As I continue to wind down Speeds and Feeds, I picked ruggedness as the topic for part 3.
In part 2 of this wrap-up series, I on Tuesday discussed reliability, suggesting that an increasing portion of the transistor budget in personal computers should be used to avoid, detect, and recover from hardware, software, and data errors.
Ruggedness, the ability of a PC to survive adverse physical conditions, complements reliability by further increasing the practical availability of a PC to do useful work.
As with efficiency in power management (part 1's topic), this is an area where PCs can learn a lot from cell phones. I expect my cell phone to continue operating normally unless it's physically damaged--and I expect that it will not be damaged even by fairly rough handling.
PCs, by comparison, are pretty fragile. I know that if I drop my laptop, even if it falls only a few feet to a carpeted floor, there's a good chance it will be damaged. The LCD could crack, the case could bend, the hard disk could crash, the battery latch could break. In fact, I've managed to do all of these things to one or more of the 15-plus laptops I've owned and used since 1984.
Not all laptops need to be rugged; for example, some laptops are used as small-footprint desktop computers and rarely moved at all, so ruggedness would be an unnecessary expense.
There are many situations, however, where greater ruggedness is obviously valuable: laptops for students (even in a classroom), field photographers, mechanics, factory workers, the military, and so on.
Some companies already make rugged systems for these applications, but demand for such systems is low, and they require a lot of additional engineering. The combination of small quantities and extra design work leads to very high prices; it isn't unusual to see rugged laptops with the features of a typical low-cost notebook selling for $4,000 or more.
There have been very few standard mass-market personal computers with any real degree of ruggedization. In the old days of 8-bit microcomputers, some consumer-oriented systems such as the popular Atari 400 and Commodore 64 were fairly robust due to heavy plastic cases designed to survive casual home use, but these weren't portable machines.
In the mid-1990s, Dell's Latitude line earned the favor of serious road warriors in part due to a high degree of ruggedness, if only in comparison with other mainstream laptops. Sometimes these Latitude models were the only survivors of annual notebook torture tests run by PC Computing magazine.
Panasonic's Toughbook line took over later in that decade as the first truly rugged notebooks. (I have a Toughbook 25 myself; alas, it's dead.) It's easy to see how these machines differ from ordinary notebooks: heavy magnesium casings with stiffening ribs to resist twisting, shock-mounted hard disks, water- and dust-resistant connectors, and so on. They aren't suitable for most people, though.
Three trends are bringing rugged systems closer to the mainstream today.
First, portable PCs are becoming increasingly more integrated into our daily lives. As power efficiency improves to the point that we can run them all day, portable machines will be even more important to us. But if these devices aren't rugged, we won't really be able take them with us as often as we'd like.
A simplified view of a small ruggedized notebook that I designed in 2005.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)Second, the components themselves are getting smaller, lighter, and in some cases more rugged. It's possible to buy a decent dual-core CPU that doesn't need a huge heat sink. Solid-state disk drives are a huge step forward; and with 128GB of capacity requiring only 32 flash chips, they can be much smaller than traditional hard disks. Smaller, lighter components are easier to support and protect.
Third, materials science is making a lot of progress. The glass used in LCDs is much better today than it was a decade ago--better able to absorb shock and flex a little when needed. (It's actually a little scary just how flexible the displays of some super-thin notebooks are.) New chassis materials such as milled aluminum and CFRP (carbon-fiber reinforced plastic) can produce very strong machines, though in most consumer systems they're used to reduce weight instead. In the near future, carbon nanotube-reinforced materials will become available in commercial quantities; while expensive, they will be very strong.
These new materials can be used in new ways to make very rugged machines that don't have to cost dramatically more than existing systems.
In 2005, as a practical exercise, I designed a small notebook with a milled titanium case and a novel mechanical design that provided exceptional stiffness. With a fixed battery and few external connectors (another improvement enabled by new technology), it would have provided Toughbook-like ruggedness in a very small and convenient package.
That design didn't go anywhere, but there are plenty of designers out there. I expect that someone will develop something similar before too long.
The current Netbook craze is directing a lot of attention to ruggedness as a design goal. These machines are small, light, and obviously portable, but they tend to be cheaply made and more fragile than many consumers would like. Adapting these designs to more rugged enclosures would add significant cost, but I think there's a good market for such machines.
