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Manufacturer Polymer Vision has announced that its Readius e-reader, which features a foldable, roll-out 5in screen, will finally hit stores later this year.
Polymer Vision's Readius: has a 5in display and makes calls
A prototype Readius has been around for some time, but this is the first time Polymer, which was created by electronics giant Philips and Telecom Italia, has named an official ship date, however vague it may be.
A potential rival to Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eBook, the Readius’ screen rolls out like a sheet of Clingfilm and is primarily designed for displaying text, such as from e-books and RSS feeds, thanks to its 16 levels of grey.
It has tri-band GSM/GPRS connectivity with HSDPA 3G, although the lack of an external display for quickly making calls on the go could be a drawback. If your boss stumps up the cash for one though, then he’ll be glad to know that POP3 and IMAP email is supported, as are web-based alternatives, such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.
The Readius is a handy size
Polymer Vision claims the gadget gives about 30 hours of continuous reading time when the screen’s unfolded. But it also works as an audio player, so you should be able to fold the screen and relax to tunes stored on it.
As a storage device, the Readius accepts Micro SD cards of up to 8GB. A USB 2.0 port and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity mean it’ll be handy for sending data to other devices.
The bad news is that Polymer Vision hasn’t yet said which countries the Readius will be available in first or how much it’ll cost.
COMMENTS
Think paper, not Video
It takes this technology about 1s to refresh a page. It works by rotating tiny balls in cells that are 1/2 black, 1/2 white. hence colour would be about 1/5th or 1/6th brightness.
The grey is a partially rotated ball.
Though no power needed to maintain ball position.
This is *ALWAYS* going to be a tech best suited to reading text. So email is OK, static mostly text web page Ok and ebooks brilliant.
But forget colour, flash, video ...
Yes in theory colour is possible at huge brightness penalty (white /black is very like fax quality in dim or full sunlight. No backlight). And maybe faster ball rotation using high voltage (x10 power?). But is hard to imagine it getting fast enough for video. ( 12fps needs about 40 times faster to avoid bad blur)
FAO Duncan
And whilst we're at it, where's our flying cars?!
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