Hasta La Gadget!

If the paper trail for this handset wasn’t enough for you, here’s the first official imagery of the Samsung Zeal. It is, as speculated, a dual-hinge, dual-display affair, equipped with an E Ink keyboard that transitions from a four-row QWERTY arrangement to a dialpad depending on orientation. If you’re thinking you’ve seen this before, that might be because you were one of the few to notice Samsung’s Alias 2, which also called Verizon its home. The Zeal is expected to arrive in stores on November 11th, so you can expect this premature little cameo to be augmented with full specs and a price very soon indeed.

Update: The leak has turned into a full-on press release. The Zeal will cost $79.99 on a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate) and will be available in stores and online starting on November 11th, as expected. Skip past the break for the full announcement. Having checked it out for ourselves, we’ve found that this isn’t like the Alias 2, this is the Alias 2 … but in black. Shame on Verizon and Samsung for building up our interest for what’s essentially a soft relaunch with a freshened up nomenclature.

Continue reading Samsung Zeal and its dual-hinge design now official on Verizon: $79.99 (updated)

Samsung Zeal and its dual-hinge design now official on Verizon: $79.99 (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen color e-readers before, even colored e-paper displays. But in 2011, Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon will ship the first color reader with a screen made by Cambridge’s E Ink themselves.

According to the New York Times, Hanvon will announce their new e-reader at Tuesday’s FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo. Sporting a 9.68-inch color touch screen, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, it will retail in China in March 2011 for about $440.

The reader uses a standard E Ink screen with a color filter, so it has the same low-power, lightweight, high-readability characteristics of its black-and-white cousins. But this also means the screen is more-or-less static: it can show color photographs, illustrations and possibly some animation, but not full-motion video. Without a power-hungry backlight, the colors won’t be as bright as an LCD screen either.

Other features of the device remain unclear. Hanvon is known for its handwriting technology, which it packages with some but not all of its e-readers; the NYT is silent on whether the new device includes it. Business users, who are the device’s target market, are often more receptive to a stylus interface than the general consumer market; introducing color could make a stylus appealing to illustrators as well.

The long-term trajectory of color e-paper displays is even less clear, even as more-capable products from E Ink, Mirasol and Pixel QI come to the market. Color plays a different role in reading than it does in video or gaming. Will color illustrations be enough to satisfy readers, or will they drift towards LCD screens and tablets?

The short version is that consumers want everything: vibrant color and full video with low power consumption and zero glare at an unbeatable price. Until that arrives, we’ll continue to see both makers and readers in this space accepting tradeoffs and experimenting to find a balance that works.

See Also:

• Qualcomm Aims to Bring Color, Video to E-Readers
• Barnes & Noble Aims to Bring Color to E-Books
• Qualcomm's Mirasol Display Hopes to Create E-Reader Tablet Hybrids …
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets
• Pixel Qi Hybrid E-Ink LCD Screens for Your Own Netbook
• Why E-Books Are Stuck in a Black-and-White World

Cheap print, networked screens and location-aware hardware could create a world where dynamic text is everywhere — as ubiquitous and natural as our current media ecosystem of street signs, alarm clocks, news tickers and train tickets.

Design futurists BERG and ad agency Dentsu London, the team behind iPad Light Painting, have released two new videos for their “Making Future Magic” campaign. This two-part series on media surfaces includes “Incidental Media” and “The Journey.”

“In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention,” writes Berg’s Jack Schulze, “these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.”

“All surfaces have access to connectivity,” Schulze adds. “All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest, most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.”

I’m particularly taken with the use of paper ephemera in both concept videos. The shift to networked digital communication is usually identified with a shift away from paper and to the screen, when it’s actually anything but. If the identity-specific, instant-update expectations of what Schulze calls “app culture” were translated to print ephemera like coffee-shop receipts and train tickets — and I think that translation is inevitable — we start to see a new phase of print: really, a new kind of publishing.

I could spend paragraphs annotating each of the ideas and all of the tech here — none of it new, just reconfigured — but you’d be better off reading the BERG blog posts above instead.

As an American who regularly travels the postwar-era east coast regional rail system, for whom a Virgin Rail trip from London to Birmingham is already a kind of unimaginable, delightful future, this video leaves me with wonder. And not just wonder: patient reassurance that the future is already on the way.

See Also:

• Design Fiction: 'Making Future Magic,' Berg, Dentsu London …
• Stop-Motion Animators Use iPad to Paint With Light
• Tokyo, Living Lab of Possible Futures
• 2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice
• Patina and use-wear by BERG
• The City is A Battlesuit For Surviving the Future
• Digital Ink
• Flexible E-Paper on Its Way

They may not be the highest-function watches you’ve ever seen, but Phosphor’s line of timepieces can make a claim that virtually no other watches in the world can: they’ve got E Ink displays. Sure, Seiko’s been teasing us all with gorgeous pieces of E Ink wrist candy for half a decade, but the critical thing about Phosphor’s offerings is that they’re easy on the wallet (relatively speaking) and you won’t need to embark on a grueling multi-year journey through specialty jewelry shops in Asia to try to find one.

The company just recently introduced its latest line of models featuring world time capability, and we’ve had a chance to check them out — all four of them, to be precise. Read on for our quick review!

Continue reading Phosphor World Time E Ink watch review

Phosphor World Time E Ink watch review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Pandigital takes a second shot at digital reading with the Novel Personal eReader

Pandigital takes a second shot at digital reading with the Novel Personal eReader originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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