| We can cut down even further from your list. Why carry around a cell phone when your laptop already has a 3G wireless card? When you want to make a phone call, you can just open up your laptop and fire up Skype! If that sounds like a really cumbersome and painful user experience for many situations in which you currently use your cell phone, people who read really really religiously feel the same way about using a laptop or smartphone instead of a Kindle (or printed media). The Kindle is and will continue to be a more niche product than laptops or phones. Not many people are serious readers. But for those who are, the user experience on a laptop, netbook, or smartphone can't compare, mostly because of form factor an eyestrain. That's why I think only a tablet represents a serious threat to disrupt Kindle. Whether it's the mythical Apple tablet or the CrunchPad (RIP) or some other device that is actually built, if they manage to make a device that performs well in brightly-lit conditions, they can probably replace Kindle. I suspect that in the next decade the average consumer will have three devices: One in a laptop form factor (with most having cheap netbooks running Chrome or another thin-client OS, and some power users having more traditional laptops), a phone, and a tablet or kindle-type device. The tablet or Kindle is ideal for reading and consuming media, the phone perfect for making calls, and the physical keyboard of the laptop necessary to get real work done. Perhaps you could see some combinations, like a tablet that attaches to or connects wirelessly to a keyboard which eliminates the need for the laptop, or the phone just becoming a wireless headset interfacing with one of the other devices (maybe my opening question wasn't so implausible after all!). Frankly those combinations all sound pretty cumbersome and inelegant, so as long as all three devices are cheap and compact, having all three won't be a big deal. |