Sharp’s solar 936SH and 934SH with “memory LCD” headline latest SoftBank lineup

As you might expect, Japanese carrier SoftBank’s summer 2009 lineup contains the usual science-fiction array of ridiculously well-equipped handsets — plus 3G photo frames and a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 with embedded WWAN — but the real news here might be a pair of lovelies from Sharp. The mirumo 934SH (pictured left) features a 3-inch external display that can display time, date, weather, news, and other information without consuming any power between changes; sounds like E-Ink, though Sharp describes it simply as a “memory LCD.” You’ve also got an 8 megapixel camera, a waterproof shell, and a UV sensor that can help you determine just how quickly you need to slather on the SPF 30. Next up is the Solar Hybrid 936SH, a phone suspiciously similar in concept to the device Sharp is working on for SoftBank competitor KDDI au. Clearly the big draw here is the big solar array up front that’ll give you one minute of call time or two hours of standby per 10 minutes of charging, but you’ve still got IPX7 water resistance, an 8 megapixel camera, and a full wide VGA display at your disposal. Look for the 934SH in June and the 936SH in August — if you happen to be in Japan, anyhow.

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Sharp’s solar 936SH and 934SH with “memory LCD” headline latest SoftBank lineup originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 May 2009 02:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New Watch Takes Electronic Ink Beyond Books

Phosphor Watch 2

E Ink’s black-and-white displays have become synonymous with electronic book readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Now watchmaker Art Technology has extended the technology to timepieces, enabling the creation of a digital watch with a curved display surface.

“Our hope with E Ink was to take advantage of the high-contrast E Ink display and offer a curved look that we couldn’t have done with an LCD,” says Donald Brewer, CEO of Art Technology.

E Ink, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has popularized electrophoretic displays that consume very little power, require no backlights and are easily readable in sunlight. E Ink’s displays are used in virtually every e-book reader on the market today, thanks to a crisp, readable appearance that is closer to the experience of reading ink on paper than any LCD screen.

For now, the watch introduced by Art Technology is the only timepiece to use E Ink’s display. The watch, called Phosphor, is water-resistant but otherwise light on features. It offers only five different modes, including digital time, analog time, date, alarm and calendar.

While the use of the E Ink display is novel, it isn’t entirely functional. The display doesn’t refresh instantly and it can seem a bit slow, especially while changing modes or setting the time.

Another drawback with the watch is the lack of backlight. That makes the watch impossible to use in dark environments such as a theater.  Brewer says analog watches rarely have a backlight, so the lack of one in the Phosphor range shouldn’t put off too many buyers.

But then, analog watches usually have luminescent paint on the hands that make them glow faintly in the dark. That feature is not available on E Ink displays.

Though E Ink displays aren’t any cheaper than LCDs, Brewer hopes it can create the perception of greater value among buyers.

The watches will retail for $175 to $195 depending on the band. For now, they are available only through the company’s website.

Phosphor Watch

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com


Phosphor intros new line of curved E-Ink watches

Yes, e-books and phones are awesome — but there are plenty of other applications for E-Ink tech out there, and Phosphor has been selling its analog / digital combo E-Ink wristwatches for a while now. The company’s now adding to that stable with a line of curved-display models available in your choice of leather, rubber, and stainless steel bracelets and one of two faces; one can be toggled between a large digit and graphical view of the time, while the other offers an always-on monthly calendar and a smaller time display up top. Prices start at $175 for the new designs and hit streets now — and stay tuned, because we’ll be giving away a few of ’em!

We’ve had a chance to play with the watches, and the displays are as clear and crisp as E-Ink units we’ve seen; ultimately, we’d like to see what they could do with a matrix display, but segmented is a welcome first step. The models feel solid and well-built (the stainless steel versions, in particular, are pleasantly weighty on the wrist) and we get the impression that you could pass them off in virtually any social situation without the awkward “holy cow, you’re a geek of epic proportion” moments. Click on through to the gallery to see both face styles and all four bracelets in action.


