Sunday, January 4 2004
Good, color PDAs might go for $75 new with OLED tech in use, I suggested earlier.
Actually, if a Staples is close and if the price I saw in a Jan. 4 ad insert in the Washington Post applies in your town, you might be able to pick up a brand-new Sony Clie PEG-SJ22 with a sharp 320 x 320 transflective color screen, 16M of RAM and a Memory Stick slot for all of $99.98 after a $30 mail-in rebate. In plain English, that means the screen won't be huge but will suffice for many readers. Also you can hold a small number of e-books at once in your PDA and can buy more memory later on. Meanwhile you can use your PC to store books and download them from the Net.
Just a special? Yes ("while supplies last"). But this post-holiday sale is a preview of regular prices in the future for similar technology. I couldn't find the same deal at Staples.com, but maybe that'll change tomorrow.
I hope a big point here will come through. PDA are like calculators, with prices ever lower, and libraries and their users can take advantage of this. In early 2003 the same Clie was commonly selling for $200.
More at
TeleRead.
