HMV offers 80-quid colour e-book reader HMV has followed John Lewis to pitch what is essentially a 5in media tablet as a colour e-book reader. His Master's Voice is now offering the View Quest BookBox for £80 online, or £99 in store. Said tablet's colour screen has a resolution of 480 x 800, but no touch capability, it seems. There's 2Gb of on-board storage, but …
Cheap tablets are flooding the market right now, disguised under all sorts of brand names but never labeled with the actual manufacturer's name because that would cause you to think; "who?" or "oh that company that makes shit tablets".
Spend the extra £30 on a kindle and you'll have a well engineered product that does what it says on the box. There's no reason to cheap out on an ebook reader when a day's minimum wage will earn you the extra it would cost to buy the genuine article.
Since when did minimum wage imply that you could live life to the full and buy anything you wanted?
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A Kindle is hardly an essential purchase. It's a luxury. Anyone thinking of buying one /ought/ to be earning enough to make it 'less than a days pay'.
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I'm not trying to knock the poor sods stuck on that paltry pay. Just trying to bring a little realism back into the discussion. If you're paid a shit wage you ought to accept that some goods and services will be out of your reach. That's life. Very few people can buy anything and everything their heart desires.
I didn't say that people on minimum wage buy or should buy ebook readers, I said that the difference in price between a no-name ebook reader and a good one is roughly equivalent to 1 days minimum wage.
It is a factually correct statement.
If you're buying an ebook reader, you probably do earn more than the minimum, which is why I made the point in the first place - it is a trivial price difference. If you can afford £80 on a luxury, why can't you afford £110 (for something twice as good)?
Maybe I didn't make the point as well as I should have.
They're trying to sell what is effectively a cheap, no-name PMP as an eBook reader, when it only lasts 6 hours? Compared to a kindle which is built from the ground up and whose battery life can be measured in days or even weeks rather than hours, exactly what you need from a reader.
Next they'll be strapping a battery to an iMac and calling it portable.
There's a place for such reader specifications. Most people don't have six hours during their their travel to work time and working day for six hours of reading - so run it off power supply most of time at home.
Problem is that as sold it does not have guarantee that it will be able to use all DRM-ebooks and you also need a computer to download them.
Compared to an Orange San Francisco (ZTC Blade) moblie phone, also WVGA (800x480) capacitive OLED screen - on which Kindle DRM-ebook can be directly installed, and you don't need a separate computer to get the books from Amazon, it's extremely poor value. Use either 3G or WiFi if available, and get lots of Android features, as well as extra hardware such as sat-nav and a 3G phone, for 99GBP.
Although compared to some e-ink ebook readers which also need a PC to download ebooks, this is fair value at current prices being charged.
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