Tux Life

Daring Fireball: Why 960 × 640

penllawen:

Having (briefly) used an iPad now, and having owned a Kindle for a few months, I think marco is spot on here. The Kindle is one third the weight, noticeably thinner than my iPhone, much easier on the eyes, and has a battery life measured in weeks, even with the wireless on. Turn the wireless off and, as Grim… put it, “it runs on pure voodoo”. Basically, despite significant superficial similarities, the Kindle is a totally different device.

The question is, will the iPad (and forthcoming similar devices) kill e-ink before it can advance any more? Will people be willing to spend almost as much on a device that can only be used for reading, compared to a device that offers a much wider range of capabilities? I hope not; I think e-ink is one of the more interesting things to happen to computers during the last decade or so, and I would like to see research continue in this area.

I see what you’re saying but I think it’s a bit of a reductive argument. I remember when the iPhone first came out and you heard a lot of complaints about the actual phone functionality of it. Specifically, there were complaints about how you had to press the home button, THEN unlock it, THEN (possibly) enter your passcode, THEN hit the phone button, THEN choose whether you wanted favorites or contacts or recent activity, THEN pick the number to call or, horror of all horrors, THEN dial the number. Whereas on something like the Motorola RAZR (were we ever that young and naive?), you just had to flip it open and dial the number.

My point is that you can reduce virtually any multi-purpose device that Apple, or anyone else for that matter, makes and say that there’s something else that does it better. Creating documents? The iPad totally doesn’t stand up to a laptop. Listening to music? The iPad can’t beat its own cousin, the iPod. And so on.

What really matters is not how the device works now on an individual basis but all of the individual things that happen within a single device. Because, over time, a version of Moore’s law kicks in and battery power becomes greater, technology becomes cheaper, etc. In other words, it’s not so much about best-practices functionality as it is about the convergence of disparate tasks into a single device.

[caveat: This is the opinion of somebody who owns neither an iPad nor a Kindle.]