Ok I haven’t touched on this here yet, but I have on a couple of the blogs covering it and just yesterday I was talking with a friend about it, so here goes.
This thing isn't real. There isn't anything about it that is real. There are only renders on that site probably done with
http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/index or something very close to it. It is much more like a design student's project than a real product.
Specifics
When the site was first talked about by the various blogs like Wired and Engadget, it said Eink all over the site. They even reported it as Eink without questioning it.
1 Eink doesn’t even advertise an Active Matrix display over 12" and they haven't commercialized anything over 9.7
2 Eink doesn’t do one discreet color at a time like is shown, except black or white, and even if it could it wouldn't be as bright
3 A 9.7" grayscale display will cost $50 to $60 dollars in bulk. So the pricing talked about is impossible with Eink
Of course the person has done an update and removed references to Eink
SOOOO what about that Stylus. What kind of stylus could act as both pen and eraser? Active digitizer like Wacom and Hanson make. Look at the description though. It says the eraser is shaped 10 pixels wide by 1 pixel wide so you have a wide or narrow erase track.
Digitizers like Wacom do not do that, they work or pressure. However, Wacom and Hanvon also do NOT license their pressure sensitive tech. They keep it in house.
So the only thing that might possibly work is resistive. Guess what? The person changed the site to add a mention of resistive touch. Ok so it hasn’t been done this way before but it is possible to do it with newer resistive multi-touch displays from
Stantum
So back to that display- If it’s not Eink what could it be? Well it could be SiPix. SiPix has the capability to show colors besides grayscale discreetly. They offer that for shelf labels etc. But guess what. They have never even shown it in public in an Active Matrix display. So SiPix is out. They have nothing bigger than 9 inches and they can't do the color by June either.
What about that similar product from
Kent Displays -
the Boogie Board . Fantastic product. We have two here at the house. One for the kids and one for us for notes and grocery lists. I've talked with them at CES and in between about possibly even being a retailer. Can't though. It's not so much that other retailers have "exclusives" but they buy the WHOLE production run for 6 months and then do it again when they run out.
Boogie is a ONE PIXEL
CHLCD . When you press on it the crystal shift so you see the green layer under. When you hit the erase button, it sends a charge re-aligning the black crystals and leaving the pixel all black again. It has no memory. I can't show you a page you already saved even if you could because its 1 pixel.
They actually intend to come out with a new version of the boogie that would have memory. They have to add a touch layer and have the memory remember that input. They actually wanted to do it from the start but the retailers all told them it would be too expensive to retail so they have been waiting and selling it as is.
The retailers are asking for it now because it is the number one requested change to the product from the folks who are buying it. Depending on the cost of memory and how much they add plus a USB slot or just a card slot for you to add your own memory it will probably add 20 to 25 dollars to the current retail of $40.
It still will only be able to erase the whole page and still will not be able to show you a page you already wrote because it will still only be 1 pixel. You will have to download your notes elsewhere to view them.
So to clarify; Kent displays who makes the display itself can only make a 1 pixel 6 inch display, only whole page erase, can't view previous pages device, with memory for between $60 and $70.
Yet this Note Slate person is saying that by June they can sell a 13-inch device with an Active Matrix display for $99? And the Tech people are falling over themselves to write about it? People who are supposed to be tech experts.
Okay so maybe it's not CHLCD. Digging further in the new version of the site, they actually wrote a description of the display tech.
Scroll way down
Quote:
Detail of the display surface
Pixel units based display screen
Technology behind Note Slate display is based on magnetic electronic paper display units, points, electro-mechanically controlled by the pencil. This simple technical solution works great for functionality of this unique device. The resolution is 760x1080 pixels, which equals 102ppi physical interface.
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magnetic electronic paper display... electro-mechanically controlled by the pencil? 102 ppi?
I'm stumped. I've followed the electronic paper and LCD advances over the last 10 years extensively. Spent time at CES, SID, attending seminars and conferences. Reading white papers and Patent filings. Talking with the creators of roll-able displays.
I have never heard of such a display. I cannot even think of a display tech that would be that size and the PPI. Ask the Nates that run
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/ and
http://www.the-ebook-reader.com/ , two blogs I highly recommend, if they have ever heard of it or wrote about display tech like that.
I challenged a couple of the majors like Engadget Wired and Tech Crunch to find the display tech described. They haven’t responded.
So Engadget actually put some hedge in their most recent article
[IMG]Right now it exists only as renders but with, a release mere months away and a decidedly attractive price point, we're intrigued. Skeptical, but intrigued.[/IMG]
Go back and read their articles about the Notion Ink Adam leading up to it's launch. They displayed more heated skepticism about that product being real, even when they held versions in their hands, then that quote above.
Oh the Adam- another bistable display, Pixel Qi. One laptop per child costs more than a hundred with a 10-inch display. The 10-inch display is the only size Pixel Qi display in production. Of course no discreet single colors. Okay so it’s not Pixel Qi
Just look at some of the things that are on the horizon that have bistable displays, memory, and stylus that are coming from Boogie Board, Hanvon, Asus, Acer and others. Look at their expected price ranges and then ask-
How would a person no one has ever heard of, at a company (is there a company registered?) that no one has ever heard of be able to raise enough money to buy manufacturing in enough volume to deliver a product in 4 months at $99?
/rant
