Interested in ereaders

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:35:19PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> So folks (naturally) want to carry as few things as possible.  Now
> that I'm starting to carry a smart phone, I'm running out of pockets.
> So I have to decide whether to drop my Swiss Army knife or my MP3
> player.  Things are a little better now that the weather has cooled
> off: more pockets.
> 
> I tried using the phone as an MP3 player but it isn't 100%
> satisfactory.  Running down an MP3 player's battery isn't as
> consequential as running down a phone's battery.
> 
> I haven't figured out the best way of carrying earphones.
> Wrapping them around the MP3 player has worked fairly well, but
> wrapping them around the phone doesn't work.  So the MP3 player almost
> earns its keep just as headphone storage.
> 
> All these tradeoffs are non-obvious and very particular.  Hard to
> theorize what would work for and sell to the masses.

The mp3 player has dedicated electronics for audio decoding.  The ereader
often does not, and hence is much less power efficient at doing so.
Now some newer ones might actually have CPUs with audio decoding features,
but it isn't always easy to determine what actual hardware is in the
things you can buy.

The ereaders tend to have amazing battery life because they essentially
turn off while you read a page, and then turn on when you hit a button
and update the screeen and go off again.  Playing audio continuously is
completely different from what they were designed to be good at.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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