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Phosphor intros new line of curved E-Ink watches originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 May 2009 20:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bookeen outs pocket-sized Cybook Opus e-book reader

Details are not totally clear at this point, but Bookeen recently teased its newest e-book reader offering — the Cybook Opus — during a presentation. At 200 DPI, the teensy 5.3-ouncer will have one of the higher resolutions we’ve seen on a reader, and it will supposedly be controllable by just one hand. We hear that It’ll also have 1GB of onboard storage, and boast PDF support, but that’s all we know spec-wise for now. There’s no word on pricing or availability for this miniscule paper-slayer, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. [Warning: read link is a PDF]

[Via Electronista]

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Bookeen outs pocket-sized Cybook Opus e-book reader originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 May 2009 18:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Why E-Books Look So Ugly

amazon-dx2

As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice, Twilight or the Federalist Papers.

“There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,” says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. “Right now it’s just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consideration for layout and flow of text.”

With the popularity of the Kindle and other e-book readers, electronic book sales in the United States have doubled every quarter. Though still a very small percentage of the overall book industry, sales of e-books touched $15.5 million in the first quarter of the year, up from $3.2 million the same quarter a year ago. By contrast, the printed book market sales in North America alone was nearly $14 billion in 2008.

The rapid growth of e-books has piqued many publishers’ interest, enabling Amazon to sign all the major publishers and offer more than 275,000 books in its Kindle store.

But despite the rapid growth, e-books are still new territory for most publishers. Add proprietary publishing standards such as the .mobi file format for the Amazon Kindle, and you have a recipe for confusion among many would-be e-book designers.

“E-books today are where the web was in its early years,” says Andrew Savikas, vice-president of digital initiatives at O’Reilly Media, a major publisher of technical books. “And some of those e-books are as difficult to read and browse as the early web pages.”

After spending a weekend with the Sony e-book reader, I found that the convenience of having so many books in a single, lightweight, slim device had me hooked, and its screen offers nearly print-like readability. But after about four hours of flipping through blocks of grey text I found myself feeling strangely melancholic. It couldn’t have been the lack of sunshine. Moving from one book to another, while easy, didn’t help: I was still staring at the same font, the same gray background and the same basic layout.

I had stumbled onto the reason why design and fonts are so important in publishing, says Mark Simonson, an independent typeface designer.

“Different typefaces are like like having different actors in play or different voices in an audio book,” Simonson says. “The variations in typeface influence the personality of the book. Sticking to one font is much like having the same actor play all the different parts.”

It’s why creative directors at publishing houses try so hard to make one book feel different from another, says Henry Sene Yee, creative director for publishing house Picador.

Sene Yee’s department is cover design. A book’s cover design can be photographic, illustrative, iconic, typographic or something more conceptual, he says. In each case the cover is a finely-tuned representation of the book’s genre and the message it wants to send.

“It’s about what we want readers to see in the book,” says Sene Yee, who says his job is part designer, part ad man. He spends more than two weeks coming up with the first sketch of a book cover — one that he hopes will bait readers in.

If readers are not familiar with a writer, they make impulse buys in bookstores or even online, “so covers are what make readers pick up a book they don’t know,” says Sene Yee.

So, if book design is so important, why is it so absent from e-books today?

“Ultimately the sticking point for e-books is accessibility,” says Defendini. “A large component of this is making sure the text flows right and the fonts are appropriate, even while giving the reader choice to change that. That flies in the face of the traditional role of a typographer, who is in minute control of everything.”

Designing a cover specifically for an e-book is rare: Most e-book covers are digital images of their print namesakes. That’s likely to change soon, says Savikas, who compares e-book stores today to how Apple’s iPhone App stores were when launched.

“With the iPhone App store we have seen app creators get more sophisticated with their choice of icons or the screenshots they use to attract buyers,” Savikas says.

E-books publishers are likely to get there soon, agrees Tor.com’s Defendini.

“The illustrators will be big winners soon,” Defendini says. “The social aspect of buying e-books will go up, just like it did with apps and music.”

When it comes to the guts of the e-book, fundamental aspects such as fonts and page layouts become a battle. There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books, says Defendini. That’s because e-readers’ firmware offers few font choices. Licensing custom fonts from a well-known foundry or font designer, a ubiquitous practice in print book design, is an impossibility for e-books.

Savikas says O’Reilly Media learned the hard way when the first-generation Kindle was released. The technology publisher found that the Kindle did not have a way to ensure that blocks of computer code would remain intact and properly formatted.

“As a publisher we are not necessarily looking for 800 different font choices,” says Savikas. “But even at this early stage we are looking for a set of standard fonts that guaranteed to be in any device or software.

