Finally, Color E-Paper
Sony has unveiled color e-paper. One thing I had hoped with the iPad was that the screen would be some kind of new, advanced color e-paper, since rumors were they were going to market it as a reader.
If this works well enough, I’m pondering whether or not it’ll work well enough for digital picture frames. Judging from the display appearing in the article, it would be. I like digital picture frames, but I hate the backlighting. This makes them difficult in a bedroom, living room, or any place where you might be distracted by the soft glow of fluorescent backlighting.
At the least color e-paper will mean readers like the Kindle can host color content, for things such as magazines. I doubt Apple would want to go that route with the iPad, now that it’s out, and it’s pretty clearly a more general purpose tablet computing device. This should keep the Kindle and Nook competitive with content, like magazines, that demand color.
I have a Kindle and LOVE it. While color would be nice, I don’t think I would pay extra for it. Publishers struggle to convert books as simple as novels to the Kindle format (there is often misspellings and the formatting if often poor) and I would not trust them with more than one color.
The Kindle is already all I want it to be. Color would be neat, but not if it costs more.
For several years, I’ve wanted a flexible reflective color display that could refresh fast enough that it could be used as a computer monitor. Light-emitting plastics fail because they emit light; e-paper fails because because it isn’t color, and it doesn’t refresh fast.
This looks like it might be what I would like!
Currwnt Nook Color is a mildly-crippled Android tablet, and B&N is increasing functionality of it by the last rumor I saw. With a little bit of hackery, it is the cheapest Honeycomb tablet available.