Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
Its not just Cybook. Amazon doesn't seem to roll out new features that quickly either.
I really wish I understood the ebook development environment. From the stuff that I'm familiar with, I'd predict that folders could be put together in a few days. Similarly with other features. I'd expect just one or two programmers could turn out a steady stream of enhancements.
A rolling stream of features would create ongoing buz. Since no one seems to take this approach, I assume that there is more than meets the eye here. I wonder what it is.
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I share the wish with you, although I do not believe that the a few days ould be sufficient to roll out any enhancement. It depends of course on the development platform and the willingness also to document what you have produced. That last thing may take a while.
Having said that, we have to take into account the fact that Bookeen, like the others, seem to have a remarkably pretty stable platform; with a few exception, I do not hear or read of spectacular crashes while you are reading ebooks. Thus the incentive to add new feature has to be weighed carefully, in order not to compromise the features they already have working. Look at the bug on the Bebook, (you can read about it in the proper forum) at the beginning of the year, if I recollect, where the upgrade, once installed, cancelled preciuos data.
I believe that what galls most of the Gen 3 customer is their silence, it would be appreciated a little dialog with the customer, attendance to the forums etc. Not, again, that the other companies do it, mind you.
They are certainly working on something, there are at least two new firmware releases in the newer machines, the build 820 and 834, compared to the 796 we have. But nobody knows anything about them. And it is now 5 months after the 796.
That fact that probably the Gen 3 is actually a family of at least 3 machines, with different processor speeds (200 MHz and 400 Mhz) and memory size (older machines with 64Mb and newer with 512), does not help; it surely makes consistent development across the range more complicated, as you have to make sure that what you do works on all machines.
I would also appreciate some openness, like the iRex community is developing, I believe it would help in the sales, knowing that a flourishing community is behind it. Sufficient opennnes for me would mean that every week / two weeks, something appears on their blog, like we' re working on this and that.
Let us wait for the promised firmware upgrade promised in the 1st quarter 2009 and then we'll see. Like you say, there is more than meets the eye, maybe one day we'll understand it.