Rollable E Ink Displays Get Real 116
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago Philips unveiled a prototype of a functional electronic-document reader, called the Readius, which could unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself. Unfortunately, that was only a prototype. According to Cnet, however, Polymer Vision, which spun out from Philips in 2006, has redesigned the Readius and turned it into a real product that it is going to be available by the end of this year. There are some notable differences between this Readius and the prototype version, in particular, the ability to display 16 shades of grey instead of just 4 and the connectivity options. What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?"
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, it's coming (Score:3, Informative)
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My old LG TouchPoint 1100 finally broke a hinge last week, so I had to give in and buy a replacement. Unfortunately, I need a phone without a camera, and I wanted something cheap and basic.
I was impressed to find the LG LX150 [phonescoop.com] available. This is as close to "just a phone" as you're going to get - no camera, no mp3, no wifi, no memory card slot - just a phone with bluetooth, the usual polyphonic sound, and minimal game and internet support. So far, I'm really impresse
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Not to say I'm not worried about my power usage, things like my storage heaters and ov
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Personally I think it's just that the power consumption of cheap LCD's is pretty trivial compared to the milliamps used to send and receive RF signals. Transmission of voice or data is much more expensive than passive receipt. You burn more power in a five minute cell call than your display probably uses in 30 minutes or more.
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Let's try basic physics. How much power does a 3.5W signal take to produce, for example? Now how many milliwatts does an LCD take in comparison? If you want bean counter references for the obvious, hit the search engines.
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E-Ink has yet to be tested wide scale on America's consumers, or any consumers, really. Technologically, for a number of cell phone users (at least in the U.S.), it is a step backwards. We already have bright screens with a number of colors. The cell phone is a s
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As another poster mentioned, Moto
"Who Killed The Electronic Ink?" (Score:2)
Don't worry, a conspiracy-uncovering documentary like this one [imdb.com] will explain it all... Only the centralized planning (preferably, in the 5-year periods) can alleviate the so called "free market"'s constant failures and get the real innovations adopted without delay.
Gebyy zr ohggbpf...
Scrolls? (Score:1)
Audiobooks (Score:2, Interesting)
Then I discovered audiobooks. Just put them on your MP3/Ogg player and listen to them everywhere where you need your eyes but not your ears -- in the car, on your bike, cleaning the kitchen, et cetera. I'm working my way through the entire 20 piece science fiction/fantasy book series of Pern [wikipedia.org], written by Anne McCaffrey. Absolutely great.
Re:Audiobooks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Audiobooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Most cyclists don't have rearview mirrors; they use their ears. They can tell a car is just-behind-and-to-the-left or riding-my-arse by the engine noise. You can hear that fool doing twice the speed limit well before he passes you, assuming you can hear. Now, yes, I agree: every cyclist needs to look around and be aware of the traffic around them, the same as a driver in a car. But would you drive a car with *no* rearview mirrors at all? By shutting off your ears as a cyclist you are doing the same thing.
Yes, I'm a cyclist. I ride in traffic. I don't wear my iPod unless I'm on a separate cycleway/path. I would use a rearview mirror if I could find one that actually works.
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They are quite capable of listening to music and pedalling until the day they die - noticing that idiot changing lanes into your kidney is a different story. As a cyclist you need to assume you are either invisible or you have a big target drawn on your back to make it easier for rednecks to run you off the road. Wearing headphones on a bicycle while riding in traffic is stupid and is illegal in some pl
Re:Audiobooks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Audiobooks (Score:4, Funny)
I'd rather have a cyclist listen to an audiobook than a driver making a hands-free phonecall.
I didn't know the two were mutually exclusive.
By the way, you seem to be from The Netherlands, the country that taught me to stop watching out for cars and start watching out for deadly bicycles :). I still do this back in Sweden even though it is totally unnecessary here.
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I'd be a lot more concerned about drivers listening than bikers. At least on a bike, you have to do something to keep moving.
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The numbers I quote are for an average person who is in their mid thirtys, and not a hardcore rider. Have you seen the Tour de France? Those guys are going WAY in excess of 30km/h, on road bikes. They can average in the low to mid 50's.
Re:Audiobooks (Score:4, Insightful)
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I had a job for 5 years that required driving 1 hour to and from every day. I thought it was such a waste that I couldn't study for some university courses via audio material
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I'm certain LibriVox [librivox.org] would be happy to record some more 'educational' books .. only they only have access to works in the public domain. Everyone else seems to want to be paid for their work. Because of this, most of their books are very old. Educational works that are old enough to be in the public domain will likely teach that the sun orbits the earth :)
If you have a source for public domain works that you'd like to hear as audio books, that's the place to submit them.
Cheers!
Rick Measham
(disclaimer:
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It'd certainly be nice to be able to go to the library (or library website) to get material for a device like this "on-demand" instead of what can be a long, long, long, wait for the
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Though remembering the Harry Potter books in a British accent does give it some kind of charm.
