Sony’s e-paper tablet is a great example of Weird Sony
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It's also nearly impossible to find a physical place where you could test it without making an appointment. There are few things I want more than a product like this to succeed. I have had a couple of Microsoft Surface products, and they are amazing. Game changing even. But nothing beats e-ink as far as being pleasant on the eyes for extended periods of times.
I've been trying to move from books to e-books, just because I don't have a lot of space to keep books anymore. For non-technical books, a Kindle suffices. But for anything even slightly technical everything falls short. Nothing comes close to the experience of physical books. The surface is the closest for me, but even that the software available for making annotations on it is lackluster, and just staring at a screen too long is not pleasant. This sort of large e-ink tablets I hope are the solution, but their popularity being so lackluster, makes me think that those that have spent the money aren't quite happy with it.
I wish more products like this keep coming out until one sticks.
Which is a shame because I'd love to purchase this for reading technical books.
But I'm honestly kind of amazed that something like this isn't already widely available at a reasonable price... I don't feel like my needs are that atypical and it's just the dream product to me.
Edit: Curse you autocorrect!
The Mobileread discussion linked from there is >60 pages of discussion including staff from the company, and there's discussion of a Boox Max 2 coming out later this year that will have the higher-resolution screen, touch instead of pen, an updated (but still slow) processor, possibly a bump in Android version (still ancient, jumping from 4.0.4 to 4.4 perhaps?). Doing a little digging, the processor change may not be a processing power increase but a power consumption decrease (i.MX6 to i.MX7). Note that all of this is unofficial and that it doesn't seem like the details have been finalized.
I'll also note that (without reading the whole 60+ pages) I saw at least one person who'd also installed apps from the Google Play store and found that troublesome, particularly when updating the firmware in the device.
Edit: after a bit more reading on Mobileread there might also be a 10.3" version of the Boox ("Boox Note") towards the end of the year; they're taking prototypes to the Hong Kong fair to gauge interest but would likely not do mass production until October (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=285006)
When I read this post about the Sony tablet, I'm thinking the product space is getting interesting--FINALLY!!
I came at this way back in the epaper epoch by getting an Illiad2 from IRex Technologies (a large epaper device with a watcom digitizer), I've since gone through an iPad, iPad Pro, and currently use a Surface Pro 4 for this function.
The essential bits are exactly smooth drawing on it and for wide market penetration low cost. I have been really impressed with Microsoft's ASIC which makes drawing on Surface almost lag free.
Sony on the other hand has a history of weak business models, I was amused by their selling of the books made available by the Gutenberg project for their original e-book (as an example).
The product I would find really interesting (and would buy at least one of :-) Would be an e-paper tablet that I could draw on at a reasonable PPI (200+) that was US standard paper drawing area, built in wireless network and presented to my computer as a 'printer' on the network. I would use it by printing to it from my phone or my laptop and I would use it to review things and write notes on them (sort of like Drawboard PDF) and then either push the annotated prints into an archive or delete them once I was done with them.
I would use it by printing to it from my phone or my laptop and I would use it to review things and write notes on them
Very interesting. This is a workflow I could get behind of.
I personally can't stand the idea of using that much paper, but I dig the future-y idea of printing to a read/markup slate, and automatically posting the markup to phabricator.
I imagine legal and other business functions that are review heavy could similarly benefit.
That's why I like to print code in an ultra-small font with 4 pages per sheet, duplex.
Right now I do something similar (but more cumbersome) with my iPad Pro: I print to PDF, save the PDF in iCloud Drive, and then open it in Preview on the iPad, which lets me annotate it with the Pencil.
What I really wish I could find is some way to do the same for e-books. Amazon, if you're listening, it'd be a game changer if you could support this in the Kindle app.
I don't think it's quite US Standard Paper (I don't have mine with me at the moment to check), but it is quite a decent size.
It takes only a moment to save what you've written, and clearing the screen takes a split second. You do have to use a special stylus it comes with to write to the device though, other strokes won't be saved. The battery life is supposed to be ~7 days of run time, if you were writing continuously. It is quite slim, and very light weight.
