or perhaps two) coming in about 12 months of the right size, and that have only the devices that it/they need. Only one of them will have WiFi -- probably the one with CF (or equivalent). All current owners will be invited to buy one for 2/3 of the list price, which will be approximately 1/3 of the price we paid now :-)
I'm just guessing, of course. It will be very interesting to see what applications based on the iLiad that will turn up over the next year or so.