On a little different note... I have always been interested in a color e-Ink reader. I have considered various options.
First I guess I should mention what I want it to be used for.
- Obviously, I have already mentioned using it for map and cue sheet navigation as one thing. That requires good battery life since it wants to be on all day.
- Another use is field guides. I have a small fortune invested in paper field guides. They are great, but they have one big problem they are big and heavy. If I go out mushroom hunting, even just my mushroom books would be way more than I want to carry. Even just my one favorite for the area is a big book. Then when i get out there I may see a bird i want to look up, or may want to identify a tree, or a snake, or whatever. If there is a good connection for the phone a google search might suffice, but wouldn't it be nice to have all of those familiar field guides at your finger tips? Having the equivalent of 50+ pounds of field guides in an 8 ounce package would be awesome. Of course that would mean spending a small fortune to but the ebook versions of all of the field guides I already bought in paper. It galls me that they charge pretty much the full price for the intellectual property thay I alreaddy bought. I figure that yes I should pay something for the conversion to e-format, but not all that much. It ought to be a more nomnal fee for those who have purchased the paper book. These days folks are pretty likely to have records of purchases so proof of purchase is likely to be easy.
- Obviously normal reading is another use.
Early on I bought a Kindle Fire on impulse. I hated it. It didn't really do anything well. I hated the interface. It was a poor reader and a poor tablet. I probably should have returned it or resold it while it was still worth something.
A tablet (chromebook?) is a possible solution. I really like my Chromebook and could see forcing it into use, but for navigation battery life, while good may not be enough in all cases. It might run out of battery some really long days unless I either turned it off for some portions of the day or charged at some point in the day between riding and reading. Some extra battery capacity would need to be carried in the form of a power wallet if charging wasn't available every day at some point. It might work out for throwing in my day pack for local hiking, canoeing, kayaking, and so on for guide books and field guides. The problem with that is that I haven't been willing to spend $$$ to buy all those guidebooks in e format.
The color eReaders require that you remove the DRM to load books from amazon or other sources with drm. Possibly a problem if you want to buy books mid tour. Also I figure that I'd spend over $300 for a Pocketbook InkPad Color, E-Book Reader and then a bundle on guidebooks. I would probably be able be into it for $1k total (reader and books) pretty quickly if I really started buying all the guide books that caught my eye.