Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
Indeed. For that price point, a huge swath of e-ink business just died as though shot by a cannon. There aren't even enough pieces left lying around to bury. Skiff and Plastic Logic basically just went out of business before the even managed to get their products on the shelf: at the kind of prices they were talking about at CES, they'll be lucky to sell a few thousand units each. A $400 Kindle or a $400 DR800 or a $400 Sony? Their sales just dropped through the floor and crashed into the basement in a cloud of dust. Joe Consumer won't even consider a slow-refresh, black-and-white-only reading device, most of which you can't even annotate, when one of these pads is priced so close. Any device requiring a stylus? That'll look like a joke now. Sony might continue to sell some of the smaller devices at prices around $100 to $200, but no one except the extremophile fanatics who populate this board will consider buying anything else, and there aren't enough e-ink fanatics out there to keep any sort of business model viable for anyone except perhaps Amazon.
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Totally agree. At that price point they basically just killed all e-ink devices, unless they start pumping them out at $50 each, which is highly unlikely. Amazon will probably survive as some kind of app, maybe, but who knows. Sony's dead in this game now. $499 is a price point that kills everything else dead, no matter what my initial reactions were.