Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle
No, they don't need a new designer. The jetBook layout is very functional. It is not sexy.
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I'm glad you think beauty and function are unrelated. I feel the JetBook could use a new designer because the one they had may well think as you do.
The thing on the whole
is better-designed than some of the others on the market like the Sony 505 and 300...but pretty much all ebook readers were apparently designed by cretins. It's rather shocking, actually, that they were almost universally gouged in this way.
I'm no stranger to electronics product design myself, and while I've only a few years experience, I can see that most of these products are connected either to really terrible designers, or decent designers with so many restrictions imposed on them by non-designers that they really didn't get any chance to do much damage control on any layer really...be it the electronics, the casing and buttons, or the software.
It really looks like something a 1990s VB programmer would have cooked up in an evening, which is very possible given the corners cut when designing crap like the iliad (I always recall the fireplace in the movie Betelgeuse), the first gen kindle (2nd gen to a lesser degree), and innumerable other cookie-cutter devices. Perhaps as the market gets more heated, design will be one element, in addition to technology and gimmickry, that can be used as a selling point, and qualified designers and consultants will find some work. Just trying to badly mimic an Apple aesthetic isn't going to work for some certain companies for long either. I think it's rather unsettling that the JetBook is in fact one of the more ergonomic devices in the market.
Of course, like I said it could all be because the designer got stiffed badly, or the company threw the responsibility on the engineers' shoulders to save some coin (not uncommon at all in China and Taiwan). I just hope it's remedied in future iterations of the JetBook and the 易博士 m-series.