Openmoko unveiled their latest product, last Tuesday: The WikiReader. It's a palm-sized touchscreen-LCD device that could, I suppose, accurately be called an `e-book reader'. There was a suprising flurry of negative of bad publicity that followed the launch, but it all seems to come from the amature wanna-be pundits and consists of:
... and they all seem to be... completely missing the point. The `just buy an iPhone' people are missing the significance of `something that actually works everywhere', `something that's only $100', and `something that doesn't need to be recharged every day'. An iPhone app isn't going to run for an entire year on one charge, is going to cost $200+ (as an initial investment... plus $100/month), and will work slowly, intermittently, or not at all depeding on the quality of wireless data-link available (or even the availability of any wireless data-link at all--I've spent plenty of time, recently, in places where a weak and intermittent GPRS link was a luxury). Yes, it'd be easy to just write an iPhone app to read Wikipedia--it'd be even easier to just use a desktop computer with a web-browser and a mouse and keyboard. The `why would you want anything but the latest information' people have managed to forget that there's plenty of information that's not just ephemera; I'd even hazard to say that the bulk of the world's information exists outside the scope of `news', and that there are still plenty of people interested in learning durable information. The people who complain that Om is `ripping off Wikipedia' somehow managed to miss that the entire point of the Wikipedia project has always been to create freely-reusable encyclopedia-data, even back when it was called "Nupedia". The `why would I want to carry another device' people are... either people who don't have any friends who ever call them, or people who never `really engage' in the activities that they're claiming can have their devices supplanted by a telephone. They forget that there are still those of us who `just want the phone to be a phone', and there are those of us who still consider it rude to ditch someone who's actually invested themselves in giving us facetime because we'd rather talk to someone else who hasn't. [Reply] |
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