Re: Accessing the internal disk of Digital Book Players
Actually, to be brutally honest, the Victor series has just been energy-efficient no matter the cpu. The dragonboard410C doesn't drain the battery on the Trek. Even with the GPS on, you can still get a good 10 to 12 hours, and with gps turned off your battery is usually about the same.
Also, keep in mind the yearly royalties Humanware has to pay to all these services they contract/partner with for the Stream. Acapela is a yearly deal. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon were clawing at their funds as much as they can since Audible is still present, considering how they treated Pay with Chip Marketplace. And everything else that the Stream/Trek gets integrated. In the case of the Trek, they have to pay Tomtom royalties for a license to not only utilize the maps, but for the ability to modify them (Humanware does doctor them to make them more blind/pedestrian-friendly) so it's not like they're slapping the maps onto the Trek and calling it a done deal. And even after that, map updates are free on the Trek because Humanware wanted them to be either free or as low as possible since they were not looking to make profits off the maps.
Also I hope no one's buying Streams off Amazon, because then Humanware would be barely getting any value for those sales.
So when they charge what they do for these devices, they're nowhere close to five figures in disposable profits on a regular basis like mainstream companies would be.
Indeed, they are closely looking at the low-cost braille market kicked off by the Orbit20, but they are not going to integrate it into their own products until it actually matures and become acceptable in the mainstream, with a stable market (the fallout between APH and Orbit proves that either there's a conflict of interest, or the braille market is just too small for innovation at low prices). So until then, Humanware has chosen to stick to the tried and true braille technology, because as expensive as it is for both them and the customers, it insures that their products are still at a high quality standard. And with there being only one braille manufacturing company that is actually staying afloat (Metek), there is no competition to decide the price of these piezoelectric actuation braille cells. Baum is struggling (at least in the US, not sure about Germany).
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