imageWhy isn’t this $130 handheld with a seven-inch color screen being touted for texty e-books, not just for multimedia cooking lessons and the like?

And are $20 multimedia "books" the only ones that Photoco‘s new miBook can display? How about Mobipocket books? Or, gasp, nonproprietary standards such as ePub or HTML or ASCII? And are Photoco and partners, such as the Food Network and ParentsTV, hoping that the content will subsidize the hardware? As claimed in the ballyhoo, or at least Gizmodo’s repro of it, the display is a "New advanced TFT." No info appears on screen res and battery life. Maybe there are some negatives, then; who knows? Perhaps an inadequate interface for e-books? Is the miBook just a jazzed-up PhotoShare device? At any rate, the miBook is to be on sale through major outlets ranging from HSN to Circuit City—in fact here’s the related CC page.

K-12 possibilities?

imageimageWhether or not the miBook is an e-book-fit gizmo, it makes me wonder how suitable would be gadgets in this general category for applications such as K-12. Don’t kids love color and multimedia? Beyond that, must every new e-reader gizmo have an E Ink screen? How about the legions of e-book enthusiasts who still like good old-fashioned LCDs—including romance readers, some of whom might enjoy the multimedia, for which E Ink won’t work right now? I just hope that the miBook people won’t repeat the mistake of the Pepper Pad folks and play down old-fashioned e-books. Give customers both e-books and multimedia if possible.

imageRelated: New York Times article on the Photoco machine. Like Gizmodo, the Times focuses on the female-related apps, but the CircuitCity image suggests that Photoco is really going after both sexes. Maybe with separate packaging, even? Yep. See image to left.

Also of interest on the hardware front: More publicity on the double-paneled e-reader being developed by researchers at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. Yawn. We’ve covered this topic before, complete with a discussion by TeleBlog readers on two screens vs. one. Drop by and join in. Oh, and doesn’t the OLPC XO-2 have double-screen capability?

 And speaking of hardware debates: Sony’s amnesia, -in forgetting to announce wireless for the Sony Reader, assuming it’s planned anyway—a quick summary of a Mike Cane item on the company’s network strategy. Hey, Mike, maybe Sony just doesn’t want to telegraph any punches to Amazon. Who knows?

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9 COMMENTS

  1. Huuuh?

    Why is it so thick? Why are there air vents on the back?

    I looked at that and thought, Those eejits at Palm. Focused on PDAs and phones. Never realizing they were in the *gadget* business. Why don’t these things have Palm logos slapped on them?

    Screen seems to be LED. I doubt the res is anything better than an EeePC at 7″.

  5. David,
    If you read the mobileread thread that Nate is pointing, you’ll find the answer to your question. It was not designed to be an eBook reader, but instead was meant to be more a PMP with some custom video format, so I doubt they’ll get around to putting in rendering of the popular eBook formats.

    I do however agree with the other posters in that thread. If you don’t mean for it to be an eBook reader, naming miBook will certainly lead to confusion.

  6. Thanks, Jim. Actually I was wondering why Photoco didn’t play up the genuine book capabilities more, if they do exist. Remember, the miBook might be able to display popular e-book formats–by way of text-to-image conversions, a big point I made in the second post. What counts, from a consumer perspective, isn’t Photoco’s intent but what people can do with the thing. Meanwhile I agree with you re confusing name.

    Thanks,
    David

  7. I have been looking into book readers. Jetbook, Sony’s and Amazon’s each have one that I am aware of. All of those are in black and white. They use LCD, but they use a non-reflective LCD screen. Which means they don’t illuminate themselves like desktop monitors. And they are all about 160-170 ppi (pixels per inch).

    But what does this have to do with video? Well I would like something like the LCD non-illuminated stuff. The ppi in color does not pose too much of a problem. Look at the iPhone which has 160 or 170 ppi. Personally I would look for some other company that makes something like the iPhone, but can support video more easily than an iPhone. Samsung has a iPhone-like product, but I have not seen video being the main point of the advertisements.

    Another thing to be concerned about is how long a battery on a video player could last.

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