From what I've read, the PDFs store your pen strokes. They claim this is optimal for OCR, but I've never tested that claim.
If you compare what you can do with that vs a Surface Pro 4 pencil and Drawboard PDF the contrast is fairly startling (and expected given order of magnitude difference in price).
I asked the inventor of the Boogieboard at Makerfaire if they had ever considered making a large whiteboard sized one (that would be pretty useful in my lab). He said they would consider it but there were technical issues with the surface area vs the erase mechanism (something like generating a very strong electric field across a very large area like that).
b&h photo had one in their store to play with. Was very nice, weighed much less than I expected, but still wasn't quick. They seemed to push the note taking with a stylus feature which I didn't really care about.
The 13 inch size is amazing, but leaves the whole thing probably larger than I really wanted.
DPT-S1 even with its limitations (PDF only, so Calibre is extra helpful) it feels amazing to read on it.
It is a combination of hardware (lighter than 9 inch iPad, amazing screen, battery lasts a month) and quite decent software tailored for PDF reading and note taking.
I read on multiple devices, iPad Air, Kobo H20, Kindle DX and others.
Out of all devices DPT-S1 is by far my favorite for consuming text and gray scale images.
I thought of ordering a dev kit for the 13.3 inch screen but Sony really did do a good job on this that no single developer could hope to come close.
BOM for DPTS1 is probably around $200, so I envision a future where digital paper could reach mass adoption and cost less than $100.
For some reason no company feels compelled to push for this mass adoption.
Jumping into almost SF realm I'd say what we need is a 400 pages A5/A4/A3 standard book. With blank pages. Those pages are made from a material that feels like paper so the book folds, is lightweight and can be flipped through. There's a switch (or a knob or whatever) on the back cover and when pressed the back cover screen allows you to select which books you want to load. Then e-superink © displays the content on all the page at once. And now you have the exact same experience you have with real books (flipping through, knowing more or less « where » you are in the story). Except the back cover can launch a search bar. Oh, and you can write on pages and it's recorded in the software which displays it again when rendering pages.
Back to reality and to some of the geek things of the early 2000's: IBM had some kind of foldable screens in the demo department. I remember some video or concepts and you could see a guy reading his newspaper on his folded screen. Attach 8 of them together in a binder and you got some kind of physical computer interface that you can easily skim, read and pass around.
edit: Dug out a 2000 wired article about that very subject https://www.wired.com/2000/08/epapers/
edit flexible screen picture: http://a57.foxnews.com/global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/i... and http://www.computerworld.com/article/2507175/emerging-techno...
But ... what exactly does it solve? Fundamentally all it provides is a way to mechanically flip through the pages of a digital book. It doesn't replicate a real paper book, in terms of feel, smell, or nostalgia.
Ignoring nostalgia, is the ability to mechanically flip through a book important? Is that the ideal way to traverse a large volume of text? I doubt it. It's unlikely that, when humanity designed paper books they stumbled on the ideal way to handle a large volume of text.
When I'm reading things on my computer, whether they're articles or books, I never really think "man I wish I could flip through this text like a book." PgDn handles that just fine.
What I usually long for is a more portable form factor, which tablets solve, and more space. Side-by-side pages is great, not just for reading, but also for looking at different sections of the book at the same time. Again, a tablet _could_ solve that. If they made e-ink tablets larger ...
Heavy readers and researchers I'm sure will argue about bookmarking and notes. That's not unique to physical volumes; tablets can handle that. And again, probably better. Maybe we don't have the right UIs for them yet. But I guarantee we eventually will.
Basically, I don't think having a bunch of e-ink pages is what we need. We just need the readers to be bigger, faster response time, color, physically flexible, and have better UIs.
Of course, none of that addresses the nostalgia factor. But I don't think people are going to have such a strong desire for old fashioned books once we have e-ink readers that are fundamentally easier to use than physical books.
Nostalgia is always a shrinking market. Imagine someone who really wanted to access Google using the Dewey Decimal System. At least the amount of content in books remains about the same as it always has.
eInk still costs far too much per unit area. You can buy wall sign sized eInk displays, but they'll cost much more than an LCD TV panel of the same size. 32" diagonal display, $3,599.[1] Compare 32 inch color LCD TVs for $200 at WalMart. Despite talk of cheap "electronic paper" displays, the eInk people never delivered on cost.
[1] https://www.visionect.com/product/visionect-development-kit-...
Any idea what those ballpark figures look like today?
The E ink product you linked is a dev kit targeting a niche market, not a general CE product manufactured in the millions and benefiting from economies of scale...I'm simply not seeing the relevance of the comparison.
Visionect's 9.7" e-ink sign, which is their version of a digital picture frame, costs $400.[1] That's a product, not a development kit. A comparable LCD digital picture frame from WalMart costs $70. Color, too.
A friend's wife works at the United Nations, and a couple years ago I got invited to have a drink at their bar, I was really looking forward to seeing the e-ink wall display (made of tiles of smaller screens - not an entire surface) but unfortunately it was broken so I never got to see what it was like in person :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnb4tFK4I90
Another 'fun' fact. Sony is the only big company that is going to support Sailfish OS on their smartphones later this year.
They are not afraid to try new stuff.
Then I noticed that e-paper is window to knowledge that allows me to look in but never allows my mind to enter. There is cognitive wall between myself and the things I read.
Reading physical papers and books and storing them is concrete memory palace technique. Writing notes on them, underlying, leaving coffee stains and folding corners, adding sticky notes etc. is concrete physical creation of of a memory palace. It helps to arrange, retain and absorb knowledge with spatial associations.
When I store paper I have just read into a stack of papers, or put it into a folder in a bookshelf, it's stored in a spatial space that helps with remembering and recollection just like memory palace memorization technique. If I look at the paper years later, just quick glance brings in the associations. E-paper tablet is just the same tablet every time.
I still use tablets and computer to read fiction and skim abstracts. If I have to fully learn and think what I read, I print it out.
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This is what I've been looking at them for. I would consider them an electronic notebook.
I can bring up parts of a book page in my mind, but I don't think I can do it with electronic readers. I'm not sure, because I haven't been in school for awhile, or needed to bring up something for a test.
When I was in school, I had a hard time memorizing. I started taking notes differently, my recall increased dramatically.
I would doodle on every page. Every page of notes was only written once, and I never re-copied. I tried to make every page a picture. My text books were filled with doodles, and pictures in the margins.
It really helped me.
Now--my books are just taking up too much room. I hate to get rid of them, but might have too. There was a time where I could get any book on the Internet. Those days are gone.
I'm not a big reader either. My books are just reference, but have value to me. I know it's crazy.
To solve my bookshelf issue I use Calibre and keep all of books, including technical manuals in it. I store all of the files and the Calibre database on a folder in DropBox. It suits me fine. I standardized on PDF and ePub files for maximum compatibility, but Calibre will also convert the files on the fly for me.
Now, I tend to do two kinds of reading - (1) research papers - often with multicolumnar writing, tables, diagrams and mathematical notation (2) "normal" books.
I realized that kindle is very bad for (1) ---- I could load a PDF but then I don't get to use flow, and given the screen size, this can be annoying. Converters (like calibre) don't always work. Math symbols (which can show up mangled), diagrams and tables can get displaced from the "region" of discussion. Eventually I just moved to read stuff of type (2) on my Kindle. For (1), I still use printouts.
This doesn't replace paper at all, but it does bridge a gap that I've wanted to bridge for a long time. I've always liked printing out documents and making notes on them as I read, but it's hard to share those notes with others and it's impractical to haul the documents around. Products like this let me do this much more efficiently.
It's pretty decent, and exactly what I wanted - an old-school Kindle around the size of a sheet of paper.
How is it for taking notes?
How smooth is the experience with PDFs?
Is it any good for annotating on top of PDFs?
What file types does it support?
What is it's battery life like?
