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It is as though it is not about the quality of information any more.
It's about how PRETTY the picture is.
I think we need to ask ourselves, "WHAT ARE THESE COMPUTERS FOR?"
Are we buying more and more sophisticated junk so Apple and Intel and Macro$cam can make money or are we buying computers to serve useful objectives of our choosing?
E-book readers with black-and-white screens look like they’re stuck in a time warp, now that Apple’s full-color iPad is on its way.
But not for long. A new generation of displays are waiting to bring full color and video to low-power displays, while maintaining readability in different environments. That’s something that Apple’s LCD-based “Moses tablet” — and E Ink’s low-power, monochrome screens — can’t do.
One of the e-reader hopefuls is Qualcomm, whose latest technology, named Mirasol, promises to combine color, speedy refresh rates and low power consumption in a single display. Qualcomm hopes to have the first color screens available in e-readers by fall this year.
“For e-readers users coming from a black-and-white world, this is going to be like ‘Oh, my prayers have been answered’,” says Cheryl Goodman, director of marketing for Qualcomm.
With an estimated 5 million sold last year, e-readers have become one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics categories. And while screen sizes and functionality may be different, they all have one thing in common: Almost all of them use a black-and-white display from E Ink, the company that pioneered the low-power technology. The reason that e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader and the Barnes & Noble Nook can go days or even weeks without a recharge is that they use power only when the screen changes. In between, while you’re reading the page, the screen draws no power because its pixels are “bistable” — they have two stable states, dark and light, and can remain in either state without drawing power.
But the iPad’s debut and its focus on e-reading has raised the stakes for Amazon and other entrants. Amazon has reportedly acquired Touchco, a company that could provide it with the technology to add a touchscreen to the Kindle. A push for a color display would likely come with any new product that would use the Touchco tech.
Qualcomm’s Mirasol could be one of the contenders. Mirasol displays work by modulating an optical cavity to reflect the desired wavelength of light. The reflected wavelength is proportional to the cavity’s depth.
And if you are wondering what a color low-power Mirasol screen looks like, think a glossy scientific textbook rather than an LCD screen. It’s subdued, somewhat low-contrast, but crystal clear. Its reflective surface means that it doesn’t have (or need) a backlight. Its pixels, like E Ink’s, are bistable, so it will draw power only when refreshing the screen. And it can play video.
“It’s a very good display for what it does, which is an extremely low-power color screen,” says Vinita Jakhanwal, an analyst with research firm iSuppli.
Color screens for e-readers are more than a question of aesthetics. Many genres of books, including textbooks, cookbooks and comics, require color illustrations to make them come alive. Magazines and even newspapers are rendered almost unrecognizable without color.
Low-power color displays could change that. They could also help convince reluctant consumers to get a gadget designed for reading, without giving up gains in battery life.
A 5.7-inch Mirasol screen, not much bigger than an index card, with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, can offer at least five times the battery life of a 6-inch Kindle black-and-white Kindle display, says Goodman. The 5.7-inch screen is the size that Qualcomm is planning to debut its color displays in, though it says it can do larger screen sizes based on demand.
Mirasol displays are built on glass substrates. Thin films deposited on the substrate form one wall of the cavity, while the other wall is a highly reflective flexible membrane. An electric force applied across the cavity causes the membrane to collapse against the thin films. The cavity then becomes very thin, and the wavelength that is reflected moves into the ultraviolet spectrum.
For the viewer, this element, which is one pixel, is seen as black. Varying the depth of the cavity results in changes in the wavelengths reflected, which yields different colors.
“Because you use the lighting around to generate the image and color, it makes the display extremely low power,” says Jim Cathey, vice president of business development for Qualcomm.
And like the E Ink display, it is visible even in bright sunlight.
“Mirasol does color well but it has difficulty in reproducing gray scales,” says Jakhanwal. “When it comes to black-and-white, it is not as high contrast as an E Ink screen, but the advantage Qualcomm has is that it can offer color now.”
A Nascar race on the Mirasol display may not be pleasant, but the screen’s refresh rate of up to 24 frames per second is good enough for almost every other kind of video. In a demo at Wired.com, the screen showed a decent, sub-second refresh rate that was noticeably slower than 24 fps, but fast enough to show slow-motion moving images of butterflies.
Mirasol’s response time is also better than E Ink — in microseconds, compared to E Ink’s 200 or so milliseconds.
Still, many customers could find the videos on a Mirasol display unappealing, says Jakhanwal.
