`Charbax shot this video at the Freescale suite the other day. (It’s off site, so I haven’t had a chance to make iy over there with my camera).
This demo unit is using a Pearl screen and is running on an i.MX508 CPU which was designed specifically for ereaders and incorporates a Cortex A8 800MHz processor and E Ink display controller.
Just don’t ask them what the power requirements are. This unit probably draws more power than a comparable LCD.
I stopped by the Qualcomm booth earlier and I think there’s something funny going on. They have a new demo unit for the Mirasol, which is reason enough to go. They also changed the video running on it. Do you know the demo video I found a few days ago? It was running on the floor model.
I’m sure you’re amused by the recursive promotion, but that video wasn’t supposed to run on that hardware.You have to see it in person to notice, but the video looked very grainy. The previous demo video running on the Mirasol demo unit looked a lot better.
I believe they started using the new video in order to confuse the issue after the Pocketbook Mirasol was delayed. The other reason I believe this is that the same demo video was running on the 30″ LCD TV next to the Mirasol demo unit.
This is a post that you probably think isn’t worth reading. I bet you already read about the ereader that Aluratek announced. Well, that press release was incomplete. Aluratek have a tablet and 2 new ereaders (one was released a few weeks ago).
First, Aluratek are going to be a hardware partner for Marvell. They are adopting Marvell’s 10″ (1024×600) reference design as the Cinepad. It’s going to have the great specs that Marvell promised as well as a capacitive touchscreen.
I was going to get a picture of the pre-production model but when I stopped by all they had was the Marvell prototype. Needless to say it will look a lot different. It should be out soon with a retail of $299.
Aluratek also have a new based on a 7″ (480×800) LCD screen. I haven’t seen this ereader before but I recognize it as being designed by Gajah. It’s even using the exact same menu system as the others I have. It has support for Adobe DE DRM and it probably will also be a decent PMP. I want to double check that first, though.
It’s available now for about $140.
The other new ereader is the Libre Aire. It’s based on the same 5″ screen as the Libre Pro, and it has basically the same feature set . But it also comes with Wifi and swipe pad (which replaced the arrow keys). It should be available in March and cost less than the Libre Color.
Editor’s Note: I thought that I published this post in January 2011, but it was listed as a draft when I found it today. It is over year old but I am posting it anyway.
Hanvon had a bunch of ereaders at CES, but the 2 that you’re dying to see are the new 9.7″ color ereader and the new 9.7″ high resolution ereader. I got my hands on both.
They were both engineering samples and there isn’t a definite release date for either. I know some sites are reporting that the e920 (grayscale) would be out in June but that’s not what I was told.
Also, since they were engineering samples I didn’t try to play with the features much; they’re going to change as the design matures.
I’m not impressed with the color screen and I’m really beginning to wonder if color is worth it. E-ink will always be at a disadvantage; LCDs can do it so much better and faster.
Next we have the new high resolution screen that Hanvon announced a few days ago. I really couldn’t tell the difference between the 6″ (at 167 ppi) and the 9.7″ (at 200 ppi). But, the previous 9.7″ screen had a resolution of 1200×864, which meant it had about 150ppi. The new screen is a 33% increase.
I couldn’t get them to let me move it so I could shoot a video, unfortunately.
When it comes to ereader industry, Ectaco are something of an outsider. They have a lot of experience with electronic dictionaries and digital translation, but it was only recently that they started integrating their core expertise into their ereader development.
Ectaco brought a pair of new ereaders to CES. The first is the most interesting; you’ve probably seen the press release for the Jetbook K-12. When Ectaco first started selling the jetbook 2 years ago, this is what they were working towards.
The jetbook K-12 has the same 5″ screen as the original Jetbook, but that’s the only similarity. This ereader – well, first it’s not an ereader. It’s an educational tool that can function but also do a lot more. It will ship with a built in graphing calculator app and an interactive Periodic table. It has both a speaker and a microphone, so you can both play and record audio notes. The wand on the right can work with the Jetbook to do OCR which you can then play back as TTS.
And that’s just a small measure of what it can do. It’s due out this quarter and the retail is projected to be $249.
Ectaco had another ereader in their booth, the Jetbook+. This is a significantly improved redesign of the existing Jetbook. It has the same 5″ screen but Ectaco replaced the arrow keys with a swipe pad. It also has Wifi and an accelerometer.
BTW, this is the same hardware as the new Aluratek Libre. The Jetbook+ is due out in a couple months but the retail and exact date has not been set.
