Posts Tagged by reader
Sony Reader Daily Edition up for pre-order
| November 18, 2009 | Posted by Jessica Moreno under Electronics, Gadgets, Sony, Tech News |
We’ve got to admit, having played with the mirasol ebook prototype earlier today, Sony’s pre-sale of their Reader Daily Edition is looking marginally less appealing. Priced at $399.99, the Sony Reader Daily Edition has a 7-inch monochrome e-ink display, integrated 3G connectivity, and weighs 12.75oz; wireless access to Sony’s ebook store is included in the sticker price.
As well as content from Sony’s ebook store, the Reader Daily Edition will also play nicely with PDF, Word, BBeB, ePub and other text formats. You can highlight blocks of text and add notes with the included stylus, or use the on-screen keyboard if your handwriting is illegible, and there’s an onboard dictionary for checking up confusing words.
Battery life is rated at up to 2.5 weeks from a single charge, though you’ll only see that sort of longevity if the wireless is shut off. Switch it on and you’re looking at more like a week’s worth of use. Actual deliveries are expected to arrive sometime between December 18th and January 8th, which is a pretty large window if you’re considering giving the Sony Reader Daily Edition as a holiday gift.
Press Release:
SONY READER DAILY EDITION NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-SALE AT SONYSTYLE.COM
SAN DIEGO – November 18, 2009 Delivering on its promise to give consumers a variety of choices, Sony today announced its newest addition to the Sony Reader Family — the Reader Daily Edition™ — is now available for pre-order on SonyStyle.com. The Reader Daily Edition, a highly-anticipated wireless model with 3G connectivity, will ship next month.
The Reader Daily Edition joins the Reader Pocket Edition™ and Reader Touch Edition™ to round out Sony’s complete family of digital readers. The Reader Daily Edition gives consumers wireless access to Sony’s eBookstore from most of the U.S., via a 3G mobile broadband network. Book lovers will be able to browse, purchase and download books as well as select newspapers and magazines on the go. There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB. Sony will announce newspaper and magazine content providers within the next month.
The Reader Daily Edition features a responsive, menu-driven, seven-inch touch screen panel that enables quick, intuitive navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen. Users can take handwritten notes with the stylus pen or type with the virtual keyboard. All notes can be exported and printed out for easy reference. The Reader Touch Edition includes an onboard Oxford American English Dictionary that allows you to look up a word by simply tapping on it.
For more details on the Reader Daily Edition please visit sonystyle.com; Sony’s online destination for book lovers – wordsmoveme.com; or the Sony Electronics Community, which includes a corporate blog, video, photos, polls and profiles. For a list of all the Sony Electronics community sites please visit:
Key Facts:
o Sony’s new Reader Daily Edition is now on sale at SonyStyle.com.
o The Reader Daily Edition provides wireless access to Sony’s eBookstore from most of the U.S.
o Wireless access is provided by a 3G mobile broadband network.
o The Reader Daily Edition’s seven-inch wide, full touch screen display provides intuitive navigation and comfortable layout of content, including newspapers and magazines, in portrait or landscape orientation.
o In portrait mode, about 30-35 lines of text are visible, making the experience very similar to that of a printed paperback book.
o A high contrast ratio with 16 levels of grayscale ensures that text and images are crisp and easy to read.
o The Reader Daily Edition features an attractive aluminum body with an integrated protective cover.
o Easy access to the embedded dictionary with a simple double-tap on a word for its meaning.
o The Reader Daily Edition has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more.
o It will sell for about $399.
o Newspaper and magazine content providers to be unveiled within the next month.
Quotes:
Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division: “We firmly believe consumers should have choice in every aspect of their digital reading experience. With the availability of the Reader Daily Edition, we are delivering on that promise. We now have the most comprehensive family of devices on the market, the greatest access to free and affordable eBooks through The eBook Store from Sony and our affiliated ecosystem, and now round out our Reader offering with a wireless device that lets consumer purchase and download content on the go.”
Android ebook reader shows up in shaky shot
| November 18, 2009 | Posted by Jessica Moreno under Electronics, Gadgets, Google Android, Tech News |
Nine out of ten blurry-cam operators agree, a diet of caffeine and Twinkies is best for getting those sneaky shots that make you so popular among tech blogs. Someone has sent CrunchGear a deliriously wonky photo of what’s said to be an e-reader from a company with no track record in the tablet or ebook reader segment.
The device apparently runs Android, and there’s speculation that it’s a musical-themed gadget since there are some decidedly note-like icons up near the top of the image. Of course, given the fact that there are exposure trails from most of the on-screen images, it’s entirely possible that those “notes” are in fact simply circular, with camera shake creating the hooked tails.
Either way, it’s seemingly bigger than other Android touchscreen devices we’ve seen previously, and we’ll always welcome a new entrant to the tablet/e-reader sphere. Anybody have any idea what this mysterious gadget might be?
