QuokkaPad: Kindle Killer

It seems the eReader market is mirroring the Smart Phone market in one way: "product killers". How many iPhone killers... haven't? Now we're starting to see the phrase "Kindle Killer". Enter QuokkaPad, from an Australian company.

The device is purportedly to sell for about $500, and Australia's itnews wants to know if the Kindle and the (unannounced) Apple Tablet are a match for the product.

Australia's Bleeding Edge kind of answers that question for us:

The Quokkapad will cost around $500. It’s aimed at the corporate, education and government marketplace, rather than consumers, to take advantage of the fact that large organisation can save millions of dollars a year by distributing their documents on electronic devices, rather than printing them.

So no, it won't displace the Kindle, seeing as it's a consumer marketed device and QuokkaPad is not. Also:

Powered by a 400MHz MIPS processor with 64MB of ROM and 128MB of flash memory, which can be expanded up to 500MB internally, the Quokkapad is a Linux tablet PC, running version 2.7 of GPE Linux. That means it ships with Web browsing and email, calendar, to do, contact management and notetaking capabilities, in addition to audio playback and image viewing.

At $500, with a slow processor, less RAM than an iPhone and virtually no internal storage, I can't imagine it's going to knock off an Apple tablet offering... if there is such an offering really about to be unveiled!