Don’t hate the E-Ink

The Kindle E-Reader, Too expensive for something that only reads books

Nowadays, every self respecting geek will hate Steve Jobs. Just when geeks were becoming cool and mainstream, in comes Jobsey, throwing about products that make the common geek an unneeded, non-mainstream relic of the past, trying to cling to what little glory he could muster when all the rich guys were geeky. Revel in what little glamor you have, for the Age of The Geek is drawing to a close if Steve of The Tablet has his way.

The age of most things smart and mobile (Laptops, smartphones) might be drawing to an end, too, if he has his way with the iPad. But maybe there’s a savior technology hidden in the foreground that nobody has been noticing…

E-Ink! Yeah, it has a long way to go, I know. And even then, why should anybody care? It’s just a simple way of saving battery life on e-readers and such nowadays  nostalgic devices…

Just imagine a world where all those industrial displays that don’t change much have E-Ink instead of LCD displays. Then a world where the alarm clock next to your bed has an E-Ink display on it. Then a world where everything from calculators to dumb-phones use an E-Ink display. It can happen. It’s already happening, actually. It won’t change that much stuff, basically one technology will replace another that is at the end of its production cycle. Think again.

E-Ink with Touch!

Again, meh. So touchscreens with long battery power, usable again in fancy but now obsolete (Steve Jobs is evil) e-readers, with no real function

Well, think about it like this. With a capapative touchscreen, some simple design improvements and a lot of backing, E-Ink touchscreens can replace button based inputs. Stuff like keyboards, keypads and anything that can use a touch display but without all the costs associated with it.

The enTourage eDGe1, A dual screen notebook/E-reader released earlier this year

Imagine, say, a laptop. Imagine this laptop with 2 displays instead of 1. Imagine something similar to the enTourage , except more practical and. Imagine that this laptop has one of the screens in place of the keyboard and mouse pad. Calm down, I am still sane. Imagine this screen is E-Ink. Imagine this screen is multi-touch enabled, in a manner similar to Samsung’s Alias 2 phone. Now, I ask you to imagine the Fun programmers and designers can have with this thing. Writing and drawing now become possible on a laptop. Now imagine how easy it would be to have that e-ink turn into a regular keyboard with a dedicated area below as the mouse pad. Now imagine what the game-design companies can do, and what the music artists can do, and what everybody else in the world can do. You are no longer limited to a simple input method, limited to 70 or so pre-specified keys and a pointing device. Oh, and these might kill e-readers by allowing users to read books on the e-ink display while applications run in the background. Yeah, I really don’t like e-readers. They are PDAs living what short life they have before a real device with more functionality comes along and steals the limelight from them.

I don’t think this move will be a smooth one, if it ever happens. It’ll probably start small and simple, close to what we know now. We might see high end laptops with an e-ink touchscreen for a mouse pad, at first. This might be the the mouse replacement that dethrones the Apple Macbook Touchpad. An extra 100$ for something like this in a laptop doesn’t seem that much when you’re shopping for something premium. That’ll get us out of the quagmire of small annoying trackpads every PC laptop comes with.

But what does this have to do with tablet computers?

Well, tablet computers don’t really fill a niche. Tablets do most of what a smartphone can do, only in a more versatile way; tablets do most of what laptops can do, from a common consumers point of view at least, and they do everything those hideous netbooks can do. Better. And in a more fun and accessible way, too!

And They also do what Laptops do. They do a lot of what laptops do.  They do most of what laptops do..

Oh no…

Laptops are under threat. No, I don’t think tablets will be overtaking them anytime soon, but they certainly will take a slice of the sales in the short to medium term. They are cheaper than most laptops, and they serve the same function (with more functionality in most cases) than laptops.

The problem is, most Manufacturers and software developers are thinking of Tablets as watered down Laptops, thus hurting their own sales with their own mentality. Apple might not be thinking of things this way, as they bought off their customers with a slightly modified iPhone OS, but most of the other developers out there are, from HP with the Slate, to Microsoft and their disgusting implementation of tablet features in all versions of windows, to most other devs who decided on using a watered down for their tablet. These people have not realized the full potential of the Tablet, and are treating it as a niche market at best, more or less a fad that’ll be leaving us be in a few years time. They aren’t taking the time to develop the market properly, thus you have people using Windows 7 which was made for the mouse and keyboard as a touch-interface, similar to how Samsung and others tried to make a multimedia touch smartphone with Windows mobile to compete with the iPhone. We had to wait for Google to fully develop Android for things to really start moving. You do not take an OS built for machines with more power, and use it on a less powerful machine. Especially when the idea behind the device is fun usability and quickness. You take a smaller OS, and give it more juice to use on all sorts of useful bells and whistles.

Since they’re thinking of the Tablet as a fad/niche device, they won’t be trying to make any significant improvements to laptops to give them an edge over this new market.

Simply put, the laptop has something going for it: size, surface and connectivity. These 3 factors are to be exploited to the full if marketers want to increase their sales in face of the upcoming tablet challenge. Connectivity being USB, LAN, and DVD drives, Size being the form factor which allows for better specs, and surface, which can be exploited for interfacing devices such as keyboards, trackpads, screens and… E-ink Touch displays. E-ink displays will survive, but not as a standalone technology when it comes to anything that needs anything but the minimum interactivity. And thus I have given my 2 cents for today.