One of the things I was looking forward to at CES was getting a chance to look at Bridgestone’s QR-LPD screens. This is a type of color epaper technology that’s been under development for quite a few years and is only just beginning to hit the market.
Vivitek is the distribution partner for the ereaders with the Bridgestone screen, and they were at CES this year.They brought both devices I’d heard about before: an 8.2″ eReader and a 13.1″ (e-Pad as they called it).
There was a third example of Bridgestone’s screen in the booth; it measured 4.1″ and was designed to be shelf tags in a super market.
I only have a video of the 8″ ereader because the larger device just didn’t do enough to justify shooting a video. It’s targeted at the professional market and the demo software running on it was designed for real estate agents and couldn’t actually do much.
The colors on the Bridgestone screen would best be described as washed out. Screen refresh was slow, and the ereader couldn’t actually do much besides turn the page. (If you can’t see the color in the photo or video, try watching again in HD.)
As you can see from the video, the screen refresh rate was slow. But I’m told that the software is still under development, so hopefully that will improve.
The 8.2″ eReader is expected to be available soon in Taiwan and they don’t know when the e-Pad will be released.
NEC had a pair of new tablet devices at CES this year. There was one with a single screen and another with 2 screens. Really the only difference was that dual screen unit had a second screen attached; all the ports, slots, and buttons were the same on both devices.
There’s no word yet on price or release date, but they did say that it would appear in Japan first. NEC are looking for partners and developers and there’s an SDK for developing apps that use both screens.
This tablet is based on a Cortex A8 CPU (they couldn’t tell me the speed) and it has Wifi, Bluetooth, a SD card slot, speaker, camera, GPS, accelerometer, a stylus, and USB Host. It has a resistive touchscreen and the screen resolution is 800×600.
The really cool part about this tablet is that you can have 2 apps open at once, one on each screen. You can also move some apps between the screen or have the app use both.
I liked it. If they get the price low enough and get developers to support it then this could be a really great device.
The M-Edge team flagged me down today as I was passing their booth.They wanted to make sure I knew about their newest case offering. In the not too distant future they plan to offer customized cases. There’s only going to be 1 case offered, and only the iPad, Nook, K2, and K3 will have this option. Cost is expected to be $40 for the Nook and Kindles and $50 for the iPad. They’ll also offer some semi-custom designs from the designer Out of Print as well as other designers.
As you can see from the next photo, you can create a design for both the from and the back of your case.
My Edge
Earlier today Freescale announced their 2011 list of Smart Mobile Device Pundits. This is a list of 20 gadget geeks, journalists, bloggers, and commentators who – well, basically this was a popularity contest. The Pundits who made the list got the most votes.
In order to thank and honor true industry pundits in the smart mobile devices category, we’ve gathered YOUR nominations and feedback in order to compile a list of the top 20 most revered commentators YOU plan to turn to in 2011 for the latest news and trends.
I’m on the list. Thank you, everyone, for voting for me. I appreciate your support. Other people on the list include:
I managed to miss this one yesterday. I actually passed through the Qualcomm booth twice and it wasn’t there either time.
This isn’t a product prototype, just a screen demo. I don’t know who shot the video, sorry.
In other news, Pocketbook will have a press conference at 11am today.They’ve been giving me the run around on exactly what they plan to announce, but it’s probably the new Mirasol ereader.
Pixel Qi is an exhibitor at CES this year, and I was finally able to see their screen first hand. (I’ve been wanting to see it for a couple years now.) They didn’t have a booth; instead they rented one of the small meeting rooms in the far end of South Hall.
It was incredibly crowded. If you’re wondering why there are no extensive galleries of photos showing their screen tech, that’s the reason. So this was the first time I’ve seen it, and I was surprised. Their screen looks like an LCD screen. That might sound funny, but I couldn’t tell the difference between a Pixel Qi and a normal LCD. In fact, I’ve used LCD screens that looked worse than Pixel Qi. So basically this means that if you got one of these screens you’ll get the benefit of a low power screen without losing any of the benefits of traditional LCD.
I could seriously see this replacing most LCD screens at some point in the future.
The biggest story at the PixelQi booth is production. When are we going to see these screens? According to Mary Lou Jepsen, production is ramping quite well on both the 7- and 10.1-inch screens and they are working on a higher resolution 1280 x 800-resolution 10.1-inch display and a 9.7-inch display for a partner. Why 9.7″? They say it’s because the iPad made that size popular. (But if you’re thinking about swapping an E-ink screen with Pixel Qi, sorry, the screen geometry is different.)
