Sony Digital Paper e-ink PDF tablet for notes and forms
pro.sony.com
pro.sony.com
After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
[1] http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2013/shr/pdf/An...
EDIT: Changed to correct link. Thanks e12e for pointing it out.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/430757/rise_fall_sony/
Is there anything in Sony's current crop of cameras that is based on Oly tech? I don't think they've added Oly's five-axis IBIS into any cameras yet.
Sony's investment in Oly may pay off in the future, but I'm not sure it applies to anything Sony currently sells.
http://www.theonion.com/video/sony-releases-new-stupid-piece...
I too have stayed well away from Sony products. Last I bought was a PS2. I don't think i own any Sony products past that.
I've got a Bravia EX that doesn't work properly (random failures, won't record to hard disk) and a dead VPC-J1 all in one at the moment. Spot on.
Every so often, I see something like this by Sony that looks so cool, but then give it a pass because it is too expensive and because a forever boycott is forever. Later, I find out that I saved myself some minor amount of aggravation when Sony screwed up the software and/or user experience in some completely boneheaded way.
While it looks like a fun toy, I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning and it no longer supported EPUB, with no warning or explanation.
I want to love SONY products. But for the past decade, it seems as if they actively try to piss their users off by building a perfectly good product and then crippling it with arbitrary vendor-specific lock-in.
Remember ATRAC for Minidiscs? If I recall correctly, Sony's first flash-memory music players tried to force you to use ATRAC instead of MP3.
I wonder if this lock-in makes sense in the local Japanese market and it's simply a matter of poor international understanding. Or if their local market gets similarly annoyed.
Yeah, and they were even claiming "MP3 compatible" which was blatantly false advertising since you had to convert your tracks to ATRAC with Sonicstage before you could transfer your MP3 on your device. My ass still hurts. Sony, never again.
Let's not forge the Sony Music CDs which installed a rootkit on your computer to prevent you from trying to copy the CD. Where they went is just unimaginable.
> After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
Even if it were not for that experience, the Sony Ebook Readers have been very, very poor and very slow every time I looked at their latest models. Sony is supposed to be a company run by engineers, but seriously I'm wondering if they know their shit.
* There is no such thing as "Sony". It's just a marketing name. In reality it is a loosely-coupled group of companies, each of which has internal fiefdoms. There isn't much cooperation, efforts are often duplicated and groups compete with each other. So, for example, the particular business unit that created the E-reader device probably has little incentive to work with anyone else in the company: it is likely the software was developed internally by that particular group. While there are groups within Sony that are capable of producing excellent top-notch software, not all of them are that good.
* There is a whole culture of being proprietary and locking customers in. Just read the other comments in this thread to see examples of how Sony takes this to an extreme. And before someone compares this to Apple: Apple doesn't lock your data in, while Sony has often done so (an example: a sony dictation recorder that requires a Windows application to read the data and export it from a proprietary format into something readable). So even if they contract the software out, I'd expect a specification of a fairly tight system.
There's a vibrant community (though you might need to be somewhat familiar with Russian) of all manner of customization possibilities and different applications you can install.
It also comes with snake.
When they start offering A4 devices, I'll definitely buy one (unless someone gets an incurable brain tumor and makes them closed).
No modding, though.
Interesting. Which model?
This just looks like a bad product migration to me and I will make sure to steer clear of Sony's niche products that don't make it more than a few years.
Is it wrong for me to also admit that ever since the "Root Kit Debacle" from Sony, I cringe a little at the idea of plugging a Sony product into my PC? Or am I just being paranoid?
But yes, I have been waiting for a device like this for ages. I tried a smaller e-ink device, but trying to view PDFs on that was painful at best. I'm even wondering if 1200x1600 resolution is good enough for scientific papers.
Why letter size? Isn't that a little bit obscure?
I own a few Sony products, but I tend to flinch a little with any Sony product that: (A) Probably has a DRM scheme associated with it (as most e-readers do, I assume this one does as well). or (B) Requires me to plug it into my PC and install Sony produced software.
It may have been a long time ago, but I tend to be one of those guys where trust is easy to establish, easy to break and serious loss of trust is nearly impossible to recover from. The Rootkit Incident was a serious loss of trust to me, so I'll steer clear for now. It's too bad, even at $1100, it'd be worth it to handle my collection of printed-to-pdf notes, documents and books.
That there, is a big turn-off for me. What business would Sony making a device like that which requires their own specialised software to interface it with a normal computer. There are standards for these things. The USB mass storage device standard is well-established already.
It was also nine years ago. We have to move on eventually.
Also, they killed Lik-Sang just for selling across region boundaries.
Unless you're in the USA, where it's the standard paper size.
Nearly everyone else standardised on ISO 216 paper sizes decades ago, but the USA insists on doing its own thing as usual.
If you are then so am I. I don't knowingly let anything with sony written upon it touch my network.
I imagine it's terribly expensive. "Pricing available upon request".
EDIT: That's right. $1000. http://www.golem.de/news/dpts1-sonys-digital-paper-kostet-me...
