News

e-Paper "tower of Babel" warning as iRex unveils light wireless e-book based on Philips e-ink technology

At first glance, the Iliad is another Tablet. Second glance shows it to be "only monochrome" and for most mobile toy fans, that would be the end of their interest. But this is the start of the e-paper revolution, unlikely though it seems.

What's remarkable about the device is its battery life; and this is due to the revolutionary display. What's important about it, is the content formats it can accept: Acrobat (PDF), XHTML, TXT, MP3 - and other formats "will be supported in the near future."

Unlike more futuristic flexible e-paper technologies - from companies like Plastic Logic - this uses a more rigid, Philips derived display. Like the Plastic Logic designs, this is electrophoretic - it uses a tiny charge to "set" each pixel into one of 16 grey-scale levels, and the pixel stays set indefinitely. The result is that as long as you don't charge the pixels too frequently, a very small battery can drive the device for a very long time.

"Based on three hours reading a day," said the inventor, "the operating time of the rechargeable battery is more than a week."

The company, iRex Technologies, issued its press release on the Iliad today, revealing a 1024 x 768 pixel device with a total storage capacity of 64Mb Ram, plus 224MB internal FLASH memory "for storing
content." This, it added, "is sufficient for 1 month of newspapers, 30 books and many other documents."

And it's equipped with WiFi wireless, and a USB, or an Ethernet connection to get online, either directly on a WiFi hotspot, or via a PC. Price isn't known; shipping isn't till April or May 2006, and even the enthusiastic commentators at AFAICS Research won't claim that this is much more than a primitive first step into e-book readers.

"These devices will eventually have a resolution and contrast that matches, or improves on paper," said AFAICS partner Nick Hampshire. "Early devices like this are still relatively low-resolution; but already, this screen is going to be easier to read than a notebook computer of similar resolution."

Hampshire welcomed the touch-sensitive screen. "For this market to take off, it's essential that it can be used exactly the same way that real paper can - allowing the user to annotate, copy, save, clip, and so on," he said. "And because of the low power requirements, this weighs only 390 grams - far lighter than even the smallest PC Tablet designs. That means you can hold it in one hand, or adjust its viewing angle, without getting sore wrists. It's already a better experience for the reader than a PC can be. As time goes by, with higher resolutions coming matching laser printer output, it will become even better."

But he had a warning: "Already, we're seeing multiple content formats needed. Looking into the quite near future, we expect the number of e-paper devices to proliferate rapidly, and we expect many consumer electronics makers to go for their own, proprietary content formats. There's a limit to how many a small, low-power device can support without becoming too costly to sell. It's important for the industry to focus on harmonising content standards early, before we have a Tower of Babel."

There is a choice of five standard connectivity options for transferring data to the reader, said iRex - USB stick, Compact Flash or SD memory card using slots on the top of the device, as well as Ethernet or WiFi links.

AFAICS Research has published an industry report on e-book readers, and will be following that up this month with an in-depth survey on the e-paper revolution.

Full tech details of the Iliad are on the iRex web site, with further details here.Tags for further reading at Technorati: e-paper, e-book, e-book reader, Plastic Logic, electrophoretic, and AFAICS Research

Disclaimer: the Editor of NewsWireless is a partner of AFAICS Research Limited