And there’s one piece of gossip I can share. I was talking with one of the Pixel Qi people about the perils of rushing a screen into production. If you’re wondering why they’re taking forever to get their screens on the market, there’s a reason. This is new technology and it takes time to get all the bugs out. Sipix came up, of course, as an example of why you shouldn’t rush.
So here’s the gossip. He’s heard that Sipix will be winding down production of the screens. I don’t know if this is true but given the problems of the current generation Sipix screen I think it’s a good idea.
I was walking through South Hall and I happened by this one company’s booth. They’re not offering an ereader but I like this idea and I thought it was worth a mention.
Datawind are a UK based that currently offers a 7″ and 9″ netbook under the Ubisurfer brand. They’re about to expand into the US market, and they expect to have the 9″ netbook with a Sprint data connection available in about a month.
The Ubisurfer 9 has 1GB Flash, a SDHC card slot, USB Host, Wifi, and either a 1X or 3G connection. Retail is expected to start at $199 and it’s already available in the UK. (If anyone in the UK has bought one I’d love to what you think.)
It runs Windows CE, which might be a concern. But it’s also going to ship with Softmaker office suite. This suite is a full office suite (unlike anything I’ve found on Android) and the fact the company even knew about it was a point in their favor. Software won’t be the shortcoming of this device.
I know free internet sound great, but when you look at the fine print this stops being such a great deal. You only get 30 free hours of web browsing a month.
On a related note, Datawind are planning to offer a pair of Android tablets (with the same data plan) in the near future. Retail is projected to be $249 for the 7″ tablet and $299 for the 10″. These babies will be running Android v2.2 on a Cortex A8 CPU with 1GB Flash, a SDHC card slot, Wifi.
One MobileRead user got frustrated with the lack of an official SDk from Pocketbook, so he did some digging and managed to put together his own.
I’m sure quite a few of you have noticed that the new models – 602, 603, 902 and 903 – do not accept programs built for earlier models. The root cause appears to be a change of ABIs; the 15.1 SDK expects a /lib/ld-linux.so.2 loader but the one in the 903 is .so.3. That’s probably because of a switch to EABI. So I installed an EABI system in a qemu emulator, shoved in some headers from the old SDK and libraries from the 903, tweaked a makefile… and managed to build a program! You’ll find poterm runnable for the 903 at my machine, as well as the emulator system image in which it was built – probably usable to build other things as well. Don’t forget poterm.ini if you try poterm out!
Is anyone going to pursue this? I’d like to hear about any new apps you might make.
via MobileRead
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announced this morning that Qualcomm will indeed be investing $1b in a new production plant for the Mirasol screen.
Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2008 U.S. investment mission to the formation of American Qualcomm (Qualcomm) headquarters called, finally in the fierce competition, stand out to compete for the favor of Qualcomm company, select the investment of nearly one billion U.S. dollars to Taiwan to set up world’s first small and medium size Mirosal reflective display technology production plant. Department of Investment Services Division in the continued economic assistance, Qualcomm announced its decision based on the earlier Dragon base in the Hsinchu Science Park, construction of production, plant area of about 7 hectares and is estimated to create a large number of employment opportunities.
Here’s the interesting part. If this is the first Mirasol plant, then the screen isn’t in production yet. That’s not what the Mirasol pr people were saying a couple months ago.I wonder who made the mistake?
Damn. It looks like we’re at least a year away from this screen actually showing up on a retail shelf.
Update: PCWorld are reporting that this is the second plant, not the first. That does make more sense.
I just came across the slides for a presentation given by Julia Wolf, a senior researcher with FireEye. I only have the slides, unfortunately, but they are a fairly good technical summary of the basic details of PDF format and how it can be hacked.
From the summary:
PDFs are currently the greatest vector for drive-by (malware installing) attacks and targeted attacks on business and government. A/V technology is extraordinarily poor at detecting these. The PDF format itself is so diverse and vague, that an A/V would need to be 100% bug-compatible with the parser in the vulnerable PDF reader.
You can also do cool tricks like make a single PDF file that displays completely differently in several different readers.
If this presentation doesn’t scare you then trust me, it should.
slides (PDF)
27C3 Update: The video of the presentation has been uploaded to Youtube.
P.S. Note that the slides are a PDF and the presentation is on PDF hacking. I find that amusing, don’t you?
The other new ereader is the Libre Aire. It’s based on the same 5″ screen as the Libre Pro, and it has basically the same feature set . But it also comes with Wifi and swipe pad (which replaced the arrow keys). It should be available in March and cost less than the Libre Color.