Quote:
Originally Posted by BigWaffles
Unfortunately what they are adding doesn't really belong on an e-reader.
Unfortunatley you are probably in a minority with this type of surfing.
Exactly. The problem is that some of the functionality that they are adding has nothing to do with reading books. A lot of what they seem to be putting in the new devices is only going to lead people to want a color screen to display it on (video, web surfing, etc). The resolution will get higher, color will be added and more powerful processors will be needed to drive it all. Eventually you will end up with a computer in your hand with a color LCD screen and low battery life (can you say netbook?). Meanwhile everyone will accept these devices as e-readers and forget where they started from and why.
I know that technology is always moving forward but what bothers me most about this is the speed. I've had my Kindle for 10 months and in that time the readers have mutated from several very useful devices to a mob of bloated hardware with features a lot of us don't want. Feature Creep. 
Hopefully some of the basic devices will live on.
C.P.T. |
I want the basic function to improve. If it gains a few features that are unrelated to reading by virtue of being better able to accomplish it, I don't mind really. I've found that it's easy to ignore functions I don't use.
The problem is that it seems nobody is investing anything into improving the book reading part. It's totally an "oh, me too, and uhh I'll add an autoblogging feature!" market, where the core purpose of the device is stagnant and neglected at a very crude and immature stage.
Purity in a device is a nice wish, but peripheral functions and features are more or less going to be reality as long as hardware allows it. Unfortunately, the hardware is rubbish mostly and cannot support any of these functions very well,
including reading. If it can't do reading exceptionally well yet, all of the other features are just insult to injury.