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I tried audible in the UK, but they have a very limited selection, especially in the SciFi genre.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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The laser in my DVD burner doesn't have a corresponding black-body temperature.
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Sony engineers are already hard at work on that problem!
You seem to have missed "vaporware" in the tags (Score:2)
It has indeed been over 2 years since this was announced. I wonder what is going wrong ? Are these displays too expensive ? Too many patents ? Difficulty in designing ? What is going wrong here ?
Re:You seem to have missed "vaporware" in the tags (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not expensive compared to LCDs, but they're expensive compared to paper. Since e-ink is supposed to make cheap and portable e-books a reality, you need to have an e-book that's cheap enough for consumers to want--the technology isn't well-suited to anything but static text and images, so you can't try to sell an e-book that, for example, also plays video games.
Since more people want to make phone calls than read books, e-books need to be pretty darned cheap to sell well (schools could be a prime market, but they're all broke, too). Personally, I wouldn't buy one until it broke the $99 barrier AND was as small and portable as a paperback book, and they haven't gotten to that point yet.
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I would be happy to have sit and read while listening to music. If my music player/book interupted me for incoming phone calls, that would be an incredibly convenient bonus. It's actually something I've complained about before with my phone, that the music player is great, the ability to take calls is obviously a necessity, but the inability to read text without going cross eyed is a major headache, and I stand on the train to and fr
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HTH
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Call me when you can fold it, or when they make a device out of it that is a hardcover book you can "reprint" on demand.
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amazingly ink-like (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't very portable in the modern sense though. This unit was about 5.5" x 8", hardly pocket-size. I don't know how portable they will be able to get these - you can only roll it in one direction, so at best that one would have to be at least 5" in some direction. This screen was perfectly flat of course, and I wonder how much it would mess with your vision to read a page with a curl or warp to it? I know it bugs me to try to read a newspaper if it's not laying flat. I suppose this would be ideal for say, a long plane flight or while waiting for a connecting flight at a gate.
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The burst of incredibly annoying static between page switches is the sole reason I haven't gotten a Sony Reader. I'm hoping someone figures out a way around that issue.
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But at $350-$400, forget it. I'm getting an eBookWise reader at $124. www.ebookwise.com.
It's a more evolved version of the ol
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This screen was perfectly flat of course, and I wonder how much it would mess with your vision to read a page with a curl or warp to it? I know it bugs me to try to read a newspaper if it's not laying flat.
From the pictures in the article, as well as some of the text, this reader has a rigid backing with hinges to allow it to wrap around itself. When unrolled, it should still be quite rigid, and flat. This won't solve the minimum length being the shortest edge, but I'd love to have a rollable 5" x 8" eBook reader.
Other Devices (Score:1)
Secondly, i think that concentrating on the applications of E-Ink in mobile phones is a bit limited. The capabilities of E-Ink paper are much bigger than just for mobile. Sure, having a clearer mobile display might be great, but i want to see other innovative uses for this technology. I would love to be able to read a paper made of E-Ink paper (a la minority report) and other such things.
no color, updates slowly (Score:3, Informative)
What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?
It can't display video, or serve as the display for a camera phone. Seriously- the update cycle on eInk is up to half a second or more, something they don't like to talk about. That makes it a pain even for scrolling through your address book.
Related rant: All I want is a phone with a extendable antenna for good reception, a message indicator LIGHT (my SE phone has a message indicator on the screen, but the screen goes blank or to a clock. It even HAS a LED in the joystick, but it's not used for anything!), bluetooth, and a fully functioning address book (ie: I want to be able to see an address, not just a #, and I want the phone to support contact groups in iCal.)
Why won't anyone make it? If they do make it, why aren't they doing a better job of marketing it? I understand all the cameraphone crap is to get me to buy more services; I don't give a shit about video or MMS or cameraphones, and I'm unlikely to EVER buy those services- so just sell me a GOOD PHONE. And NO, I don't want a large phone, even if it does run Linux...
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Which means people are missing the point. This technology should be set around a different target: the dedicated e-Book reader. I want two pages, the size of a comfortable paperback, that fold together to make an ultra-thin folder-like book. It doesn't have to roll u
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For the message indicator light, get a Siemens phone with Dynamic Light.
(I guess second-hand since Siemens no longer makes mobiles... )
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I bought one of these [esato.com], and my god, it's the best phone I've ever owned, having also owned a Motorola Slvr L6 and a V330. It actually has everything you wanted but the extended antenna, but it has great reception. It also has the message indicator light and bluetooth. The address book might not be up to snuff for you though, it was released pre-OS X and I imaging it doesn't support OS X, and putting in address are a bit of a pain. Also, it's GMS, but only a tri-band phone, but won't work some places (like my
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It's smaller than a Razr (which it replaced, Motorola's software is slow and unintuitive), but has a bigger keyboard. The outside screen is actually a mini-screen and some LED-driven indicators on the top that show you a clock, network reception, battery life, and the presence of an SMS message
It has Bluetooth connectivity, and supports contact groups (no idea about iCal connectivity though). The contact info lets you specificy a ton of info like e-mail, 3 phone
Feep ! Feep ! Feep ! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a small creature saying "feep !".
