ethereal.
Myself and many of my friends buy ebooks to read on our pda’s or just peruse onscreen on our computers, it’s boring and the multitasking nature of modern operating systems makes it very much like trying to find a needle on the street in downtown NY in the middle of a working day.
There’s been a few portable prototypes of ebook readers that’ve made it to market, sony being one of the foremost contenders, but still lacking in the ye-olde usability department.
another contender is the amazon project ‘kindle’ which I consider to be the bastard child of every device that has gone tits up since 2001, eerily reminescent of the n-gage & apple 2+ and seemingly packing an immense distaste for usability — ‘distaste’ might be the wrong word, it could also be lack of UxD / IxD schooling — and ambivalence to the goal, which.. would seem to be reading books and surfing the web, and well. texting a great deal.
some hobbyists did get it right with a prototype — not availible to the public aside from schematics — dubbed juicebox;
and oh boy did they ever figure out that an ebook reader doesnt need to be fifty eleven things at once, doing audio output and displaying the text on a readable display is all that’s really needed — note the lack of the kitchen sink.
technorati tags:UxD, Ebooks, usabilitymistakes
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