Amazon building a Color Kindle with FFS display. Shipping for holidays 2011?

Agreed.

I'm still hoping for e-ink monitors. I'd be willing to shell out decent money for a large e-ink screen. It'd need color and would have to be faster than current screens. For writing and for reading mostly-text webpages, I think that a just slightly faster e-ink screen with 16 or 32 colors would be a real boon.

This would seem like the reasonable choice. Or, just leave the tablet market alone. They could, perhaps, enhance the amount of other useful features in it for the "temporary mode before bothering to find a computer" but abandon the very low power drain (mostly by frugal screen) and they're abandoning the whole niche and stepping into a strange and different land. Many others have so much more to offer in all kinds of ways except.. recharge it every few hours of use. Nope, sorry, can't do that - the tempting device is now useless to me.

After having used a Kindle 3 for a few months now, I've come to realize that there are certain things about it that a touchscreen would sort of ruin. It's a remarkably stress-free device. Some of the stress of using a tablet that an e-ink screen mitigates:

1. It's light and cheap enough that I'm much less afraid to drop it, both because it's light enough to more easily avoid dropping and because it's less likely to sustain damage from a drop and cheaper to replace if dropped and damaged.

2. I literally have never had to worry about charging it. I use Wordcycler to sync to Instapaper, which I guess means I have it plugged in often enough to have never had to explicitly charge it.

3. The non-touchscreen means I don't have to worry about accidentally touching the screen and causing an erroneous input. Which means I can hold it by the screen if that's most comfortable. Physical buttons mean that I know for sure when I've made an input.

Truth is, there's very little I would change about the hardware of this device.

It seems likely that it will turn into a more or less standard Android tablet, with some nod to a slightly readable (FFS) screen outdoors.

I wish Qualcomm would get Mirasol manufactured in volume; I have seen it on a 5inch prototype tablet and it looks really lovely, is readable in full sunlight, and has good refresh rates.

That probably only improves the marketing.

Blizzard's WarCraft 3 file extensions are .wtf.

Don't see any harm done.

Hah, I came here to say something along those lines, although I know HN is not very tolerating of that kind of comments.

You are not alone.