My almost-10-years old Ericsson T39 (dating before "Sony-" started appearing in front). Had and still has today all this : Bluetooth (for being used as a modem on my other equipment) with GPRS, extensible antenna (although as an option), and low power consumption (even had an optionnal huge LiMH replacement for the polymer battery that could last up to one week).
It's good enough and I'm still using up to today. Only now I begin to consider changing it because UMTS sounds interesting...
The reason you can't find such things ?
Feature creep. When everyone changes phones each year for free with his tarif plan, companies have a hard time trying to be "the one" elected by the consumer for the next cycle. So their overbloat their phone with semi-useful functions and then hope that the consumer will pick to one with the most marks in the checkbox on the label at the shop.
Or they go for the cheapest phone, and not only remove things not necessary in a phone (like the webcam) but also functions that could be used to connect the phone to other device that could provide the function (the phone doesn't need internet connection. The Laptop or the Palmtop *DO*) and you get no UMTS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth or IrDA (and sometime, no other connector except a charger port).
So they either produce Everything-including-the-kitchen-sink phone, or the cheap crap-phone, but no "give-me a basic phone and let my use my laptop for everything else".
The one company that gets that right *AND* that use some standart connector (so that we don't have to buy a new round of charger and such accessories everytime a new model is out) would have definitely a market.
Re: kitchen sink is so 20th century (Score:2)
The tech isn't ready! (Score:1)
Not as a main display (Score:2)
Think about a GPS.
They usually have small screen (in the phone or palmtop range), which are good at showing an overhead view of the car with only the current intersection visible.
With a second eInk display, if you need a more wide point of view, you could just unroll a bigger (laptop-range of size) blach and white map of the region you are in. If you don't drive at the speed of the jet, the map itself doesn't change that quickly a
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Irex Iliad:
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad [irextechnologies.com]
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Why is't it used? here's why (Score:2)
Also, a colour version which could play video would look rather different to a normal computer display. It would be using reflective colours instead of transmitted. Everyone is used to high resolution printouts from their inkjet or fairly low resolution TFT screens. A display using e-ink that is colour would be a mixtu
Re:Why is't it used? here's why (Score:4, Informative)
Like a book, you mean?
The idea of e-ink isn't that it's b&w, but it's very low-power -- you only need to use electricity to update the screen, and after that whatever's "written" on the "page" is permanent until it's updated again. Very useful for e-book readers, not very useful for phones or much of anything else.
I'll roll my own - thank you (Score:2, Funny)
Want a Readius?
No thanks -- I'll roll my own.
Why, you must be from Holland.
Sure, aren't you?
Can it run Linux?! (Score:1)
I'm not into any paper (Score:3, Funny)
call me when... (Score:3, Interesting)
Convertible Displays (Score:2)
I want to see "convertible displays" destroy the distinction between mobile "phones" and "PCs" forev
The problem with bringing this to market (Score:5, Informative)
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Dumb questions strike again! (Score:2)
1. This sentence is a little run-on.
2. This sentence is a declarative ("What doesn't make sense..."), so it should not end with a question mark.
3. This is another stupid question at the end of a summary. People want color (preferably at least 32,000 color) displays
This is not an english test (Score:2)
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The spelling I gave is most certainly correct. [reference.com] It is the American spelling of color and has been in use for over a hundred years. Ironic note: Firefox's spell checker is flagging your spelling of color as incorrect right now as I type this. But I'm not going to make the same mistake you are, because I actually recognize that "colour" is the British English spelling of color and that Firefox is flagging it bec
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2) There is no such thing as a"little" run-on
3) correcting someone's grammar is rude.
4) I am rude
Because... (Score:1)
Show us your pink bits! (Score:1)
Why not make them in shades of pink, not grey?
Phone displays? I think not. (Score:2)
Phone manufacturers are more interested in bright, vibrant, color displays that look attractive. The efficiency gains aren't a big advantage given the frequency with which people are used to charging their phones, and the readability is only an issue when reading
Why should it makes sense for cell phones? (Score:1)
Why would it make sense to use e-paper (or e-ink, whichever term you prefer) for cell phones?
How much energy do you think the LCD screen on a cell phone consumes? Keep in mind that for most people, the LCD screens and their backlights are on only a fraction of
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why it won't fly on a massive scale (Score:2, Insightful)
If every textbook in the world would be available, then only maybe it would sell (unless it would be very, very cheap.. like $10-20.
If every textbook in the world, as well as every picture book would be abailable, then there's a small chance people would be interested as both porn and manga would open up for these devices (and the price would have to be lower than
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How does that have anything to do with E-ink? Are you a squid?
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