The hardware is lustworthy, though the resolution could be higher, it's just a shame there's no SDK. The buttons on the front look very old school Androidish.
I have a 10" e-ink device with 1200x825px which is perfectly fine for A4/letter-designed PDFs, so I'd say the resolution should be fine. I also have a 10" notebook, and the readability is considerably worse at about the same resolution, so I guess e-ink resolutions are not really comparable with lcd resolutions (the pixel layout is quite different: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2286311679_f98bdba47f_m....).
Visionect sells developer-friendly (SDK included) 6" and 9.7" devices starting around $500: http://www.visionect.com/
it's just a shame there's no SDK
With that said, it would still be cool to try. It should at least be able to support a calculator.
EDIT: To add, obviously minimise network connections. And if you do need them, batch them.
what part? I have a 1440x1080 ereader retailing at $170.
Indeed. As a PhD student that reads and annotates a ton of scientific papers, this really seems like something that could help me do my job much better.
Please, if any of you manage to get your hands on one, I would love a hands-on review with a lot of pictures.
The price is really high, that's true, but I can see top people in academia or enthusiasts like me adopting it.
I'm a sucker for being able to write notes by hand, and when I tried out the surface pro 2 I was pretty blown away by how nice the handwriting felt. Also seems to be in the same price range, and you end up with a full blown PC (which may not be what you're shooting for). One more thing that I liked is how natural it was to use one note to make notes, cut a part out, and move it around. When I'm sketching ideas out, or learning math stuff, it's always nice to be able to move a snippet over really quickly.
I also used to review and edit a lot of training materials that were being designed, and I was using an ipad 2 with PDFExpert, which was pretty great for that, but I always hated how crap the ipad was for writing things with a stylus or a finger. If I could go back and do it again with a surface pro 2, I would in a heartbeat.
I tried other larger form factor e-ink devices like the Kindle DX and such, but if the screen wasn't big enough to fit the entire page on the screen at once, it didn't matter how big the screen was. The device just ended up being too slow. I liked the ipad because I could swipe around, highlight, circle things, make notes, etc.
Obviously the battery life on the surface pro 2 wouldn't be in the same universe as this thing, and it's bulkier, but just thought I'd throw it out there. Kind of rambly, heh, YMMV
The other huge problem with the DX or any other e-ink reader so far is the lack of note-taking. I hoped the DX would be good for academic papers, but it just isn't.
The problem with the iPad, however, is that it's not good for marking up documents. It's great for reading legal cases, but not for marking them up and taking margin notes. Personally, I'm one of those people that gets a lot more out of having paper in my hand and scribbling on it than I do just reading something off a computer screen. I'm really intrigued by this product: http://www.thedigitalink.co.uk/products/capturx-markup-for-p..., which lets you print out PDF's onto special paper so that when you write on it with a digital pen, the markings are reintegrated onto the digital copy. Unfortunately, it's really expensive!
Also, 10" is on the small side for what's ideal. A standard piece of paper is 13" diagonal. I've been looking at the 12.2" Samsung, which also has a digitizer, but Samsung's Android skin is just god-awful. It's a shame nobody makes a 12"+ Baytrail Windows 8 tablet with good battery life...
This product seems to really tackle this niche. Apparently Sony is going to be showing it off this week at the ABA tech show in Chicago.
You can get the 1st gen Pro heavily discounted right now.
The battery life is not the greatest, but you can now cheat with the power cover.
But like you said, a 12"+ Baytrail would be fantastic.
[1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination, with the clunky obsolete desktop married to the slick, intuitive Metro interface. Having to flip between the two just to use Word is a sick joke.
I think the Surface is basically for the segment who either use it on a table like a computer or an iPad when it's not -- like me. The good thing is that there are lots of competing products that satisfy other use cases.
But isn't 16:9 more akin to a legal page than 4:3? ;)
>> [1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination
YMMV, I guess. I'm primarily a Mac user, and I don't mind W8 at all. Keep in mind that the Metro version of OneNote is pretty bad. The desktop version of OneNote is leaps and bounds better. And because of that, you wouldn't have to mode swap to get into the desktop version of Word.
What I do is print out PDF's onto regular cheap paper, mark them up by hand, then run the paper through the scanner. Voila!
I am not interested in the note taking, although it may prove useful at some point, I want it as a large e-ink reader for technical books.
Except, there is so few informations on the software. It seems the supported sync service is worldox [1], as it's the only link in the sidebar and there is no explicit mention of any other solution. Does this means one has to contract this service provider just to wirelessly sync this device ?
Of course, no mention of an SDK or any third party integration.
As usual with Sony, the hardware seems perfect and the software an afterthought.
[1](http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/assetDownloadController/User_Guide....)
It was super light and cool but it's so damn big and fragile feeling that it didn't feel safe putting it into a bag. It was just one more thing to carry around.
You had to connect it every time to transfer files on or off of it, could not even email it out. Supposedly the only service it was going to work with via wifi was Evernote. We asked for dropbox but that didn't seem like an option. Felt like the future in concept but more like using a palm pilot.
But seems like people prefer burning batteries that need daily recharging, or input lag.
I wonder if wrist pressure confuses the tablet about where the pen is?
The Feel is a pretty looking pen though.
Jump to near the end.
http://www.amazon.com/Onyx-M92-Black-Pearl-Edition/dp/B00BBD...
For me then, it would go from "yeah, its kinda neat" to "I really ought to consider giving them my money for this"
The iRex Iliad had a big screen and you could write on it with a stylus. It ran linux and didn't use proprietary file formats, so was great for actually doing stuff.
BUT
The refresh rate on the screen meant that doing anything with the stylus was painful. It lagged way too much. I see nothing in the specs for the sony device that refers to this problem with e-ink, and no video demo. Anyone have better info?
But still: $1100? When an iPad (which can do so much more) is ~$500 ? Once again, Sony seems to be miscalculating.
And this is a specialized device that seems much more suited to the type of work it's designed for than an iPad is. The iPad doesn't even support a stylus (except for the big nub stylus, which is really more of a stylized finger replacement).
That's only one advantage the Sony device has that matters, and it's a niche one.
...though I might insist on nano ;)
Don't worry, though, in addition to PDFs, you can convert other files to PDFs!
I hope Sony actually goes through with this. I currently use an ipad mini & notesplus with a jot pro - it's a good setup and works well, but I still find myself reaching for legal pads half the time.
I currently use a Surface Pro with OneNote (full version, skip the W8 app store version), and it's fantastic. I have actually stopped using the hardcover sketchbooks I normally carry around, and the Surface takes up space than those books.
StylusLabs Write is a pretty great app too, and it's available for most major platforms.
You might want to consider one of the smaller tablets that have a real Wacom digitizer, i.e. Samsung's Note / Pro series or Asus' new W8 8" tablet. I don't know about how good the Dell Venue Pro 8 is, since its stylus isn't a Wacom.
$1000 +, closed to common eReader document types and no path to openness for developers.
Add in Sony's miserable record for supporting their customers after they move to the next flavor of the week and this is a great illustration of their march towards increasing irrelevance.
I have had no problems with how well Sony has supported me as a customer, despite their organization going through changes.
I will go back to school just to use this!
Also, from the images it does look like it would be "e-ink" but I see no mention of it on the page. Is it really "e-ink" (like Kindle) or just "e-paper", which is just a transflective LCD (Pebble, Notion Ink Adam, etc).
From the youtube link posted above it looks like e-ink.
If not, what would be a possible e-ink device to display an SSH terminal over Wifi and pair with a bluetooth keyboard ?
[off topic] Are there any recent product launches which would not feature a cup of coffee on their landing page?
Is this reader any different? Just looking at the page, I don't quite get what makes it different and HN worthy?
Does anyone know how qr-lpd compares to e-ink?
http://www.slashgear.com/bridgestone-aerobee-flexible-e-pape...
Its hardware is comparable to the old Kindle 2. The Kindle DX was withdrawn from sale in October 2012, but in September 2013 was made available again. An improved Kindle DX with touch support for $199 would be awesome. Color e-ink displays exist for years, add one.
The new Sony Digital Paper for $1100 is too expensive .
Surface Pro, Galaxy Tab, Asus Vivotab Note. Each hit vastly different price ranges (Surface Pro ~$900 high-quality device, Galaxy Tab rounds out $500 mark, and Vivotab Note hits $300).
I doubt Sony can beat the Vivotab Note on price / performance, and I doubt it can win on flexibility vs Android or Surface Pro.
I wonder if this may be a limitation of e-ink.
and please make a external monitor version! preferably 24" so I can have a secondary monitor dedicated to word-processing.
even though refresh times might be slow for anything else having an e-paper external monitor for word-processing would make total sense from an ergonomics perspective. a lot of people spend many hours a day writing/editing text and e-paper is much more eye-friendly.
b) I really need something like this urgently. $1000 isn't much, if it makes your life measurably easier. It IS expensive, but unlike tablets, smartphones, convertibles and notebooks this is something that directly effects my productivity.
c) I was hoping for foldable Mirasol or Electrowetting (EWD) displays in Q1 2014 since 2009 and it's still not there. These are the most promising display technologies that I know of, which are still hold back for reasons that I simply don't understand. It may have to do with the Display Technology Cartels, bad marketing, or no funding. I just wish to know why Electrowetting isn't mainstream yet. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf1GjCaYzYg The MirasolHD 5,1" display prototype with 2.560 x 1.440 Pixel had a pixel depth of incredible 577 ppi and you could use clearly see everything at direct sunlight. Here's an old video I found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDoVzKd9H4U
PS: It makes me quite sad and disappointed that we still don't have this technology:
I'm speculating, but in general the only thing that holds good technology back is an inability to scale manufacturing to the point where it is profitable.
Speed in general? How is it to write notes on? Linux/wireless support?