Pixel Qi, ebooks and convergence

Pixel Qi are making a lot of news at the moment with the launch of their new display technology. First concieved for the OLPC laptop, the display is a clever update of existing LCD devices. With its backlight on, it behaves just like any other LCD panel - bright, colourful and power hungry. Turn the backlight off though, and the display consumes much less power, displaying detailed black and white images that can be seen in full daylight.

Immediately bound for netbooks that can take advantage of low power and don't mind the relatively small size of initial screens, the new display promises much. However, it's not the universal panacea and the ghosts of convergence are rattling their chains. Yes, everyone's getting excited that laptops, netbooks and ebooks are all going to merge into one uber-gizmo that will allow you to work, travel, read and browse the internet seamlessly, painlessly and cheaply.

Wrong.

Convergence is a misleading distraction when it comes to technology. The dream of a swiss army knife device that solves everyone's needs in one easy package is alluring. Time and time again innovators attept to deliver it. It doesn't help that the public clamour for it too. Why, if everyone wants it, is it such a bad idea then?

The problem is that there is a disconnect between the ideal and the reality. In our imaginations, the converged device does everything just as well, if not better than our existing machines. However the vast majority of users (and quite a lot of technologists) don't really understand what it is that makes their devices so successful. When it comes to reality, the converged device must make compromise. The effect may be obvious (low quality lenses in camera phones) or it might be more subtle (the paucity of interaction on iPhone games), but it lowers the bar, and largely weakens the user experience rather than enhancing it.

When it comes to ebooks the ideal is a device that is small, light and virtually indestructable. It should rarely need charging and be fantastically simple to operate. To really gain acceptance, it should also be as cheap as possible. It should be 'invisible technolgy' - something that doesn't get in the way of the job in hand. Carry it anywhere or just pick it up and read. These goals are all achievable if you design for them - and the future of ebooks is likely to see devices refining these ideals.

With a netbook, the goal is different. We're talking about a device that gives you convenient, portable access to the stuff you do at work, the documents on your PC and the internet as a whole. Music, video, photographs, games, email, instant messaging.. the list goes on. This is a class of PC, albeit designed to be just powerful enough to do the mundane things and no more. Those specifications allow us to design a device that is cheap, portable and with reasonable battery life.

It's very tempting to converge the two. Why not keep evolving the netbook until it's battery life is long enough and it's screen good enough to let it function as an ebook? Why not add a keyboard to an ebook and let it browse the net and take notes as you go? The answer is that from one direction you get an ebook that is expensive, over complicated and just physically the wrong format for easy reading. From the other, you get a netbook that is underpowered, awkward to use and lasts hours, not days on a charge.

Rather than convergence, divergence will provide us with revolutionary new devices. Ebooks will dip below $100 in a very short time, and will be given away by bookshops eager to sell books and subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals. Netbooks will become powerful enough to be used as a desktop replacement in many offices and media centres in homes. Attempting to bring the two together will rob the end users of two very useful tools for the false promise of a single device that doesn't quite do two jobs well.

None of this is bad news for Pixel Qi - their displays could be used in both netbooks and ebooks. In the former, the backlight will usually be on as the user browses, watches video and edits documents. In the latter, it'll usually be off as the machine eaks out battery life, slumbering whilst the user reads largely static text. In both cases though it's the rest of the device that will make for an interesting product, not the screen technology.