![]() Saving money here, however, would have compromised the usefulness of the device. Even today, an 8GB Micro SD card is a sub-$15 item in wholesale channels, which is a big chunk of the $99 retail price. Not long ago, distributing Wikipedia this way would have been impractical. (Openmoko will offer quarterly updates that can be downloaded for free, or delivered on new memory cards twice per year for an annual cost of $29.) But overall, it's still an impressive amount of useful information. The content on the card is just a snapshot of the active Wikipedia database, complete with whatever errors or vandalism may have been present at the moment each article was copied. ![]() (The latter point is reasonable enough because the device can't access the Internet anyway.) In fact, all 3 million Wikipedia articles viewable on WikiReader ship on a memory card in the device. It doesn't display images, references, discussion pages, or links to outside Web sites. A parental-control feature allows blocking mature content (imperfectly, as I quickly learned).Īnd that's about it. There's a search button for looking up individual articles, a history button for recalling previously viewed articles, and a button to open a random article from the collection. Pushing the power button boots the device in less than two seconds. The user interface couldn't be much simpler. The device, which was released about two weeks ago, displays the text only. How useful could such a thing really be, I wondered. I was initially incredulous when I heard about WikiReader, a $99 device from Openmoko designed solely for the purpose of reading Wikipedia articles. Openmoko's WikiReader is a standalone Wikipedia browser with a touch screen and the complete text of Wikipedia on a memory card. So it's a little startling to see a new gizmo that does nothing but display text, especially when that text comes from a preprogrammed memory card.and it's extraordinary when the text came from the Internet in the first place. In fact, it seems like it's only a matter of time before everything with a battery or power cord will be connected to the Internet. There are Web browsers in cell phones, cameras, televisions, and digital picture frames. ![]() Today, it's rare to see a single-function electronic device.ĭigital still cameras can record video, and camcorders can take still photos. ![]() It's been years since the concept of a digital convergence was seriously debated. ![]()
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