E Ink

Samsung announced that the E6 e-reader will soon be available in the US market. They have formed a partnership with Barnes & Noble for an e-book store. It'll cost $299 when launched.

Samsung E6

The Samsung SNE-60K is a slider e-reader (with some extra controls under the slide) with a 6" E Ink touchscreen (using a stylus), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hand-writing recognition software.

Daza Electronics announce the E-002, a 6" (800x600) E Ink e-reader that supports PDF and ePub formats, and also the E-003 which adds a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi or 3G:

It seems that Gigabyte are developing an E Ink (6" 800x600) e-reader (called EB10) that's running on the Android OS (or Linux or Win CE 6.0) using a 667Mhz Samsung processor. They want to allow users to install any software on the reader: RSS readers, news aggregators, e-book readers, web browser and more. Check the following video preview:

Sri Peruvemba from E Ink has talked to PC Magazine, and he gives some very interesting information. He expects color E Ink to arrive soon, and devices based on this technology would ship in the beginning of 2011. This color will be more like the color you would see in a newspaper, and not like an LCD display. We can expect more on this from E Ink at the SID show in May.

Sri also reveals that they are working on much-faster E Ink displays, but it can take around 2-3 years for such technology to show up in shipping products...

Via E-Ink-Info

Laptop has posted a review of the Sony Reader Daily edition. This is a 7" touch E Ink reader with free 3G (AT&T) costs $399. And they're not too happy...

The good things:

• Simple and clear interface
• Fast page turns

The bad things:

• Sluggish, sometimes it takes a few seconds between screen taps and a response. Sometimes there was simply no response to taps or swipes at all
• Display is a bit 'dull', because of the touch layer
• It's slow compared to the Kindle or the Nook
• More expensive than the competition
• no ePub support

Freescale announced today a new processor called i.MX508 targeted for e-readers. The processor is based on an ARM A8 core and includes an E Ink controller. Freescale says that the chip is fast (800Mhz), efficient and cheap (less than $10 in large volumes). In fact they say that this chip can enable $150 e-readers.

The new chip is faster than Freescale's previous e-reader chips (used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony's Readers, for example) which can result in faster page refresh and can enable new features. As the chip includes an E Ink controller, USB and NAND memory it can help reduce the price of the final product.

Interestingly, the chip includes a special e-reader power mode, in which it can turn-off when users are reading a page to save power, and only operate at full-speed when users want to turn a page or perform an operation. 

The i.MX508 is expected to sample in 3Q 2010, and freescale (together with E Ink) are offering a dev-platform (called SABRE) which costs $1995 and is available now.

The enTourage eDGe is an exciting device - an e-reader/netbook with a dual LCD and e-paper display running on Google's Android OS. I had the good chance to interview Asghar Mostafa, President and CEO of enTourage Systems, and Doug Atkinson, their VP of Marketing and BizDev.

eTourage Systems, based in McLean, VA, was founded in early 2008 to work on the eDGe. They say that the eDge is "an interactive dualbook that merges the functionalities of an e-reader, tablet netbook, notepad, audio and video recorder and player in one dual-screen device".

Q: First of all, the eDGe release date was set to February, now I see in your site that it's pushed back to March. Is that still on track?

DA: Pre-orders received by January 12 will start shipping at the end of this week as scheduled. New orders will begin shipping in March.