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Our Blogs ShrinkAge Finally - the year of the e-book?
Our Blogs ShrinkAge Finally - the year of the e-book? | Finally - the year of the e-book? |
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| ShrinkAge - personal and global mobility | |
| by Charles Wright | |
| Wednesday, 19 December 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The Quokkapad has an eight-inch colour touch screen with 800x600 resolution. Powered by a 400MHz MIPS processor with 64MB of ROM and 128MB of flash memory, which can be expanded up to 500MB internally, the Quokkapad is a Linux tablet PC, running version 2.7 of GPE Linux. That means it ships with Web browsing and email, calendar, to do, contact management and notetaking capabilities, in addition to audio playback and image viewing. The Quokkapad was expected to cost around $500. It was aimed at the corporate, education and government marketplace, rather than consumers, to take advantage of the fact that large organisation can save millions of dollars a year by distributing their documents on electronic devices, rather than printing them. But it shared the iLiad's ability to handle Mobipocket ebooks, and with Adobe expected to release a Linux version of its Digital Editions ebook software, the Quokkapad looked like a solid contender for something that could justify the enthusiasm of those New York publishers: an affordable, flexible, ebook reader/PDA. Unfortunately there were production problems, and its current state is a bit of a mystery . The other contender is the Cybook Gen3, which also sold out on its release, and has been difficult to obtain in the US. Like the Sony Reader, it has a smaller (6-inch) E Ink screen than the 8.1-inch iLiad, but at $US350, it's substantially cheaper. It also shares the iLiad's commitment to more open e-book standards than Sony or the Kindle. I suspect that I'll buy either an iLiad or a Cybook Gen3 in 2008, and a lot of readers will do the same. |
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