I've been pretty happy with it so far. The included stylus is pretty responsive.
> How smooth is the experience with PDFs?
Scrolling a PDF is a little weird on the e-ink screen - the refresh rate is kind of low, so it looks a bit like the old Windows Freecell victory animation while scrolling is happening. Switching between pages is smooth.
> Is it any good for annotating on top of PDFs?
Haven't tried it yet
> What file types does it support?
So far I've opened up PDFs, EPUBs and MOBIs. I believe there's more in it's app store, but I haven't needed to explore that yet.
> What is it's battery life like?
I charged it up when I got it at the beginning of March, and it's still at around 50%, with the Wifi enabled.
So glad I was not a backer. It just seemed to good to be true.
https://earl.is http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/04/10/earl-back-country-t...
I'm blaming apple. The iPad killed eink just as it was about to take off. Who would want a slow black-and-white display when you can have a fancy glossy color display? Nevermind that you can't read properly on an glossy screen and that the battery life is measured in hours rather than days/weeks.
We lost out on so much potential for the gimmick that is the tablet.
The public didn't realize this because of the ipad hype. I'm not arguing that the ipad isn't a success, I just wish the ipad would never have been created.
I'm not arguing that they should compete. Rather, I'm arguing that the iPad can be seen as having opened the door to mainstream usage and acceptance of tablets -- both as devices and as form factors.
Many of the consumers who are now comfortable using tablets are more likely to use an e-ink based business tablet than they would have been if they'd never used a tablet before. And it's likely they'd never have used a tablet before if the iPad hadn't made tablets mainstream.
And precisely because said tablets wouldn't compete with the iPad, those consumers might buy both. Or have one provided/subsidized by their employers.
Another idea would be to pair a large e-ink display with a Macbook Pro style "magic bar" (or whatever they call it). So you can do the typing on the e-ink, with a Submlime text-like minimap for scrolling and context. Anyway, I don't have the chops to pull it off…but it would be great I think!
It seems like the LCD panel would make the eInk panel less legible there by negating any advantage there. Being a fixed device with constant power, the other advantage of eInk is removed.
[1] http://www.mmt.io/transparent-oled-touch-screen-display/
You used to be able to buy the displays standalone from Pixel Qi, but the company folded in 2015. There is a successor company, but it's not clear whether they're actually producing the displays anymore, or if they're just selling off existing stock.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/29/4783132/the-amazing-produc...
The Kindle DX graphite was almost workable in grad school for journals, until a vector-based montecarlo convergence plot or even a scatterplot with many points would bring the poor thing to its knees.
The Kindle DX was exorbitantly priced (nearly $500 at launch), inconveniently large, and poorly marketed. And it didn't really play into the primary market for the Kindle, which was light reading.
me personally, i've always used color vary sparingly, if at all, because a bunch of highly contrasting colors ends up looking, to my eye, like vomit soup without really clarifying anything.
getfreewrite.com
It is the brightness of the screen, with every pixel lit up, that is the difference. I think if there were color e-ink, it would be just fine and still help serve this same niche market.
Also, they make $700 sound like a high price... that sounds cheap for a coveted and new emerging product to me...
I used to be a hardcore Sony fanboy (still have the original AIBO). Great innovative stuff, pushing limits with abandon, bringing the sci-fi future to life. Except...they always got it a little wrong, in the "uncanny valley" way. Everything was built to specs - barely. Key ports were implemented cheaply. Compatibility was often trumped by proprietary - the latter being better, but in the "Beta vs VHS" losing way. Device driver software was...lacking. Once the device was sold, there was a sense of abandonment - great product, but you're on your own now. Crapware was common (software was delivered with the device just to get the hardware sold). UI/UX was more focused on "cool" than "useable". Overall, the focus was on bringing futuristic to life, failing to make it really usable; as a result, "cool" slides sideways into "weird" - it's neat, but ultimately infeasible.
