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$13 Txtr Beagle Ebook Reader To Sell For $69
Nate the greatest writes "Remember that really cheap 5" ereader that everyone was talking about back in October? It turns out that the price was too good to be true. Txtr, maker of the beagle ereader, has confirmed today that the beagle will be coming to the US market in the near future. But it's not going to cost $13. Instead this ereader will cost $69. It seems that txtr isn't having much luck selling the beagle to telecoms (where it was going to be marketed as a smartphone companion device), so they have instead decided to try to sell it in the retail trade, where it will have to directly compete against the Kindle. That is going to be a problem because the beagle is much less capable than the Kindle, even though it costs the same. The beagle won't work without a companion Android app which is needed to transfer files to the beagle over Bluetooth. That app requires Android 4.0 or above."
Ruff.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I hope they make enough of them that when the product fails, they'll be able to sell them off cheap. Assuming it's easy to jailbreak, there may be uses for it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
From the linked article:
"As for price, the 10 to 20 euros mentioned before is the subsidized price; I don’t know what the actual retail will be. If you want the lower price you will need to contact a cell network which carries it and buy it from them – with contract, probably."
So it was only a $13 ereader in the same sense that this is a $0.01 cellphone.
It really doesn't take a lot of power to read an eBook. Some of us have been doing it since the Palm days (for reference I had no problem reading eBooks on a 4MB Palm IIIx, which used a 16 Mhz low power SoC version of the CPU that powered the Apple Lisa).
Reading the specs for the device it seems that its 4 GB of storage are used to hold 4 bit uncompressed bitmaps - the companion app must render each page as a bitmap, send it to the device by bluetooth and then the device just dumps it on the screen with no processing power at all. That would seem to be the 'cost savings': take out the CPU and RAM and replace it with a simple 8 bit controller linking BlueTooth, flash and display, or at least that must have been the original sales pitch before anyone actually sat down to design it.
By comparison a $30 photo frame contains a CPU powerful enough to decode JPG files fast enough to display them as a slide show. That's more powerful then the Palm at half the cost of the Beagle. Part of that is because the cheap ARM CPU inside costs under $2 and has all the power you could need.
I think the simple truth is that 80-90% of the material cost of the Beagle (and it's competitors like the entry level Kindle, Nook, Kobo models) probably comes from the eInk screen and the NAND memory. There just wasn't a huge savings to be had by eliminating the CPU and RAM. They seem to have saved $10 after markup over their competitors (who not only have CPUs but touch screens and rechargable batteries as well). This seems like a pie in the sky sales pitch that wasn't aborted as soon as they discovered the cost savings where not there.
You are old fashioned.
A good e-reader only needs to be charged every month or two (thanks to Lithium batteries), and is using micro usb, so you do not need a charger, cause if you are gone from home for more than a couple of weeks, you might have your cell phone charger or a laptop or something with you, anyways.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Sometimes I wonder what kind of asshole would make a device so useless and restricted and then charge so much for it. But then I think, why not raise the price by two hundred dollars, make it white and then it will sell like plastic hotcakes.
P.T. Barnum was right; there's one born every second.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Had it actually allowed them to hit their price point, it would have been a lot less nuts. As it is, I'm not sure why they are even bothering to ship(maybe they had some already in the warehouse?)
More generally, it sounds like their plan was part sensible, part gamble: The sensible part is that, by requiring the companion device, they did get to cut the cost and power consumption(runs off a AA or two, less demanding CPU/RAM, no wifi, etc.) The gamble: that telcos would take the 'bluetooth only, requires smartphone' restriction as a virtue and subsidize the price further. Without that, the device still has a few technical advantages; but is only slightly cheaper than a full ebook device, and without the economies of scale that the incumbents get.
The architecture of this device is just slightly ahead of its time. It is, literally, a secondary display for a primary computing device. Electronic ink is optimal for reading when there is enough ambient light, so it would be much better than reading a book on a cell phone (plus the screen size is larger too). However, there are two places where this would be the killer app, and neither are mainstream yet: Google Glasses, and the iWatch. Both of those are wearable computers, but they both have sub-optimal displays. That's where an external display would be extremely useful. It would make a whole lot of sense to just extend your existing wearable computer into an ebook reader, instead of having to carry (and thus synchronize / manage data / etc) a discreet device.
Imagine - you have your Txtr in your hand, or simply propped up on a little stand or laying on your lap as you read. To turn the page, you just give your wrist (the one your iWatch is on) a little flick, and the page turns. Pretty much optimal.
This really is the future. Your iWatch or Google Glasses will be your primary computing device for everything. Want to watch a movie at home? It simply outputs wirelessly to your TV (with an Apple TV box attached). Want to browse the internet? Use an external display that looks like an iPad, but that is merely a display and touchscreen. Want to read an ebook? Grab an eInk screen. Got a lot of typing to do? Whip out your bluetooth keyboard. I predict devices in a laptop form factor (including touch screen) that is nothing more than an I/O device for your wearable computer.
Better known as 318230.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of asshole would make a device so useless and restricted and then charge so much for it. But then I think, why not raise the price by two hundred dollars, make it white and then it will sell like plastic hotcakes.
How is the iPad "restricted" compared to a Kindle? (since that's obviously what you're alluding to)
Amazon has a Kindle app, Amazon Instant Video app, and a Cloud Player app, meaning the iPad can access all the same content as the Kindle Fire, plus all content from Apple's iBookstore and iTunes media store. You can read PDFs on an iPad as well without having to send your documents to Amazon electronically first, as well as read other non-DRMed formats.
And if you're going to talk about how Kindle's OS is based on oh-so-open Android, or how easy it is to root a Kindle to install some version of Linux, save it. It's great you're interested in that stuff but honestly 90% of the market has zero interest in doing stuff with their device the restrictions on their tablet's ecosystem have anything to do with. The tablet is by design a consumer device. As long as folks can surf the web, watch their videos, play their music and play Angry Birds there's nothing defective about the system from their point of view.
I didn't think that was possible. The Nook is a better ebook reader than both. I can actually read and transfer PDF files to a Nook with a USB cable.
Anybody who thinks a tablet screen is a good replacement for an e-Ink screen has never seen an e-Ink screen or never read more than a few dozen pages at a time.
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Idiot alert.
As in, I never said the iPad was better. They are one and the same. Both devices made to steer their audiences towards their respective content crops by design. But it's a simple fact an iPad lets you eat from both fields, and the Kindle tablet does not (that's not Amazon's fault obviously).
The ways the Amazon Kindle Fire is superior in geek minds is ways most consumers -- and by extension, the marketplace -- don't care. Raise the Kindle to the same price as an iPad and you'll see how much "Open" is worth to the sheeple.