Despite the Amazon Kindle‘s limitations, it has been pretty popular. The E-Ink technology makes reading so much easier on the eyes (and increases battery life) than traditional lcd displays. And having a catalog of over 170,000 titles that can be downloaded within a minute doesn’t hurt. But one of the things that users complain about is the display (seems like DRM is another big one!). It is a 6 inch diagonal display that can display 600×800 resolution and is glass. That combination of added bulk, small viewing window, and fragility erk some users. Yesterday Plastic Logic announced a new reader that is flexible, gesture based display, and supports most office documents.
The reader is 8.5×11 in size and is built on plastic substrate transistor display technology developed at Cambridge. That development is probably the more important one, in terms of broad, revolutionary impact. It will allow the manufacturing of plastics based electronics that are cheap and easy to make. That manufacturing process can be done at low temperatures and could severly disrupt the silicon based electronics industry.
The reader will allow direct office document viewing. This includes Word, Excel, PDF, Powerpoint, books, publications, etc. This is accomlished wired or wirelessly. The screen is a touch screen that allows gesture based movements for navigation. Unfortunately, a price hasn’t been set yet and shipping will start in 2009. Video is worth a billion words:
