Folding smartphones are slowly making their way into the mainstream. Could foldable e-readers be next? The E Ink Corporation, the company behind the digital paper tech found in the majority of e-readers, is trying to make it happen. The firm’s R&D lab has been developing foldable e-ink screens for a while, and its latest prototype clearly demonstrates the idea’s potential.
This feels like such a natural fit for an e-reader. A foldable e-reader mimics a real book a lot more accurately than a regular portrait display does, and can potentially reduce the amount of times you have to perform a digital page flip. Still nowhere near a real book, of course, but a tiny step closer nonetheless.
I’m hanging out for a connected fold-able e-Paper tablet device.
I realise there are gadgets like Remarkable, but they are way too expensive, too fragile, use proprietary file formats or are just poorly supported.
I want a e-paper alternative to the tablets that keep getting broken when they are dropped, and that will work for days or even weeks from a charge. Weighs almost nothing, doesn’t crack when dropped, isn’t some buggy invisible dot grid scanner. A device that can be WiFi connected and transfer to a cloud repository in a universal file format of my choice like PDF, ODF, RTF or HTML. I really not fussed as long as any software I use can read it, and it doesn’t require a special viewer beyond my eyeballs!
More importantly for non-USA and Japanese users, it must be A3, A4, A5 ….. Ax whatever metric. Not Quarto, Legal, Letter, Foolscap, Folio or any other obsolete non-standard rare or exotic display or print size that won’t scale correctly!
Finally, I realise resolution and response can be a big issue on these devices, so maybe one small high res fast response area for signing.
Back in 2015 I worked on the prototype that became the Intel Tiger Rapids :
https://www.cnet.com/news/intels-tiger-rapids-two-screen-notebook-vision-informs-our-mobile-future/
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/18/17993690/intel-computer-concept-copper-harbor-tiger-rapids-dual-screen-pc-prototype
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2CgFEOOEgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpVGMdbu2bE
This neat implementation really pushed the form factor to demonstrate what could be achieved, and the 8″ 1200×1600 16 grey scale e-ink screen was not only impressive for its quality, but was also pretty damn fast regarding it’s refresh rate thanks to area specific redraw which allowed writing in real time on it.
Current dual screen tablets gets that further, yet going to e-ink removes a bit of versatility (drawing pictures, watching videos).
I think most Devs are focused on the wrong market, the winner will be a low cost device that can perhaps run a CUPS type service to allow printing, read documents or display images and drawings in good quality resolution and greyscale, with a bit of note taking or form filling, perhaps email at most. Not web browsing or full colour video.
The device that takes off will be the one someone like myself can supply to hundreds of workers, for hospitals, restaurants, factories, service vans, meeting minutes. At that point paper is gone for writing, and instructions become real time and JIT.
The cheap digital Clipboard++, the upgrade and replacement for those stupid Apple Store, Fedex and DHL scanner gadgets!
Wow, this one is super cool. Definitely the best dual screen concept I’ve ever seen.
Kind like Iota phone on steroids. If you could get some vibra feedback for the keyboard to get it any physical feel it could be a winner.
Being able to operate content on an LCD in conventional apps ecosystem and then push it on eink for reading and notes seems to have a lot of sense, but the eink part would have to have a dedicated energy efficient OS to preserve the expected eink battery life when operated alone.
Now If you paired that with foldable eink to gain full A4…
Yes, that. An also one with a mainstream OS like Android so you can do more than just reading epubs and with a color display!
I’ve had the yotaphone (the one with a e-ink display on the back) it was wonderful! It was even fast enough to watch youtube (but, because of the display quality, only really usable for watching talking heads 🙂 )
I think that if the foldable 2 page ebook format was any boon for the user it would have caught up in the market long time ago.
You don’t really need a foldable eink screen to implement that.
The major feature point for this device is rather an ability to present A4 document on demand with a device that fits in a small bag so its utility comes down to the use cases that Remarkable covers but w/o the clumsiness / fragility of it. I guess that’s where Remarkable will be heading if they manage to survive.
The main application (imo) is small but potentially profitable niche: engineering companies that exchange a lot of technical drawings in their day to day workflows.
Now I think the biggest problem on the software side I’m afraid. The device would have to seamlessly integrate with myriad of solutions those companies use for producing and validating those artifacts and that’s a big barrier of entry.
No it would not have caught, because of the price and of the washed out colors. EInk devices have reached their peak demand for ages, mostly in electronic price tags for shops and small static displays (huge market) and eink kindles (tiny market). Every other attempt at doing anything else is doomed to be overpriced. The demand for eink devices with big screens is ultra low thus the screen is expensive to produce, while we got bazillion of really cheap and good enough LCD/OLED/IPS screens. Almost nobody wants an overpriced laptop or tablet with washed out colors or, god forbid, no colors at all, even if the device can be up for a week without a charge. And niche market means expensive prices,
So far, the only dedicated devices I have seen with eink screens and a decent price are either using tiny screens (rasberry pi hats) or used Kindle screens (The Open Book Project). That is a niche market for you, and I too would love a good dual screen eink with a reasonable price, which will probably never exist.