“It was frustrating to contrast the Kindle’s limited fonts with that of the iPhone, which has very rich support for fonts, spacing and layout,” he says.

A big part of the problem with the Kindle (the largest selling e-books reader) is its use of the Amazon-specific .mobi file format, rather than the open standard ePub. ePub is based on the XML and CSS standards used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format.

As a result, if publishers want to sell Kindle books, producers like Defendini have to do a lot of manual work to create the digital file. In some cases, that means almost page-by-page customization, ensuring that drop caps appear correctly and that text flows around illustrations properly.

E-books won’t stay ugly forever, says Sene Yee. The devices’ limitations are mostly because they are in their early stages. For instance, color e-book readers are not likely to be widely available until at least mid-2010. And the current black-and-white displays offer readers no choice beyond increasing or decreasing font size.

As e-book readers get more popular they will get more sophisticated, bringing in a new crop of designers that understand a changing world of digital publishers.

“People want more than just plain text and the technology will have to change and keep up with this need,” says Sene Yee. “It won’t stay ugly forever.”

See also:
Hands-On: Kindle DX is a Pricey Pleasure
Kindle 2’s Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red
Wired Review of Amazon Kindle 2
Kindle Readers Ignite Protest Over E-Book Prices

Photo: Kindle DX (Bryan Derballa/Wired.com)


Hands On: New Cool-er E-Book Reader Turns Up the Heat

cooler1

One of the hottest category in consumer electronics currently is electronic book readers,  which sees a new device launched every few weeks.

The latest kid on the block is the Cool-er, an e-book reader from Interead, a UK-based start up. A slim, lightweight reader, it comes in a choice of eight colors and is targeted at buyers who want an inexpensive yet full-featured device.

“We have created a reader that is light enough to fit into a jacket or a purse and attractive enough to be reading it publicly,” says Neil Jones, founder and CEO of Interead. “This is not just about technology but also about being a lifestyle accessory.”

The launch of the Cool-er comes barely a week after Amazon introduced a new Kindle model, the Kindle DX. Like almost all the major e-book readers available currently, Cool-er uses the black-and-white display from E Ink. But the device joins an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace that includes players such as Sony, Fujitsu, Samsung and Foxit among others. (See a recent e-books readers round up)

At first glance, the Cool-er seems like the Sony Reader’s twin. It is almost the same width as the Sony Reader and just a little taller.  Where it differs is the weight. The Cool-er weighs 5.6 ounces–compared to 10 oz of the Sony Reader and 10.2 oz of the  Amazon Kindle 2. That means the Cool-er is nearly 40 percent lighter than its biggest competitors.

Despite the light weight and thin form factor, the finish on the device isn’t tacky–though it does have a ‘plasticky’ feel to it.  The Cool-er runs a Linux operating system and has a 1GB storage card slot.

A quick power-on button on the top turns on the device and shows some of the default titles available. You can browse through the titles using a click-wheel on the right. A button on the left offers the choice of a landscape or portrait mode, a feature that sets it apart from many of its competitors.

The buttons are probably the Cool-er’s weakest point. They are not soft-touch and require a bit of pressure to get them to ‘click.’ The user interface is fairly intutive allowing users to click through the different titles and choose what they want to read.

Unlike the Kindle, the Cool-er does not offer wireless connectivity.  It connects to a PC or a Mac using a standard USB cable and also charges via the computer’s USB port . Users can download books from the company’s own online book store at coolerbooks.com.

The device supports books in the ePub, Txt, JPEG and PDF format. Cool-er users can also listen to music and audio books. And they can choose from among red, blue, hot pink, violet, light pink, green, black and silver colors– which look surprisingly better than expected.

Cool-er supports eight languages including English, German, Portugese, Russian French and Chinese. Though many users would have preferred to have over-the-air wireless capability a la the Kindle, the tethering to the computer allows Cool-er to be used in any country, says Jones.

The Cool-er  is priced at $250 and is available for pre-order through the company’s web site. The device is expected to be available to buyers from June 1.

Still the device faces a big challenge in distinguishing itself in a crowded market.  The Cool-er doesn’t have any features that truly stand-out. It’s appeal is in that it is reasonably good looking e-book reader at an attractive price.

Interead is also hoping to strike deals with retailers. If successful, the company could further get the kind of volumes that it needs to drop prices down to $200. The company is also open to working with software develops to create apps for the device which runs the Linux OS and launch an iPhone-like app store for the Cool-er.