After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.
Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.
Today, the topic is energy efficiency.
Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.
Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't fully consistent with the needs of laptop users.
Advances in process technology and CPU design have greatly improved the power efficiency of modern microprocessors when they're running. This improvement is most visible at the highest performance levels.
Over the last few years, dual-core laptop processors have gone from maximum speeds of roughly 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz without consuming any more power. The newest quad-core chips provide much more aggregate performance in a similar power envelope.
This improvement in operating efficiency is great for gaming, mobile video editing, and a few other applications. But it's not very meaningful for most consumers.
What the rest of us need is non-operating efficiency, the ability of the laptop to consume very little power when it isn't doing much because that's what our laptops are usually doing.
We need laptops that can do nothing--more efficiently.
I've been looking at the newest crop of ultra low-power laptops. Based on published benchmark data, they consume an average of 8W to 10W of power when doing essentially nothing (what we call "idle power"). Even the best of them consumes about 6W of power at all times, getting 10 hours of battery life from a 60WH battery. Maybe 2W of that is spent keeping the display on. The other 4W to 8W is just wasted by the CPU and other motherboard circuitry.
When your laptop isn't doing much--for example, when you're typing in your word processor--it's using only slightly more CPU performance than your cell phone is when you're texting. Your cell phone consumes very little power to do this meager amount of work, usually no more than 0.25W or so for the CPU and its support chips. The corresponding elements of your laptop, however, may consume 50 times as much power under similar conditions.
Some of this difference is inevitable; your laptop has wider data buses, more and faster RAM, and so on. Nevertheless, your laptop motherboard could be designed to idle along on 1W or so.
That would give you a total system-level power consumption of around 3W--half the power of today's most energy-efficient laptops and about one-quarter the power of an average machine. Because there's a relationship between peak CPU speed and idle power, today's fastest laptops consume 20W or more at idle. With more energy-aware designs, these systems could see even greater proportional reductions.
In other words, adopting more aggressive methods for reducing idle power could easily double battery life across the board, and some systems would see much bigger improvements.
This is not merely a quantitative improvement. Consider what happens when your laptop can comfortably operate for 20 hours with the display on, or 60 hours with the display off.
For one thing, it never has to go to sleep. Your cell phone never really goes to sleep, and that's a great part of its value. Your laptop can have this same cell phone operating model.
Closing the lid should turn off the display, but the machine should keep running. It can stay connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi or 3G, periodically download your new e-mail messages, watch that eBay auction, and do whatever else you need it to do...all the time. Just plug it in to recharge while you're asleep. (If the laptop is in your briefcase, it'll have to slow down a lot to keep from consuming too much power, but that's easily managed.)
When you're ready to start using the machine actively again, it shouldn't take any longer to turn the display on again than it does to physically open the lid. Think "always on," not "instant on."
All of this is possible with today's technology, but nobody's doing it. I think one of the reasons we don't see this usage model is that laptop buyers don't know to ask for it. Incremental improvements produce adequate sales figures with each new laptop generation, and everyone figures that's good enough.
But mark my words: the first full-function laptop that works like a cell phone--always running, always connected, always ready--is going to hit the market like a sledgehammer. Everything else is going to seem obsolete overnight.
It's been years since the concept of a digital convergence was seriously debated. Today, it's rare to see a single-function electronic device.
Digital still cameras can record video, and camcorders can take still photos. Even cheap cell phones include cameras. There are Web browsers in cell phones, cameras, televisions, and digital picture frames. In fact, it seems like it's only a matter of time before everything with a battery or power cord will be connected to the Internet.
So it's a little startling to see a new gizmo that does nothing but display text, especially when that text comes from a preprogrammed memory card...and it's extraordinary when the text came from the Internet in the first place.
Openmoko's WikiReader is a standalone Wikipedia browser with a touch screen and the complete text of Wikipedia on a memory card.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)I was initially incredulous when I heard about WikiReader, a $99 device from Openmoko designed solely for the purpose of reading Wikipedia articles. How useful could such a thing really be, I wondered.
The device, which was released about two weeks ago, displays the text only. The user interface couldn't be much simpler. Pushing the power button boots the device in less than two seconds. There's a search button for looking up individual articles, a history button for recalling previously viewed articles, and a button to open a random article from the collection. A parental-control feature allows blocking mature content (imperfectly, as I quickly learned).
And that's about it. It doesn't display images, references, discussion pages, or links to outside Web sites. (The latter point is reasonable enough because the device can't access the Internet anyway.) In fact, all 3 million Wikipedia articles viewable on WikiReader ship on a memory card in the device.
The content on the card is just a snapshot of the active Wikipedia database, complete with whatever errors or vandalism may have been present at the moment each article was copied. But overall, it's still an impressive amount of useful information. (Openmoko will offer quarterly updates that can be downloaded for free, or delivered on new memory cards twice per year for an annual cost of $29.)
Not long ago, distributing Wikipedia this way would have been impractical. Even today, an 8GB Micro SD card is a sub-$15 item in wholesale channels, which is a big chunk of the $99 retail price. Saving money here, however, would have compromised the usefulness of the device. (On the unit I tested, 4.18GB out of 7.4GB was actually used; perhaps some foreign-language versions of Wikipedia could fit on smaller, cheaper cards.)
The other elements of WikiReader show similar trade-offs. In an e-mail exchange, Openmoko President Sean Moss-Pultz told me that the Wikireader design began with the chips commonly used for electronic dictionaries--for example, Epson's S1C33E07 microcontroller. But whereas such devices usually have small screens and physical keyboards, allowing them to hit very low price points (e.g., this $21 device from Royal), Openmoko chose to go with a larger screen that displays about 13 lines of proportionally spaced text--roughly 40 characters per line, 80 words at a time.
Further, WikiReader has a capacitive touch screen, enabling the use of a virtual on-screen keyboard rather than a separate physical keyboard. The touchscreen--equipped with a tempered glass face that resists scratches better than plastic--also handles touch-drag scrolling and selecting links to other Wikipedia pages. As a result, WikiReader is smaller than most electronic dictionaries, but has a larger screen and is easier to use. (Click for more details on the WikiReader hardware platform.)
WikiReader is also more expensive than most electronic dictionaries, but again, the higher price was essential if WikiReader was to accomplish its mission. That mission is simple to express: make Wikipedia accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. At $99, this device may not be affordable by everyone in the world. On the other hand, it's a lot more affordable than even the least expensive laptops, including the original "$100 laptop" from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, which is still priced at $199 two years after it first went on sale.
Although the comparison is hardly fair, it's still relevant since the number of parents and schools in the world that can afford a $99 WikiReader is a lot larger than the number that can afford a laptop plus the necessary supporting infrastructure such as an Internet connection and power source. (By comparison, Openmoko says that two AAA alkaline batteries--cheap and widely available--will run the WikiReader for up to a year, and that's the only recurring cost to keep the unit operating.)
I expect the cost of manufacturing WikiReader will come down slowly over time, and the product itself may become more valuable as third-party developers begin to work with the WikiReader's open-source software. Openmoko began as an open-source cell phone project, and while WikiReader has nothing in common with that earlier work, the company still has some visibility in the open-source developer community.
WikiReader isn't quite easy enough for a cat to use.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)The WikiReader software load is very simple. There's no OS, not even Linux; just one application to run the Wikipedia browser, for example. All of the software, along with the compressed Wikipedia database, is provided on the Micro SD card. There are some diagnostic programs, and there's even a simple four-function calculator "Easter egg" that comes up in response to a History-Power button combination.
The lack of a full OS is a matter of necessity, but this is the kind of necessity from which virtue is created. The near-instant boot time and ultra-low power consumption couldn't be matched with any flavor of Linux. Software development isn't as easy as it would be for a Linux PC application, but then, the device is simple, so it wouldn't be too difficult to develop new functionality for the WikiReader hardware. I'd like to see the usual combination of dictionary, thesaurus, and language translation found in many other devices, along with a more-advanced calculator.
In the meantime, WikiReader does the one thing it was meant to do, and I think that's good enough.
(My thanks to Pat Meier-Johnson of Pat Meier Associates for bringing WikiReader to my attention. Also, thanks to Openmoko for providing a review unit and answering my questions.)
I'm very impressed by the Nook, Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader. It's clear B&N has studied Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle very carefully.
The Nook has almost all of the major features of both product lines, plus a few more, with few competitive disadvantages. B&N has also followed Amazon's lead on support services. The Nook has a very good online e-book store as well as applications to support e-book reading on Macs, Windows machines, and smartphones.
(Credit:
Barnes & Noble)
The Nook doesn't ship until the end of November, but here's what I found most significant from the announcement and the pages at nook.com:
Industrial design
I think the Nook is attractive and well-designed. It looks better than the Kindle 2, but not as good as Sony's Reader Touch Edition, which offers a larger screen in a smaller form factor. Also, Sony's forthcoming Reader Daily Edition is only slightly larger than the Nook, but offers a much larger screen.
Secondary color display
This feature surprised me. It seems expensive and insufficiently functional for what must be a significant added cost. The low resolution of this display (480 x 144, according to a CNET blog post) means it won't be useful for much beyond the basic user-interface features B&N has already described: book covers, menus, and a keyboard for note-taking. (Although I should note for the record that while B&N says "Its full-color touchscreen encourages you to bookmark, add notes, and highlight passages," I haven't found a photo on the company Web site depicting the virtual keyboard shown in some of the pre-release images. Perhaps that's one of the features still under development.)
By comparison, the secondary color screen built into the Alex e-book reader from Spring Design, shown in another recent CNET story, is large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it's also large enough to be very much in the way, leading to an awkward device. Spring Design and B&N need to make up their minds-- are they making e-book readers or something else?
... Read moreGoogle is developing an operating system of its own, based on the company's Chrome browser and intended primarily for use in low-cost Netbooks. Now I'll tell you why I think Google is doing it.
Like any other commercial enterprise, Google is trying to make money. No secret there. But Google doesn't make money the way other computer software companies do.
(Credit:
Google)
Microsoft, for example, makes money mostly by selling software (and a few hardware products) to computer users. There are two sides to this plan. Microsoft wants to make computers more valuable, so buyers will spend more of their income on computers; and it wants to increase the share it receives of that budget.
What makes Google unusual is that it wants a share of a different budget: the time people spend in front of their computers. Google makes money by displaying ads on a small part of the display while people view Internet content on the rest. Not all the time, of course, but the opportunity is there, and Google's multibillion-dollar revenue shows how well this strategy can work.
Turning the Chrome browser into the Chrome OS is technically straightforward, though of course it'll take a lot of work. A browser already has most of the key elements of any OS: application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow application software to display content and accept user input, store and retrieve data from mass storage, communicate over the Internet, and so on. Google will have to add a driver model and some other things that don't exist in a browser, but it can learn from how these things are done in existing operating systems, and possibly even borrow much of the code directly from Linux; there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
Existing operating systems such as Windows support a far wider variety of programming languages and provide far more services than Chrome OS will, but Chrome will probably be plenty good enough for Netbooks. (Personally, I don't think Netbooks are good for much, and many Netbook buyers seem to agree as shown by the huge volume of refurbished systems now available from remarketers like Woot.com.)
CNET News Poll
So, Google is after your time, not your money. It can try to get more of your time in the same ways Microsoft tries to get more of your money. Will the Chrome OS increase the time people spend in front of the computer? No, quite the opposite. There will inevitably be less to do on a Chrome OS computer than on a Mac or Windows machine. Buying a Chrome-based Netbook means giving up the chance to run most Windows games, Apple's iLife suite, and other popular software.
But for Google, the key is this: once you've got a Chrome system, Google's in charge of ALL the time you spend with it.
I don't think that's good enough, and it looks like Google feels the same way; the company intends to implement the whole Chrome OS environment within the Chrome browser so Linux, Mac and Windows users can also run Chrome applications. This plan is necessary, since Google can't very well hope to muscle aside the incumbents, but it means that Netbook buyers will have no reason to prefer a Chrome-based machine.
Or will they? Linux may be free, but Google can undercut that price if it's willing to cut OEMs in on its ad revenue. In this way, Google could bring to market a subsidized pricing model we usually associate only with 3G-equipped notebooks. Google won't have nearly as much money to throw around as the cell phone operators do--maybe just a few unpredictable dollars per month averaged across all Chrome OS users vs. the reliable $60/month subscription fees associated with 3G cards--but that could still add up. Even a $20 subsidy could amount to 10 percent of the sale price of a cheap Netbook, which could tip the balance in favor of Chrome.
Like I said, it seems to me that Netbooks aren't the ideal platform for this strategy. The Google model can't work as well on a small screen, since users will be reluctant to share what little space they have with Google's ads. But they'll work well enough, and Google has no realistic chance to place Chrome on mainstream notebook and desktop systems except in the same narrow markets where Linux sells today. (And not all of those; for example, Chrome has no shot at the engineering workstation market, where Linux is popular.)
So I'm sure we'll see some number of Chrome OS-based machines on the market in 2010, and then we'll see what happens. My guess is that Chrome will do about as well as Linux has done in the Netbook business: not well. A lot of people will try it, possibly enticed by those lightly subsidized prices and the usual interest in novel computing platforms (the information-technology equivalent of the Coolidge effect, which perhaps could be known as the Glaskowsky effect.)
And then most of those people will return those machines, or give them to their ungrateful children, or just toss them onto a shelf to gather dust, and they won't buy more of the same--at least not until Google spends a few more years building Chrome OS into a fully competitive product, which I'm sure it will do. Google's big enough, and it knows there's a business here. It just won't be ready to take full advantage of the opportunity just yet.
I have tremendous respect for Jerry Lewis. He's a great entertainer, a ferocious intellect, and perhaps the greatest charity fundraiser in history.
I was pleased to see Lewis receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award during the Academy Awards ceremony in February, principally for his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Jerry Lewis accepts the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards.
(Credit: Michael Yada/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)I had no idea that the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon had raised more than $2 billion over the years. There are larger charities, but I don't know any that owe so much to the fundraising efforts of one man.
The technical side of my brain was intrigued to hear that Lewis had received a patent for "video assist" technology--the use of closed-circuit television to allow a film director to review scenes as they're filmed.
It seemed to me the story of Lewis' invention of video assist technology would make a good post for Speeds & Feeds. I figured I'd also be able to mention another famous movie-star patent, Hedy Lamarr's 1942 patent (US 2,292,387) on frequency-hopping communications (as Hedy Kiesler Markey), and Walt Disney's 1940 patent on animation (US 2,201,689).
I ran a Google search for "'Jerry Lewis' patent" and found many references to such a patent, including an article by a Mark Adler of VAIdigital offering the title "Closed Circuit Television Applied to Motion Pictures." Adler said Lewis came up with the idea in 1956 and first used it in 1960 on his first film, "The Bellboy."
An article by Michael Frediani titled "On the Set with Video Assist" from an issue of The Operating Cameraman (then the magazine of what is now the Society of Camera Operators) includes a picture of a video assist system, complete with ... Read more
Disney/Pixar's latest film is being shown in 3D using state-of-the-art Sony projectors in some theaters.
(Credit: Disney/Pixar)I went to an opening-day screening of the new Disney/Pixar film "Up," on Friday. I had a great time and not just because of the movie. There was an interesting technology story, too.
The Camera 7 theater in the Silicon Valley city of Campbell recently installed four new digital cinema projectors. They're the best on the market today: Sony's SRXR220, which lists for about $200,000 with the usual required accessories.
Sony also has a slightly less expensive model, the SRXR210, for smaller screens. What puts these projectors ahead of the competition is their native resolution: 4,096 pixels x 2,160 pixels, a standard known as "4K." That's over four times as many pixels as HDTV, which displays 1,920 pixels x 1,080 pixels.
I wrote about 4K technology back in August 2007 ("After HDTV, what's next?") and predicted that "you'll be seeing it in theaters within the next few years." I'm pleased to say that 4K is ahead of that schedule.
I wrote that post after attending a screening of some of the earliest 4K content at the ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, including "Crossing the Line," a short film by "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson. The Siggraph demonstration also used a Sony projector, the much smaller SRXT105.
I was amazed by the picture quality in that screening, and I'm even more impressed by what I saw from the newer SRXR220. As I wrote in 2007, these projectors create smooth, sharp images using LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) technology, which I think is inherently superior to TI's DLP (Digital Light Processing) micro-mirror chips, which are used in other digital-cinema projectors.
On Friday, we got to see more than just a movie, too. Sony has provided the Camera 7 with a bunch of PlayStation 3 game consoles and configured the projectors to display multiple games up on the big screen so that up to 64 people can play at the same time.
Before the movie, we got to see just one game, Sony's "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue," filling the whole screen. Coincidentally, that's my favorite game on the PS3 (though I must admit to limited experience with that platform since I don't own one), so I was happy with the choice.
Although the PS3's native output is limited to HD resolution, the image quality was very impressive. The movie itself was even better. I don't know what the movie's native resolution was, but it looked great, with bright, saturated colors and good detail in both highlights and shadows.
The movie was presented using RealD's 3D technology, re-branded as Disney Digital 3-D in the advertising for "Up," though the glasses we received were marked RealD as usual. Now that I've seen movies in state-of-the-art theaters using both RealD and Dolby 3D Digital Cinema, I think they're both fairly similar in overall quality.
While I'm on the subject, I'd like to make another comparison: between Sony's 4K technology and the new small-screen "IMAX Digital" theaters that are popping up around the country, generally as one or more screens out of several in a multiplex.
I've seen a couple of movies ("Watchmen" and "Star Trek") in IMAX Digital theaters now, and the quality didn't measure up to my expectations. According to the Wikipedia article on IMAX Digital, these theaters use a pair of HD-resolution (also called 2K) projectors--but I don't think this approach will produce better than HD-equivalent resolution. Two superimposed images can be brighter than one, but the resolution can't be twice as good as a single projector.
In my experience, IMAX Digital theaters fall short of the quality of these Sony 4K projectors...and, of course, they're vastly inferior to real IMAX theaters. Every time I've attended a showing in an IMAX Digital theater, I've heard other customers expressing their disappointment. I don't know why IMAX is diluting its brand this way.
Similarly, I don't know why Sony hasn't established a new brand for these 4K projectors. I know I'm going to be tracking the arrival of this technology in other Silicon Valley theaters, but Sony isn't helping.
Anyway, the new Sony 4K technology is out there. If you can find it, I bet you'll like it.
This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com)But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.
Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.
Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.
This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.
On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.
(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)
For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.
It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.
On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.
At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.
The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.
In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?
But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.
(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)
This is the third part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the second post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news", I described the limitations of the DX for news reading.
The textbook market represents an even greater challenge for the Kindle DX. There's a lot of variety among textbooks. Some textbooks will work well enough on the DX's display, but most, I think, will not.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)I think the key issues here are how each textbook is used, and what kind of illustrations are present in it.
Textbooks that are fundamentally like collections of stories, such as those in sociology, history, and literature, will likely be most suitable for use as e-books. These texts are read sequentially, so that the reading ratio (the time spent reading vs. the time spent finding the next thing to read or waiting for the display to update) can be high, and they can usually be written so as not to rely on complex color illustrations. (Though complex color illustrations are still valuable, and the Kindle DX doesn't support them.)
Texts for the natural and formal sciences will not work so well.
A biology textbook without color is almost inconceivable, except that if you have a Kindle, it's pretty easy to see how that works. Just download the sample for the Kindle edition of Steven Daniel Garber's "Biology: A Self-Teaching Guide".
Right up front, you'll get a hint that all may not be well. The e-book includes a disclaimer: "Due to the nature of digital conversion, some of the images included in this e-book may lack the detail and clarity of the originals."
And indeed, that's true. Much of the fine detail that would be visible in a printed copy of this book is lost here. Remember, textbooks are commonly printed on offset presses with more than ten times the linear resolution of a Kindle display.
And even if a reader were willing to zoom in to see the fine detail on an illustration (and if the Kindle DX allows it, which the earlier Kindle models often don't), the lack of color is utterly crippling. Biology textbooks rely on photomicrographs of cells in which subtle color gradations are essential to understanding the cell structure.
Perhaps some of these figures could be replaced by line drawings carefully crafted to communicate the same facts without relying on color, but some photographs are irreplaceable.
And line drawings have their own problems. I downloaded the Kindle sample version of "History of the Ancient World" by Susan Wise Bauer and looked at the book's maps on my Kindle. Some are fine, but many have notations that are virtually illegible at a normal reading distance, to the point where I can be sure that 50% more linear resolution isn't going to help enough.
