I also wish this was being talked about more, I am not interested in 10 hour battery life, I'm interested in a 15 day battery life for a tablet - it doesn't require a back-lit LCD 60Hz screen, but an app store would be nice.

I wonder at this point what the best multi-purpose e-ink tablet is?

Great adventure - beautiful worlds, amazing creatures, great sound, Nali!, bonus: learn FPS controls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal

Also, UT3 needs more players :-(

Did someone let them know that the company they hired to back up their data is garbage? (i365, a Seagate company: https://services.seagate.com/contact.aspx)
They must be using all that Maxtor ( http://www.maxtor.com/home-en-us.html ) junk to store the data.

I wish New Orleans could catch a break, just one time.

WinPhone 7's killer app: makes AND holds actual phone calls.

On a serious note I think the combination of 3rd party hardware with minimum specs and an itunes-like sandboxed app store could be a real challenger. Let's not underestimate the traction of Office either - the '97 bailout of Apple by Microsoft wasn't just about the $150 million after all. Office Mac truly gave Apple room to breathe and it continues to do so.

I think, far from dropping the ball on 'slate' form-factors, Microsoft has given away a great idea in the form of the Courier - a book-like, protected and familiar form. Clearly, based on recent news, they are not going to make and market such a device.

I would enjoy making one. I have the know-how to emulate the functionality witnessed in the tech demos of the Courier, in .net. Really, they have all the important ideas laid out - what form factor, what you want to do, how it can benefit YOU. Seeing the desire for the product and the opportunity to make one is a situation that comes along rarely. In form it is basically an evolved Nintendo DS, easily possible, challenging to make cutting-edge.

As with many Microsoft ideas it is ahead of its time - already on high-end Dell tablets one can purchase a touch-screen which is friendly to both finger and stylus. This will only get more common - right tool for the job. To focus exclusively on fingerprint-sized interaction on a non-keyboard device is a mistake, why can't I use my fingernail? duh.

I own and use an HP TC4100 Tablet, Nokia N800, Wacom tablet an iPod Touch and a Sony E-Reader. Have used an iPad,

Angels, call me!

What I need to know, then, is why these giants didn't ever get around to shaking down On2 before it was open-sourced.

It truly does seem that Apple is intentionally crippling OSX in order to promote an agenda, I don't begrudge any corporation formulating a plan to make money and following through with it, but the DRM debacle has taught Apple that shackling your customers, in this case by intentionally not providing the best web experience possible, is a recipe for increased profits.

I, for one, will not support this strategy. I hope in the future, much as the separation of church and state in politics, there arises a mandated separation of hardware and software (OS) vendors. I realize there are gray areas and fuzzy lines in this separation but in order to protect ourselves as consumers (like we do as citizens) this is seeming more and more necessary.

mod parent up, we've all been there, wait, we are still there.

The door is already open, an HTML5 canvas renderer and implementation in Flash is definitely possible, much like Chrome Frame for IE it could help spur adoption for legacy browsers. Silverlight could accomplish the same thing - possibly in a more complete way since custom video decoders can be written for it.

Think about this issue inside-out, what happens when full web browser functionality is replicated in Flash(AIR) or Silverlight(OOB)?

Can't we ditch JavaScript and _just_ use Flash - a nice blockable scripting engine that isn't integrated so deeply with HTML that disabling it breaks scores of sites with otherwise useful information?
If I want maximum battery life I block scripting, period. If I want fancy UI doo-dads and continuous browser-server communication I can enable Flash. What I don't want is great gobs of busted HTML when I don't want to run any kind of scripting engine. Just because you can doesn't mean you should, I'd like it if JavaScript became a "can't".

once, just once, I'd like to be in the position to answer that question that way,
nice one

I really hope we don't have to go through another "skip intro" phase.

Of the three main objections to Flash: Proprietary, Resource Hog, Inaccessible - this standard addresses exactly one.

I also have an n800 and use it to read .pdf every night (there is a download to let you set the lcd to 1/128 brightness), during the day I read the same book on my Touch Pro but the n800 has a much better screen. I use Evince to read the pdf files, it is one of my favorite pieces of software.

Evince lacks reflow but I can maximize the font by reducing the margins to 0 in Acrobat.

Evince beats the WinMo Acrobat reader because it remembers your page when you re-open the file, this is a feature not to be underestimated. On the other hand WinMo Acro has reflow and zoom which make a book readable on a very small screen. WinMo Acro. though, doesn't remember your settings per book, or at all, which makes it irritating when the device needs to be rebooted ( every 2 to 3 days )

The next evolution for me is probably going to be e-ink in the form of a Foxit eSlick Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/) I have handled the Sony readers in the Sony store and they are really nice to hold, too expensive but hopefully the eSlick will be as good and cheaper.

atb good luck

I agree they will support the tags but will they add Theora or will it be plugin-dependent?

I guess open-source plugins are the lesser evil but it is hard to imagine Theora penetration achieving critical mass without easy IE integration, and without that YouTube will remain Flash due to the h264 licensing debacle.

Interesting discussion about HTML5 video implementation