More photos

cooler2

cooler3

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See also:
Hands-On: Kindle DX is a Pricey Pleasure
Kindle 2’s Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red
Wired Review of Amazon Kindle 2
Kindle Readers Ignite Protest Over E-Book Prices


BeBook mini and BeBook 2 priced, 3G added to the latter

Slowly but surely, those oh-so-juicy details are leaking out about Endless Ideas’ upcoming duo of e-readers. We’ve now learned that the BeBook mini will boast the same specifications as the original BeBook, save for the much more compact 5-inch display; if all goes well, it should be available for purchase this summer for €199 ($270). Moving on to the BeBook 2, we’ve learned that it will include both WiFi and 3G access right out of the box, and the company is currently working with mobile operators in Germany and France in hopes of providing Kindle-like data access for on-the-go book downloads. Unfortunately, it looks like the asking price of that one will hover in the €350 ($476) to €400 ($544) range, but you can check out a Dutch interview with the new announcements just past the break.

[Via Slashgear]

Continue reading BeBook mini and BeBook 2 priced, 3G added to the latter

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BeBook mini and BeBook 2 priced, 3G added to the latter originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 May 2009 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interead’s COOL-ER claims to be the ‘iPod moment’ for e-readers

Upstart company Interead is looking to jump into the ever-expanding library of e-book readers with its debut, the COOL-ER. Company founder Neil Jones describes it as the “iPod moment that e-readers have been waiting for,” calling the device the first of its kind to be designed specifically for the non-technologically inclined reader in mind. Indeed, the aesthetics seems to borrow liberally from the iPod nano, and features eight different color options. It weighs in at 6.3 ounces, or a little less than half of the Kindle 2, with the same 6-inch e-ink screen, and is small enough to fit comfortably in your jacket pocket, he says. It’s got 1GB internal memory and a SD card slot, as well as a 2.5mm headphone jack with a 3.5mm converter bundled with every device. The feature set is pretty barebones, with no keyboard, text-to-speech, WiFi, or Whispernet equivalent — all files have to be loaded via USB or SD card — but in its place is a more attractive $250 MSRP, and Jones assures us at that price the company’ll be making a profit on each unit sold. Format support includes EPUB, TXT, JPEG, any kind of PDF, MP3 for audio, and eight languages including Russian and traditional / simplified Chinese. The company’s also launching an e-book store and offering an extra discount for customers who register their COOL-ER. It’ll go on sale May 29th for US and Europe via its website, with retail distribution partner expected to be announced closer to the launch date. We’re gonna wait until we get a few chapters into Alice in Wonderland before giving a final verdict, but in the meantime, check out our initial hands-on in the gallery below.

Read – Product page
Read – Online store

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Interead’s COOL-ER claims to be the ‘iPod moment’ for e-readers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 May 2009 09:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery, being totally chill

In a collision of journalistic labs heretofore unseen, the folks at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab hit up The New York Times‘ R&D lab for a look at what those ink-stained word-slingers think about the future of newspaper delivery. Nick Bilton, “Design Integration Editor” at the NY Times, and ever calm in the face of futurism, gave a guided tour of the devices they’re currently looking at, and while there aren’t a lot of surprises, it is nice to see they’re taking ebooks, netbooks and touchscreen PCs all very seriously. Of particular note is a (sadly damaged) e-ink prototype with a newspapery layout, complete with typography, designed for an “e-ink device that [doesn’t] exist yet.” Nick also makes mention of Mary Lou Jepsen’s upcoming Pixel Qi display, along with the marvelous world of RFID-based ads. Check out the full content delivery nerd-out on video after the break.

Continue reading New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery, being totally chill

New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery, being totally chill originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 May 2009 11:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s e-ink texting Alias 2 now on sale at Verizon Wireless

Samsung's e-ink toting Alias 2 now on sale at Verizon Wireless

Electronic ink ain’t just for readers. Samsung’s Alias 2 is here, making use of a cleverly segmented display to make a mighty-morphing, e-ink keypad, which you can now get thumbing at Verizon Wireless — right on time, no less. The price with a two-year contract is $129.99, but another $50 instant discount brings it down to a tick under $80. Go get your text on.

[Via PhoneArena]

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Samsung’s e-ink texting Alias 2 now on sale at Verizon Wireless originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 May 2009 07:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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