This past CES saw an army of e-book readers in a variety of form factors, all ready to march ashore in the wake of Amazon’s wildly successful Kindle. Not only did commercial models from vendors known and unknown litter the show floor, but many of the major semiconductor manufacturers had prototypes on display, mostly proof-of-concepts which have yet to be picked up by a commercial manufacturer.
The coming crush of e-book readers has two major implications, which I’ll elaborate on in this article: 1) chip vendors like Samsung, Qualcomm, Freescale, and TI are all scrambling to get a piece of this exploding market, and 2) chipmaker competition will quickly turn the e-book reader into a multifunction cloud client much like today’s smartphone, complete with app stores, content stores, and many of the other features of emerging smartphone platforms.
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