Future - Netbook (zb. A150L) or E-Book (Kindle)

Hi,

what is the future of the next few years ?

Netbook (zb. Acer A150L) or E-Book (Amazon Kindle)





Or a completely new development

What do you think

 

I hate to say it, but I think everyone will have some kind of iPhone variant.

 

Whatever the future is, it won't be the Kindle. Good for reading books on (although it could be slimmer) but almost useless for anything else - it won't catch on.

Although I own (and very much like) an iPhone, it cannot replace a real computer. With any portable machine there is a trade-off between screen/keyboard size and portability. No-one has come up with any form of data entry that even remotely competes with a physical keyboard. To be usable a keyboard has to have good tactile feedback and needs to be large enough to accommodate normal adult male size fingers. I addition, most people do not have good enough eyesight to read anything on a screen with decent resolution smaller than about 20-25cm. Consequently, I think we are literally decades away from a usable general purpose machine that is materially smaller than the One.

I think that we shall see machines the size of the one with full widescreen resolution, GB or even TB of super-fast SSD, some form of fast wireless (probably based on some mobile phone technology since that is already achieving good speeds and is almost universal in the 1st world at least) and a keyboard that is almost unchanged. All of this will probably be even cheaper than our Ones are now.

Five years ago, a normal decent laptop cost at least £1000. Now it's more like £300-400 and I bet that trend will continue if not accelerate.

 

Future, in my view (2009)

Combination of iPhone Touchscreen and Sony OELD Display (8,9" & 1280 * 800)

Mac OS X as operating system

Bluetooth (for Mobil-Headset and Keyboard)

UMTS, Wlan and 3 USB inside

SSD and SD Cards

8 hours of battery duration

 

The Kindle just came to Canada, and with it came the ability to install a free app available at Amazon.com called "Kindle for PC" on my Canadian Acer. Now I can download Kindle books and read them on my netbook without buying a Kindle gadget. Observations after downloading a couple of "sample" books to test the system but not buying a full book yet (the sample books are handy: the thumbnail includes links to the amazon.com description page and also a direct "Buy" link):

1. Download and setup were simple, all you need is an amazon.com account to register the downloaded app to the same credit card used for buying other merchandise.

2. Navigation is by keyboard button or mouse, and screens are perfectly fitted to the netbook. I was a user of Microsoft's eBook software on my older computers, but found the display too tiny to read on the Acer or when zoomed ruining the page layout. The Kindle app reads extremely well at a standard page layout, although font size can't be modified.

3. I haven't tried sync with other PCs I own, since I don't use them for reading. Supposedly the app will sync and save last location data between "devices" but can't vouch for it.

4. The app does not support the notes and highlights, word search and zoom features that seem to be on the Kindle hardware, but says these are planned "future improvements." It also doesn't make available whatever dictionaries are on the Kindle machine.

5. Unlike the Kindle hardware, the netbook using "Kindle for PC" displays books in color. One of the samples I tried was a Photoshop Elements guide and all its illustrations are in good color, as opposed to greyscale.

All in all, while I'm attracted to the "ebook" idea, I think the combination of a full-featured little netbook PC with an app to read Kindle books is much better than the hardware currently offered by the Kindle. I've read about the Barnes and Noble Nook reader, which seems a step up from the Kindle in hardware and its book catalog, so the jury is out, but I'll probably wait a couple of years for the industry model to mature and settle down before considering another portable device.

 

I hope you can answer this question since you seem familiar with the Kindle PC app. I'd like to know if it's possible to change the screen orientation on my Acer Aspire One so the Kindle books appear vertically oriented rather than horizontally. Any assistance would be much appreciated. Thank you.