Year of the Tablet

Numerous technology pundits are predicting 2010 as the year of the electronic tablets – where tablets are generally viewed as E-readers. It’s important to understand how difficult these devices will be to produce, especially if done right. There are major hardware limitations with a completely functional tablet. E-readers like the Kindle from Amazon and the Reader from Sony utilize E-Ink for longer battery life and ease of reading. To make similar devices with a fully immersive color screen (you don’t think that Sports Illustrated wants a black and white version of their swimsuit issue on an E-reader do you!), you face problems with battery power, operating systems, price, and a grab bag of other technical challenges. An affordable 10-inch screen capable of streaming video, with full interaction and a constant Web connection, is going to require a power outlet every two hours.

Over 90% of existing E-readers use a display technology called E-Ink, made by the firm of the same name that was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. E-Ink is based upon tiny capsules filled with positively charged white particles and negatively charged black ones, suspended in a clear liquid. Transparent electrodes above and below the layer of microcapsules create electric fields that, depending on their polarity, push either the black or the the white particles to the surface in a particular region of the display. Experts have commented on the room for improvement, however, E-Ink displays are relatively slow to update, which can irritate readers as they turn their digital pages. They cannot display color images or video, unlike the liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology used in mobile phones and laptops. But LCDs are much more battery hungry and are not so easy on the eye when reading for long periods. Another approach, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, shows promise but is expensive and difficult to scale up.

An additional barrier to providing early tablets (None of this may matter to early buyers – the nice lady in front of me at my local Barnes & Noble purchased five Nooks – their E-reader. All five units were back ordered until late February) was the lack of software. The success of the Apple App Store and the eagerness of publishers shows that this won’t be a problem for any new devices – especially with the highly anticipated Apple tablet. The publishing community views the tablet as savior – a way to innovate and change the way we read magazines, newspapers, blogs, and books. The tablet and E-reader as life preserver – with Steve Jobs and Apple doing the throwing. The secretive Apple has made fools out of predictions in the past, but Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google in China, posted an item on this personal blog suggesting the Apple tablet would feature a 10.1 inch multi-touch screen with three-dimensional graphics (maybe 10 million units sold at between $200 and $1,000 per tablet in the first year). Sort of a Jesus tablet that can do anything combined with an iPhone on steroids.

Will a world of tablets help the print media – can you take the iTunes economics model and combine it with the innovative App Store model – and turn it into a model for the print world? Will people be willing to buy print media as they buy songs and music? What actually drives consumer demand (and this is the trillion dollar question) – content, technology or both? Will I be able to turn over to a client a 500-page technical report on an E-reader platform with hyperlinks to project video, drawings, graphics, maps, a Web interface, etc. – that he or she can read while horizontal in bed?