Examples of Sony weird? MagicGate memory sticks everywhere, whether a device needed it or not (like a pen), incompatible with dominating standards (SD, MicroSD, etc). Innovative remote controls of a type used by nobody else for a reason. Pocketbook-sized notebooks with "retina" displays (before Apple got to "retina" and "Air") so small as unreadable. HDTVs with gorgeous styling suitable only for hyper-minimalism homes. Disc players loaded with demo software that made a Wii look good (trailers for "Salt" at 320x200 resolution, on a 1920x1080p display? really?). UI that looked great yet required steps that would make Jonny Ive choke. Elegant e-readers that were incompatible with pretty much any book formats.
This new tablet looks great, sure - it's big, flat, minimalistic, and has great specs. From experience, I'd hesitate to buy one because I expect it will run slow in odd conditions, have questionable real-world battery life, use proprietary chargers, suffer odd document compatibility issues, have a general sense of post-sale customer abandonment, and some specs will be met only in the most strict & strained sense. Out of the box I'd love it, then slowly develop a sense of irritation by something proving subtly but pervasively unusable. It looks cool on its own, but will predictably look out-of-place amid other serious competition, leading the way in a direction that the industry ultimately won't go. I'm not saying this particular device is defective in such ways, but having been disappointed by numerous products (despite valiant attempts to live & defend them), I expect I'd start using it with a sense of "this is awesome" soon morphing into a nagging sense of "...but something's wrong here" and ultimately buying something comparable that hits the market not long after.
who are they targetting, toddlers?
You're comparing two different things. Boogie board is not a display panel with a matrix that can be controlled electronically by software. There's no "pixels", which is why you can't use software to write to it or change the state of individual pixels. The cholesteric LCD being drawn on in boogie board is similar to the surface material in an etch-a-sketch.
Oh that sucks, I've got a large epub/mobi collection, I'd hate to have to convert them all to PDF, but it probably serves a different purpose than a device for reading your standard books. It looks like a textbook device.
This looks amazing for me personally. I love the idea of having the PDF on one side and notes on the other. It would be great for the various math / programming books that I read. The price might be a deal breaker though.
Edit: it looks to be competing with these types of devices by Onyx, the reviews indicate it's ideal for technical books https://www.amazon.com/Onyx-Max-13-3-Flexible-Handwriting/dp...
The Sony also has 16GB vs 8B storage, 11GB usuable, not sure how much of that 8 will be free on reMarkable.
I really hate Sony - many bad experiences but have to say, the near 8.5x11 format is very attractive and my one disappointment on my reMarkable preorder. Bummer that it only does pdf but not hard to go epub -> pdf
Will be interested to read the full reviews of the Sony though tend to think I'd wait at least a year before contemplating a purchase even if the reviews turn out to be good.
To save you the math:
Sony: 8.8x11.9" 8x10.6 display 207 dpi 349gm reMarkable: 6.9x10.1 6.1x8.2 226 dpi 350gm
E-ink has the advantage of being easier on the eyes, but iOS has improved in this area with night mode (blue light reduction). You can also invert the screen for white text on black background.
EDIT:
As a user of the Sony DPTS1, one good thing is that it supports WebDAV for private synchronization of files, along with a removable microSD card. But if you're already carrying around an iPad Pro of the same screen size, it's hard to justify also carrying the DPTS1. With SanDisk's iXPand USB drive, iOS apps can now support removable storage.
Sony should consider adding an app that makes their e-ink screen a second display for iOS, Android, Windows & MacOS. That way you can use the broad software portfolio of iOS & Android with the low-power large display of the Sony Device. You could connect the Sony to your phone via bluetooth and the e-reader device would only need power when doing a screen refresh / page turn. Duet Display does this today for iPad, https://www.duetdisplay.com/
Sony's cameras are the perfect example of modern prosumer tools, incredible quality, and thinking outside of the box. It would awesome if this translated into an iphone killer.
And I've seen a presale or kickstarter for a fast epaper tablet not from Sony.
--- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_disp...
I have a Kindle DX, which is pretty good. I sure wish, though, that the screensaver was the last page read. That way I could open up a quick reference pdf, prop it up next to my screen, and not have it continually switch off.