But a lightweight (<1kg) passively cooled laptop with a great keyboard, an excellent e-ink screen with at least FullHD resolution, good battery life, and fully open source software and firmware would. Any arch (MIPS, ARM, SH4, whatever) is fine with me.
I'm a bit confused: the refresh rate is terrible for eink. Typing text would be painful. Maybe the year 2020 will have great quality fast eink but today it'd be a pretty lousy experience.
During the last summers I've been reading and commenting at HN and other forums at the beach with the lousy browser on my ultra-slow Sony PRS-T1 e-book reader.
It's a pretty terrible experince, agreed. Scrolling and waiting for eink refresh every now and then, text input is laggy. Still I do it since it is so easy to read in sunlight!
I'm sure with a faster CPU to render webpages quicker and some engineering ingenuity to perhaps allow quicker refreshes but lower contrast it could become a real product for early adopters.
I'd be willing to pay $500 for something that is just a step above the current terrible level, and if it works great and is hackable maybe $1000.
More clock time is spent reading than typing.
E-ink is much less stressful on eyes.
I'd love an e-ink screen. But I remember how horrible it was to use the Kindle browser.
The closed, limited function, version one, $1000 Sony DPT-S1 is selling briskly even with EU importer markups, with one of the top feature requests being an external keyboard.