Content Source Quality

As the old expression goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Only fixing something looks to be what Amazon and Barnes & Noble are doing with young tablets which burnish their stable of e-readers beyond e-ink and into an completely new arena still dominated by the iPad.

In late weeks we regarded the unveiling of Amazon’s Kindle Flaming and Barnes & Noble’s Corner Tablet, a faster/lighter/smarter version of the discounted, year-old Nook Color. With the high-end becoming even higher it’s instantly possible to earnings equally short equally $80 for Amazon’s entry-level Kindle e-reader and as much equally $250 for a Nook Tablet, with heap of other options in between.

In other words, e-readers experience become hence wide accepted that there is room for flavors and cost points to exist all over the map, only alike there are a multitude of iPods when there was erstwhile entirely one.

But does the reading public really motivation what isn’t therefore much an improvement on the e-ink reader just an endeavor to eat a number of Apple’s lunch? Is it confusing – or clarifying – to get tablet readers from two of the major innovators in the e-ink revolution?

Jeff Bezos made it clear in an interview with Wired that, as far as he is concerned, the Amazon Flame tablet is clarifying. “They’re travelling to buy both,” he said Steven Levy, when necessitated whether his customers would favor the e-ink lector he had previously evangelized to the exclusion of totally else. A year earlier he told Levy that tablets and e-ink readers preached to non-overlapping choirs. “It’s a different audience,” Bezos said. “We’re designing for people who want to read.”

That was then. This is now.

Ok, developing relatively inexpensive tablets as e-readings devices with benefits isn’t necessarily a bad thought when the undisputed leader is $500 and, not numeration applied or late models, isn’t likely to be99 sold for less any time soon. Afterward all, cypher has yet to arrived up with something that can finally one bout against Apple’s tablet, much less exist believed an iPad killer.

The latest casualty – you had to see this coming – is the $200 Playbook. That would be the $500 Inquiry in Motion Blackberry Playbook, now deep discounted, at least for the holidays. Hewlett-Packard besides wanted to accept the world by tempest with the TouchPad, only that device’s 49 days on the market created Kim Kardashian’s marriage seem like a lifetime commitment. And let’s not eve gently taunt Motorola, whose Xoom sold fewer units in Q3 than Apple sold iPads each day in that reporting period.

There is a ground why altogether these companies are trying to build a splash in Apple’s swimming pool evening if it seems in vain – the tablet market that Apple revealed is vast and will entirely have bigger. These companies get no pick only to dive in. The delicious irony is that the nearly credible iPad competitors are coming not from computer companies, merely retailers who understand that it’s not most the device just what the device can deliver.

My ain receive with these two tablets over the past few days has reinforced my initial impression that they do not represent the succeeding nifty leap in portable electronic readers. Neither are they likely to pass Apple agita. In a world where tablets experience captured the public’s imagination it might look strange if the e-reading powers didn’t add them to their lines.

But it’s a potentially dangerous game. If tablets are marketed equally high-end reading devices, then the real breakthrough technology that was e-ink gets sullied by what is, frankly, a relatively inferior tablet experience. And if they are posed as inexpensive slates – oh yeah, they have apps for reading books, magazine and newspapers, um, only similar the iPad – then these companies are positioning more than a number of reputation on the job as they hurtle down a highway already littered with the wrecks of other tablet wannabes.

It’s either a large mistake or an incremental side business, merely I don’t see how these tab-lites – or is tween-lets a amend description? – become the natural successor to e-ink.

The other irony, of course, is that they may be completely near turning not the third device – the thing you’d perhaps view carrying equally considerably as a smartphone and tablet – only your household’s instant tablet, alternatively of another iPad. Now, that would be amazing.