Hasta La Gadget!

Remember Que, Plastic Logic’s large screen e-reader that debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year? It’s increasingly looking like vaporware.

Plastic Logic isn’t shipping the Que e-reader, though the company is officially calling it a “delay.” Plastic Logic has canceled all pre-oders and is no longer offering a date as to when we can see the Que in the real world. It has also stopped taking pre-orders for the device.

“We need to let you know that since your unit will not ship on June 24 as planned, our automated ordering system has automatically canceled your order,” Plastic Logic sent in an e-mail to its customers.

Billed as an e-reader for business users, the Que had an 8.5 x 11-inch touchscreen display and the ability to handle Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, digital books, PDFs, magazines and newspapers. The device could also synchronize with Microsoft Outlook to display e-mails and calendar.

A 4-GB version of the Que with Wi-Fi and storage for about 35,000 documents was priced at $650. The company also announced a $800 8-GB version that includes Wi-Fi and 3G capability from AT&T.

It was an ambitious move and one out-of-sync with the trend in the e-reader market. Amazon’s large screen Kindle DX is priced at$490. Meanwhile, Apple has launched its iPad tablet with iBooks, an iTunes-like book store. Starting at $500, the iPad offers readers access to e-mail and books with a large color touchscreen. So far, Apple has sold 3 million iPads. About 7 million e-readers are expected to sell this year, estimates Forrester Research.

Not surprisingly, Plastic Logic has failed to get off the ground. A month before it promised to to ship the Que reader in April, the company announced to customers that it is delaying the launch to “sometime this summer.” In an e-mail  then, Plastic Logic said it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.”

This time around, it is offering the same reason.

“Plastic Logic wants to make sure that the product they deliver is the right one for their target business customers in the rapidly changing marketplace,” a spokesperson for Plastic Logic wrote in an e-mail to us. “They are continuing to refine the product, technology and features, and are anxious to get in the marketplace as soon as possible.”

Unless Plastic Logic can bring the price of the Que down significantly and offer greater value than the iPad or the Kindle DX, it is likely to be a product that will be dead on arrival–if it ever makes it to market.

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• Plastic Logic Delays Que E-Reader
• Plastic Logic E-Book Reader to Use AT&T Wireless
• Gallery: E-Readers Push Boundaries of Books

Photo: Que/Priya Ganapati

As friends very near and dear to us have confessed, “soon” is a relative term. If you’ll recall, we heard from Palm (in)directly that the next webOS update was “coming soon” back in the early days of May, and here we are a fortnight from July without so much as an update regarding the update. Well, without an official update. A source over at Pre|Central has confirmed that a release of webOS 1.4.5 is “imminent,” and while the primary purpose will be to get a better handle on PDK apps, it’s also expected to finally bring 3D gaming to the oft-forgotten Pixi. Purportedly, carrier testing on the new OS is just about wrapped, with one unnamed operator waiting for a small bug to be squashed and AT&T simply waiting for waiting’s sake. At any rate, we’re still left twiddling our thumbs and hoping for the best, but at least we’ve a sliver of hope that our patience is about to pay off.

webOS 1.4.5 reportedly coming any day now… except for AT&T users originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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And here you were thinking this thing had vanished into the never-ending Lairs of Vaporwareville. Lucky for you, the gents and gals over at FastMac have been hard at work caving to the also never-ending list of demands from the UL and various other safety agencies. That means that the utterly brilliant U-Socket is indeed still on track for mass production, but it’ll be slightly redesigned and stacked with a few bonus features by the time it hits the market. According to an update sent out to loyal pre-orderers (which can be seen in full after the break), the USB sockets have been relocated as a compliance measure, but now, they’re of the SuperSpeed variety. Each one is also capable of 10W power (read: iPad-friendly) and it also smokes the EPA’s Energy Star requirements. The modifications have pushed the expected ship date back to October, and the original $9.95 price has been bumped up to $19.95 — though the company is quick to point out that each one is made in the US of A, and those who got in early will have their orders honored. An extra Hamilton for USB 3.0 and 10W charging? We’re still as sold as ever.

[Thanks, Brian]

Continue reading FastMac U-Socket delayed due to safety redesign, now going for $20

FastMac U-Socket delayed due to safety redesign, now going for $20 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 May 2010 10:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Manufacturers just can’t seem to figure out this whole tablet deal. The poor things get delayed, canceled, or just make you fear that you’ve been ripped off. Hanvon‘s TouchPad B10 hasn’t suffered the worst of those fates, but it is going to be a little later than planned. The last we heard they were due to ship on March 25, but according to jkkmobile the devices have just entered volume production and will instead ship to Chinese buyers sometime toward the end of May, while Europeans (and maybe lowly Americans) won’t see theirs until June. Meanwhile, Hanvon is also talking about its H10 model, which uses a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor and lacks the multitouch of the B10, instead offering a stylus-based electromagnetic panel like the WISEreader. Cost is said to be “much less” than the B10, which is estimated to cost around $877 — a figure that hopefully won’t get any larger in the coming weeks.

Hanvon suffers the tablet curse, delays multitouch B10, talks up cheaper F10 model originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve long had a thing for Pixel Qi and its energy sipping dual-mode LCDs with switchable backlight; displays that carve out a niche between traditional LCDs hungry for power and long living e-paper displays. Unfortunately, even though Pixel Qi began to ramp production lines late last year, we still haven’t seen the displays shipping in any retail products. Turns out that while the screens have been made available in some “specialized products that aren’t sold in stores yet,” Pixel Qi’s manufacturer of choice ran into some snags that slowed down deployments. That seems set to change according to a new blog post by CEO Mary Lou Jepsen. Manufacturing has now ramped to the schedule and scale required to meet “strong pull from the some of the largest computer companies in the world.” Mary Lou also tells us that Pixel Qi’s DIY display kit partner will be announced shortly and that it has “wider viewing angle technology” coming in the fall that should help rectify one of Pixel Qi’s weaknesses. So yeah, good news all around, but we’ve heard these promises before and still don’t have product in hand.

Pixel Qi manufacturing delays fixed, ready for ‘some of the largest computer companies in the world’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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