The PaperLike uses a 13.3-inch E Ink Fina screen that has a resolution of 1600 x 1200 (150 ppi). Fina is E Ink’s glass-based display and is different from what’s on the 13.3″ Sony DPT-S1 PDF Reader, which has a flexible plastic-based screen.
The interesting thing about the PaperLike is that it uses so little energy that it doesn’t even need to be plugged into its own power source. It connects to a laptop or desktop computer simply with a USB cable, and it gets enough power through the USB to refresh the screen.
This looks quite interesting in a cool-to-have sort of way. Too bad the price isn’t exactly in the cool-to-have category.
E-paper is a great technology, completely underused because of dumb adherence to current trends.
If Amazon wanted an iPhone-killer, they should have released an e-ink only phone with a two week long battery life and a really simple user experience (none of this Android everything-and-the-kitchen-sink experience).
Personally I’d love an e-paper phone that just did phone calls, calendar and other such PDA stuff.
I completely agree with you on both of your points.
I especially would love to see an e-paper phone that has a long battery life and does PDA functions; that would be VERY awesome.
Like a Palm V with e-ink. I’d buy it!
Yes! exactly PALM-like! I’d buy one for every member of my family, especially if the price was low. (Hec, it should be low, e-paper is supposed to be cheap).
i completely agree and have been saying this for ages, we would have a phone screen that would be incredibly sharp and clear whilst having the ability to view the screen in direct sunlight, this is what the fire phone should have been.
Yes, but people who buy iPhones also want to do Twitter, Facebook and chat (not to mention video and games), and e-ink is simply too slow to be useful for anything slightly interactive. An e-ink phone wouldn’t be an iPhone killer, it wouldn’t even be a popular consumer product.
Of course, you can already buy the YotaPhone, but 50 hours from an e-ink screen isn’t all that impressive: http://www.theweek.co.uk/technology/61701/yotaphone-2-review-the-e-…
Apologies, clarity of that statement slipped — unlike The Batman, in order to kill the iPhone, one must not become the iPhone. There is a large market who don’t want complicated phones, nor do they want to charge them every day.
E-ink does not prevent FB, chat etc. E-ink needs a dedicated UI. Client applications will have to ditch animations (sliding, scrolling) which are not essential to using these services. On smartphone one uses application anyway. It is true such UI won’t be iPhoney but… I see little point in creating yet another iP clone in already saturated market. Such a device would be great outdoors. I tried to mount my phone on the bike and ended up with… an extra cable to a power bank (as it won’t last on the battery until the end of a typical ride) and poor readibility in direct sunlight (full backlight). Such a phone would be also useful during longer voyages as a replacement for e-book reader. I am sure many people will prefer better reading experience to better FB scrolling. One more thing: for some users smartphone UIs are flashy mess, too confusing.
Edited 2015-01-27 22:01 UTC
If the price tag was not such rip-off, this would be a success.
I think the price is reasonable, considering the low-volume niche nature of the product. I just wish it had Displayport or something instead of USB.
This reminds me of my Atari ST days where I did audioediting with Cubase on its marvelous BW-display…
Yeah, sure :
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/stbook.html
I hope it will pave the way for other e-ink solutions. While we have learned to make power-efficient SoCs, displays remain huge battery drainers.
Edited 2015-01-27 08:41 UTC
“The interesting thing about the PaperLike is that it uses so little energy that it doesn’t even need to be plugged into its own power source. It connects to a laptop or desktop computer simply with a USB cable, and it gets enough power through the USB to refresh the screen.”
There are entire > 20″ monitors that get their charge and data over old fashioned USB 2.0 ports. If this is what they advertise as being interesting they need a new marketing department.
How about “After charging it for 30 minutes with any standard USB-port you can use it for 30 days?”
A family memeber of mine suffers with photosensitive epilepsy and often transfers documents to a kindle to read them as it does not cause him headaches like reading off a standard monitor for long periods of time..
Although expensive (at the moment) this could be ideal for him and others in a similar situation.
Just thinking aloud, another use case I envisage is possibly to carry with you to plug into headless servers while on site rather than trying to plug in power supplies and monitors (a faff of a situation i’ve encountered more than once in the past).
Yes, yes, yes!
A display that doesn’t fire light in your eyes, making electronic content more tiring for the eyes than printed content.
Also, no talk about brightness levels and contrast, no backlight or OLED elememts battling your room’s ambient light during the day.
As a person who lives in a mediterranean country in a room with big windows… this is good.
PS: Yes the price is a bit too much, but everything gets gradually cheaper in our industry. And it’s still a good buy if you do lots of work or reading in front of the computer.
Edited 2015-01-27 14:25 UTC
eInk is out for quite a long time now. Have they dared to invest more on this technology instead to go full berserk on Retina stuff, perhaps it would be more wide spread now. And do not expect prices to drop before a concurrent/better technology be developped first, they’ll milk the cow as long as possible. See the LCD cartel trials to get an idea…
If only somebody would also make a consumer display using a monochrome version of the larger 32-inch 2560 x 1440 panel shown earlier last year.
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-unveils-32-inch-color-dig…
Its hard to say without sitting in front of it, but it seems like it could be wonderful to use.
Edited 2015-01-28 02:05 UTC
I could live with 8-16 colours, all i want is to still have syntax highlighting for my code
IMO the LCD displays we get these days have sharper text than the CRTs they replaced, but to get decent contrast they have to crank the backlight way up, which is more tiring than ye olde CRT.
When I work, I could do with 2 e-ink displays, and one lcd to the side for the actual application testing.
And I agree for monochrome. Seriously! Just I can’t pay that much; I have to wait, until they lower the price. And not “a bit” – but significantly rather.
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY