I am curious
If your favorite UMPC manufacturer offered sunlight readability as an option on purchase, how much more would you pay for the device?
No use for it?
$100?
$200?
$300 or more?

At what point does this feature become cost prohobitive? It's a REALLY good feature, especially for car UMPCs. It'd make that "web browsing from the beach" concept a reality. I'd pay a couple hundred extra. How about you?

I'd prefer not to have to pay for it, of course. ;-)

I think something the $200 neighborhood would be nice. But realistically, I think it's probably something more like $300.

With LED backlighting, is this less of a concern?

Woadan

The backlighting technology means little as far as sunlight readability, from what I understand.
There are three types of LCD:

A transmissive LCD is two layers: a "clear" layer that provides the matrix of colored pixels and a backlight layer. The backlight layer is typically a white light diffusing material that spreads light evenly across the entire backlight. The source of the backlight seems to have switched from CCFL to LED with the advent of better LEDs and diffusing technology.

A reflective LCD does not need a backlight as the diffusing material on the back  is replaced by a reflective material.  Think of a calculator: the silver backing makes the black characters readable on it. These generally have lower contrast than transmissive LCDs because they rely on ambient or direct light for readability.

A transflective LCD (the best choice for UMPCs) has a material that is both transmissive AND reflective. This offers the widest range of use, but means that the hybrid material can never perform as well as a transmissive LCD in darkness or a reflective LCD in bright light.

Oh... it's also possible for a transmissive LCD to work outdoors with either a combination of boosting the backlight power (at the sacrifice of battery life) or some kind of polarization and coating of the LCD screen surface. Those super-bright LCDs, you'll notice, have shiny surfaces. Those surfaces pass light better than the dull frosted surface of standard LCD displays. however, they are more prone to reflective interference than frosted displays.

"This offers the widest range of use, but means that the hybrid material can never perform as well as a transmissive LCD in darkness or a reflective LCD in bright light."

 

Damn it... I guess I like transmissive.

 

I would pay $200. If it was magicaly good maybe 300.

 AUD

Daylight readability is, or at least should be, a fundamental design requirement.  It's worth $50 tops on the MSRP. 

The profit comes in making a usable tool for real people instead of a toy for gadget geeks.

 

The option costs an additional $300 on the Motion LE1600, and $300-400 on the Sahara slates from TabletKiosk.

Granted, those are 12.1" screens. But expecting to pay only $50 for a 7" screen is not probably a very realistix expectation.

Woadan

I didn't even answer my own question myself.

15% markup.

I'd pay 15% more. I can't say a raw number because an extra $200 on a $799 Q1U is not quite the same as an extra $200 on a $2500 fully loaded OQO 02.

I'm as tight as a bean skin. Zero. Part of a cost/benefit view of my next umpc maybe 50 quid on the overall price of the "sweet new little baby".