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This is the eternal discussion about colour e-readers. And I think the positions are irreconcilable.
Each user has his or her own reasons for preferring one device over another. Personally, I don't want to read anything on a tablet: no novels, no comics, no technical PDFs, nothing. And I don't want to carry two devices to read, depending on the content. I think it's great that people read on their tablets, but that option is out of the question for me. (I have owned the TCL NXTpaper 11 tablet and the TCL 40 NxtPaper 4G smartphone for quite some time now and I do not share your enthusiasm for these reading devices. I think the distance between an e-reader and a tablet or smartphone is the same in both directions).
I still think comparisons should be made between similar devices: tablets with tablets and e-readers with e-readers. Or at least compare them one device at a time. But the colour e-reader, precisely because of its unique feature of combining e-ink and colour (and that is its "raison d'être"), is compared to two different devices at the same time. For some things it is compared to a monochrome e-reader and for others to a tablet. And in the comparison, obviously, you always lose out. Why don't you compare each device separately? How does a comic book look on a monochrome e-reader? How can you use a tablet without illumination? If you compare colour with a tablet it loses out (4096 vs. millions) but if you compare it with a monochrome reader it wins out (4096 vs. 0). If you compare the unilluminated screen with a monochrome reader it loses because it is darker, but if you compare it with a tablet it wins because the tablet cannot be used without illumination.
A colour e-reader (also a monochrome one) is a compromise between several factors. There will be users who don't like that compromise. I understand that. But my point is that Kaleido 3 already offers an acceptable compromise (in terms of display) for many users. And that is why more and more colour e-readers are coming on the market.
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