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By David Rothman

imageWhy isn’t this $130 handheld with a seven-inch color screen being touted for texty e-books, not just for multimedia cooking lessons and the like?

And are $20 multimedia "books" the only ones that Photoco‘s new miBook can display? How about Mobipocket books? Or, gasp, nonproprietary standards such as ePub or HTML or ASCII? And are Photoco and partners, such as the Food Network and ParentsTV, hoping that the content will subsidize the hardware? As claimed in the ballyhoo, or at least Gizmodo’s repro of it, the display is a "New advanced TFT." No info appears on screen res and battery life. Maybe there are some negatives, then; who knows? Perhaps an inadequate interface for e-books? Is the miBook just a jazzed-up PhotoShare device? At any rate, the miBook is to be on sale through major outlets ranging from HSN to Circuit City—in fact here’s the related CC page.

K-12 possibilities?

imageimageWhether or not the miBook is an e-book-fit gizmo, it makes me wonder how suitable would be gadgets in this general category for applications such as K-12. Don’t kids love color and multimedia? Beyond that, must every new e-reader gizmo have an E Ink screen? How about the legions of e-book enthusiasts who still like good old-fashioned LCDs—including romance readers, some of whom might enjoy the multimedia, for which E Ink won’t work right now? I just hope that the miBook people won’t repeat the mistake of the Pepper Pad folks and play down old-fashioned e-books. Give customers both e-books and multimedia if possible.

imageRelated: New York Times article on the Photoco machine. Like Gizmodo, the Times focuses on the female-related apps, but the CircuitCity image suggests that Photoco is really going after both sexes. Maybe with separate packaging, even? Yep. See image to left.

Also of interest on the hardware front: More publicity on the double-paneled e-reader being developed by researchers at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. Yawn. We’ve covered this topic before, complete with a discussion by TeleBlog readers on two screens vs. one. Drop by and join in. Oh, and doesn’t the OLPC XO-2 have double-screen capability?

 And speaking of hardware debates: Sony’s amnesia, -in forgetting to announce wireless for the Sony Reader, assuming it’s planned anyway—a quick summary of a Mike Cane item on the company’s network strategy. Hey, Mike, maybe Sony just doesn’t want to telegraph any punches to Amazon. Who knows?

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