For math, science, and engineering, I think the Kindle DX will also be inadequate. I remember studying these subjects, and what I remember about using the textbooks is frequently flipping back and forth through the pages to compare new material to old and find the applicable explanations and formulas when answering review questions at the end of each chapter.
The Kindle DX simply doesn't support page flipping. Backing up twenty pages takes two seconds with a paper textbook, but most of a minute on a Kindle.
Amazon has made deals with several major publishers to bring texts to the Kindle DX, and with several major universities to support the DX in some classes next fall. These are encouraging announcements, but these are just experiments, not evidence of the DX's suitability.
I'll be interested to see whether Amazon, its publishing partners, and these universities initially limit themselves to the low-hanging fruit in history and literature classes, or go after some of the more challenging courses.
Ultimately, I don't think any e-book reader is really the right answer for educational use. The better solution is to adapt textbooks and other educational materials such as exams to notebook computers, which can support more types of content (including full-motion video) and provide valuable interactivity.
And the even better answer, in the long run, is to develop systems that are even more tightly focused on education, with long-life batteries, rugged construction, and specific software and hardware features that aren't generally found in laptop PCs. I've been studying this problem for a long time (since I was in college myself!) and if there's interest, I'll go into more detail in a future post.
As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.
Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)Here are the basic facts:
It's 7.2" wide and 10.4" tall, just a little smaller than I expected. With so many things in our lives adapted to the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, it seems to me that would have been a better target for the DX. (Internationally, A4 paper serves the same purpose at 8.3 x 11.7 inches, so perhaps 8.3 x 11.0 inches would have been a good compromise.)
The DX's monochrome E Ink display is much smaller than I was hoping for, only 9.7" diagonal. Like the original Kindle, much of the space on the front of the unit is occupied by page-turning buttons and a physical keyboard.
The screen has 1,200 x 824 pixels, about the number on the LCD of a 12" Dell Latitude E4200 laptop, so the Kindle DX's linear resolution is significantly higher than that of most notebook displays. However, it's about 10% lower than that of the 6" E Ink display on the Kindle 2 (150 dpi vs. 167 dpi).
As Amazon says, the DX's display is about 2.5 times larger than the Kindle 2's screen. But that's in square inches. In pixels, it's only 50% taller and 37% wider.
That's a key point, I think, because of the markets Amazon says the DX was developed for: newspapers and textbooks. I'll deal with these topics in two subsequent posts ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks").
The Kindle DX does have a few unique advantages over the earlier Kindles. It supports rotation, providing a landscape display mode, a feature long available on Sony's Reader. Also like the Sony Reader, the DX has PDF support. On the Reader, PDF documents support zooming to a certain point, but even when zoomed in all the way in landscape mode, illustrations in PDFs of technical books are often unreadable. I expect the same will be true of the Kindle DX.
Oddly, Amazon isn't retrofitting these features to the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 may lack the position sensor that makes rotation automatic on the Kindle DX, but it could still allow manual rotation. PDF support should be even easier to add.
Perhaps Amazon is holding these features back from the Kindle 2 to promote sales of the DX, but if so, I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Although it isn't particularly a Kindle DX feature, I'll mention something disappointing that I came across while browsing through Amazon's Kindle pages just now. Since the Kindle was launched, users have been able to email documents in various formats such as Word, HTML, PDF, and JPEG to their Kindles to name@kindle.com, where they go through an Amazon server that converts them, if necessary, into a Kindle-friendly format and downloads them automatically to the user's Kindle.
The fee for this super-convenient conversion and download service was ten cents per document. But now, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte. For PDF files and image-rich Word documents that exceed a megabyte in size-- a common situation-- the cost of this convenience has tripled or worse. Fortunately, Amazon still supports the "name@free.kindle.com" method, which results in the converted documents showing up in the user's email, from where they can be manually moved to the Kindle via USB.
I'm surprised that Amazon didn't equip the DX with an improved web browser. As far as I can tell, the DX has the same browser as the Kindle 2. It's still called "experimental," at least. The screen size of the Kindle 2 (800 x 600 pixels) is a little on the small side for effective web browsing, but the Kindle DX's screen is big enough to display almost any web page, especially in landscape mode.
Now, I'll move on to the two new markets for which the Kindle DX was developed. See "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks".
