Thoughts on the Que™ by PlasticLogic
Ok, I’m having a tech-gasm here. The Que™ by PlasticLogic has me excited, now more than ever. The thing looks just gorgeous and could do wonders to my learning workflow.
A little more backstory:
A friend of mine (Japanese Studies, Politics, Sinology) and I (Sinology, Economics) have been on the fence of buying an eReader for this coming semester. Up until a few months ago our options were quite limited; the Kindle (1/2/DX) wasn’t available in Germany and the Sony e505 wasn’t big enough for newspapers.
We thought that around the “Frankfurter Buchmesse” our options would improve, and we pinned our hopes on the Txtr. It turns out that those were false hopes; the pricing model for commercial and personal content is an insult to everybody that’s been waiting for it and shows how timid and short-sighted all of the involved companies are. Sony has the “Daily Edition”, but who knows when this will be available in Germany, also; Sony’s readers weren’t the best ones so far, when it came to readability.
This article on Gizmodo reminded me, why I was so reluctant about buying anything before the beginning of 2010: A letter sized display, support for a wide range of document formats, superior technology and a purportedly open plattform for content publishers.
This last bit of information is what interests me most, because it means that we could find an app like Evernote on the device someday to improve our workflow even further.
Dear Sirs and Madams of Plastic Logic and Evernote and Instapaper and Die Zeit, here’s what I would like to do with that device:
- - Read my weekly newspaper.
- - Read books and articles for university and annotate them on the device.
- - Save and sync information to Evernote for later use.
- - Read saved blogs and articles from the web using Evernote, Instapaper or a similar service.
- - Buy novels online and read them on the Que™.
- - Oh, and one more thing:
The device should be affordable for students!
I know you’re aiming for the business sector and I’m not saying “give it away for free”, but think about what a student discount could do for your sales figures. Studying is serious business and once those students graduate, they become part of the market you’re targeting now.
