Comments on: Creative multimedia Kindle rival and Motorola Droid smartphone—plus Nook may go global next year

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:02:27 +0000

No disagreement, but the Archos is a full personal computer *and* it has a touchscreen. Cortext-based smartbooks might hit $199 with 10in screens and SSDs but I don’t think the slate versions with touch will go that low out of the gate.
One of the virtues of an x86 slate like the Archos is universal book compatibility regardless of DRM; Adobe, Kindle, Mobi, eReader and Lit. And for educational users, access to content generation apps and journaling and note-taking apps like OneNote. That’s a lot of functionality for a sub 2-lb device.

Still it is pretty clear that come 2010, eink will *not* be the only path to ebook readers, especially for the textbook market where features will matter more than price. the enabling tech is in place now; all this needed is for the hardware guys to step up.

It is still early in the game; the fun stuff is yet to come.

By: pond

pond — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:00:18 +0000

@ Felix: the Archos 9 has a $499 price tag, but a smartbook (ARM-powered netbook) with a 10″ screen can retail for $199. If Creative goes with a 7″ screen, or 8″, they might well undercut that.

In other points, I agree with you: this is basically a company with a solution in search of a problem. They have the Zii, and they want people to buy Zii’s and build products around them; failing in this, Creative must make the products themselves. So, how about a media player or ebook reader? ‘Yeah, we can do that!’

By next spring, we may well be flooded with ARM Cortex-8 based slates and smartbooks; the Cortex-8 is more powerful than the Zii; next fall or spring 2011 we will start seeing Cortex-9 based devices.

A lot of wonderful choices will be coming for ebook reading devices. The future looks good. I do hope Creative can compete with the Zii-platform as well — the more the merrier1

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:24:42 +0000

The Creative MediaBook is a good development but frankly there’s a bit less there than meets the eye.
First, of course, is the fact that the news is just a statement of intent; Creative intends to do something in the ebook space sometime in the near future.
Second, is that the device, much like the Apple tablet, will not be an ebook reader that plays media files but rather a media player that displays ebooks. Screen will doubtlessly be color; LCD or Oled, battery life will be limited compared to eink readers. Pricing may end up dangerously close to the tablet/netbook space now inhabited by the Archos 9 and other UMPCs and aspiring webpads. Going to get crowded in that area next year.
If you look at the Creative Zii effort it becomes clear that Creative has committed a lot of resources to their Zii processor but is coming a tad late to the party; NVIDIA’s comparable Tegra is already out and selling in volume in the ZUNE HD and moving to a range of cellphones next year. Their flagship Egg media player is stalled on the launching pad and starting to look dated, hardware-wise.
In that context, the ebook announcement looks more like a fallback or redirection than a foreward-thinking move. They are scrambling to make something out of the Zii investment.
Which is good; they do have good hardware designers, it’ll likely bring new ideas to market. But Creative Media Players have generally suffered on the software side, with minor but annoying flaws. So software is going to be a big issue and content availability, outside their home market, is going to be a sticking point.
eBooks are not like music or video; consumers can’t really generate their own out of existing delivery channels so the content delivery pattners are going to be critical and, in the past, Creative products have had issues working with content partners (the likes of Napster and Rhapsody).
Competition is good, diversity is good, but Creative faces a steep climb here.