Qualcomm mirasol color video ebook readers ship in 2010
| November 18, 2009 | Posted by Abren Michaels under Electronics, Gadgets, Tech News |
Ebook readers are arguably coming of age, but don’t assume e-ink – and the push to produce color e-ink panels – have won the game quite yet. SlashGear met up with Qualcomm’s mirasol team today to discuss their latest display news, and while you might remember the technology from their early 1.1-inch single-color panels, they’re now showing off a 5.7-inch display capable of full color and video playback, with minimal impact on battery life. They’ve set themselves the target of having color ebook readers with mirasol panels on the market by the latter part of 2010, and are working with OEMs now to achieve that.
mirasol borrows the same elements that allow a butterfly’s iridescent wings to shimmer, using tiny flexible membranes that react to electrical charges, overlaid onto a mirrored surface. Light reflected back out through those membranes is refracted so that interfering wavelengths create colors, and because the membranes used are bistable, once they have been set to display a certain color they require virtually no power to maintain it, only if it needs to be changed. The system also needs no color filters, no strong backlighting to be visible in direct sunlight and no polarizing lenses.
It’s important to point out that the device you see here is merely a mock-up the mirasol team have put together, and while non-functional overall the 5.7-inch display panel is from their fab plant and an actual, working unit, its bistable pixels locked into a color image. Qualcomm are working with multiple OEMs – the names of which they wouldn’t disclose – on a variety of ebook reader devices, and while they couldn’t confirm any particular form-factors, they did say there are plans for units with and without QWERTY keyboards, together with touchscreen and non-touchscreen models.
Where mirasol shows its strength is in battery performance. A standard ebook reader – such as the Kindle – could last for roughly 20-percent longer if its monochrome e-ink display was switched for a mirasol panel, assuming the same sort of use. As the mirasol team explained, however, once you start pushing traditional e-ink panel refresh rates, up to the point you can display smooth video, and introduce color, power draw can actual go beyond that of a regular LCD display. A color e-ink video-capable Kindle would last roughly a day using the same battery; meanwhile the same unit with a mirasol panel would last around a week.
While they wouldn’t be drawn on specific figures, the mirasol displays – and the end products set to arrive from OEMs – are apparently roughly equivalent to what current e-ink panels and ebook readers cost now. Wireless connectivity is pretty much guaranteed, that’s certainly the model Qualcomm are pushing OEMs toward (and little surprise, given their wireless heritage), and while 5.7-inch panels are the current sweet spot, there’s no theoretical limit to larger displays.
There’s also no limit to the sort of devices we’ll see; if it has a display and a battery then you can use mirasol. The team there expect ebook readers to evolve into tablet-style devices, only this time with the sort of battery life the first generation of tablets lacked. With touchscreens, optional keyboards and integrated wireless connectivity, they’re betting users will more readily pick up a device they only have to charge weekly rather than every few hours. The 5.7-inch panel in the ebook reader mock-up is an ideal size for a MID or UMPC style handheld, and it’s worth noting that the runtime estimates Qualcomm have been making are based on a Kindle-style battery around 1,500mAh in size. Smaller panels, meanwhile, could take the pain out of preview displays on digital cameras or camcorders.
As for image quality, like e-ink the mirasol panel performs best in bright lighting, though that’s not to say it’s tough to read in regular conditions. Our photos – which are of a working mirasol panel, remember – were taken in both direct natural light (on an overcast London day) and with halogen lighting, and the colors really popped. Text is crisp and readable, with the 5.7-inch panel running at XGA 1,024 x 768 resolution and around 220ppi.
Best of all, this isn’t some pipe-dream or research project. mirasol have Qualcomm as a parent company and LG as a key hardware partner, and their target of having devices ready and on sale by the end of 2010 seems eminently possible. The company recently won a Wall Street Journal prize for innovation, based on the fact that the mirasol technology is a completely fresh and unique approach to displays, rather than trying to eke color out of e-ink or ween LCD or OLED off their hefty power supplies. As they told SlashGear today, “imagine an e-reader with color and video, but no battery sacrifice”.
Amazon Kindle 2
| September 6, 2009 | Posted by Tony Viteritto under Electronics, Gadgets |
If Apple release a tablet Amazon can forget about it.
Amazon recently released the new version of the Kindle called the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 offers two sizes to choose from with the larger size featuring the ability to show the text both horizontally and vertically. The Kindle 2 also offers the ability to save more books to its harddrive than the original Kindle. Personally, I’m going to hold out until Amazon releases a Kindle with a color screen before purchasing one. It’s a convenient device, but the pricemark makes it higher than my liking for its ability. A netbook costs approximately the same amount and has nearly equal portability with the ability to read e-texts if I so choose. I think that Amazon has the right idea with the Kindle 2, so I am looking forward to future generations of the Kindle and will likely be purchasing one when Amazon incorporates color to its text.
If Apple release a tablet Amazon can forget about it.
Amazon recently released the new version of the Kindle called the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 offers two sizes to choose from with the larger size featuring the ability to show the text both horizontally and vertically. The Kindle 2 also offers the ability to save more books to its harddrive than the original Kindle. Personally, I’m going to hold out until Amazon releases a Kindle with a color screen before purchasing one. It’s a convenient device, but the pricemark makes it higher than my liking for its ability. A netbook costs approximately the same amount and has nearly equal portability with the ability to read e-texts if I so choose. I think that Amazon has the right idea with the Kindle 2, so I am looking forward to future generations of the Kindle and will likely be purchasing one when Amazon incorporates color to its text.
