US Army considers Edge for use on the battlefield

Forget the academic market...if Entourage can get a DeptDef contract they've got it made.

McCarthy (director of the mission command complex of the Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss in Texas) bought a Kindle, six Apple iPads and an Entourage Edge, which incorporates an e-book reader and a tablet into a dual-screen computer, to see how the retail products could be used on the battlefield. He said the devices could serve as electronic manuals for Army standard battlefield systems, including broadband radios and unmanned sensors systems.

Currently, soldiers use printed manuals. Every time a system is reprogrammed or revised, the Army has to print new instructions to distribute to soldiers. But the service could easily update the e-manuals and push the changes out instantly over a network, McCarthy said.

I'd imagine the annotation capabilities and image viewing would be a plus in the Edge's favor, but the lack of 3G might hurt their chances vs. Kindle.

Does the army use commercial 3G in the battlefield? Sounds to me like the wifi would be of more interest, but even there I wouldn't be surprised if the army commissioned their own custom driver for some sort of military USB wifi/3G/WiMax device). In any case, I think the eDGe may well be of considerable use to the army - with the dual screen a bonus over the other devices, not to mention the self-protection offered by the folding screens.

Amazing but not surprising story. I know how well my eDGe works for me for work (EDUCATION) and my personal life (organization). My guitar wiring diagrams are on evernote and also in my eDGe library so it makes finding what I need no problem.

I think the only problem would be the delay between pressing the 'next' button and the actual eink page flipping.

** actually, page delay in only slow on pages with annotations on them. Regular epubs and pdfs are not slow.