“Videos look much better in Mirasol than they do in E Ink,” she says. “But when you are watching video you want full color saturation and a washed-out picture is not that attractive,” she says.
Convincing e-reader manufacturers to bet on Mirasol won’t be easy. Qualcomm will have to compete against Pixel Qi, a scrappy California-based startup whose displays combine a full color LCD screen with a low-power black-and-white display. And then there’s E Ink, the current market leader that promises to come out with color displays by the end of the year.
Mirasol’s success will also depend on Qualcomm’s ability to prove that it can manufacture millions of displays that its customers will need. After all, Qualcomm is a chip company that’s known for creating processors that power smartphones, not displays. The Mirasol technology comes to the company through its acquisition of Iridigm Display five years ago.
Qualcomm says it’s serious about creating a place for itself in the display business. The company has set up a fabrication plant in Taiwan dedicated to producing Mirasol displays.
“Taking it from the lab to the fab is the tough part,” says Goodman. “But we have launched Mirasol on a few phones.” In 2008, one of the first handsets, the HiSense C108, featuring a black-and-white Mirasol display, debuted in China.
For the color screens, though, Qualcomm is betting on e-readers.
“The challenge in the e-reader market is that there are a lot of substitutes — the iPhone, laptop or the iPad,” says Qualcomm’s Cathey. “But we think consumers want color content and long usage between charges in a variety of environments.”
Of course the people with e-readers aren't paying attention to your book cover.
um
More fool them then,as they'll be missing out on my awesome Iceberg Slim artwork!
I sat opposite a guy on the subway with one of these contraptions,I have to say it made him look like a right pussy!,this might be one of the most emasculating pieces of technology EVER!!!
One of the sexiest things in the world is seeing a guy with a book in his hands,at least it is for me.
......"Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy,what was strange was what he had to deal with"-Al Sharpton
with respects to colour e-readers I think this has more to do with video, I think the next generation of ipad like e-readers will change the way people read the same way the printing press did. There is a difference between scrolls, clay tablets and bound printed books. I think younger people are used to a "multimedia" approach to reading, the internet is already changing how we read and write. I tend to think future magazines will be more hybrids with video and sound as well as written words. Most of the e-reader manufacturers probably want to future prof their devices.
With repects to the back of the e-reader, I don't see why a simple way of displaying what someone is reading cannot be found, or indeed advertising, imagine gaining free internet on your device by advertising on the back of it? Or having novel ways of advertising yourself with certain colours/symbols alerting like minded people of one's availability? New technology always brings about new and sometimes unexpected ways of consumption.
with respects to colour e-readers I think this has more to do with video, I think the next generation of ipad like e-readers will change the way people read the same way the printing press did. There is a difference between scrolls, clay tablets and bound printed books. I think younger people are used to a "multimedia" approach to reading, the internet is already changing how we read and write. I tend to think future magazines will be more hybrids with video and sound as well as written words. Most of the e-reader manufacturers probably want to future prof their devices.
With repects to the back of the e-reader, I don't see why a simple way of displaying what someone is reading cannot be found, or indeed advertising, imagine gaining free internet on your device by advertising on the back of it? Or having novel ways of advertising yourself with certain colours/symbols alerting like minded people of one's availability? New technology always brings about new and sometimes unexpected ways of consumption.
Yeah this is probably the way forward.The guy I saw had a duck-egg blue, leather cover on his,the gay-est looking thing this side of creation.
......"Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy,what was strange was what he had to deal with"-Al Sharpton
Yeah this is probably the way forward.The guy I saw had a duck-egg blue, leather cover on his,the gay-est looking thing this side of creation.
My PMA400 isn't much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It has wireless capability but I hardly ever use it. Not much range and the screen is too small for good web browsing. But it is fine for for reading text files with the enlarged font format. So I download stuff at home or at work and xfer it to the PMA and read it there. It can mult-itask so I can play music and read simultaneously. This device is 3 years old. If the iPad can't do that it is really LAME.
I wouldn't put an ad on the back of my PMA if I could. I use the flash blocker on my desktop.
We have a contradiction here. The purpose of the device is to get GOOD information into your head. Ads are mostly BAD information with a lot of psychological bullshit mixed in.
My PMA400 isn't much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It has wireless capability but I hardly ever use it. Not much range and the screen is too small for good web browsing. But it is fine for for reading text files with the enlarged font format. So I download stuff at home or at work and xfer it to the PMA and read it there. It can mult-itask so I can play music and read simultaneously. This device is 3 years old. If the iPad can't do that it is really LAME.
I wouldn't put an ad on the back of my PMA if I could. I use the flash blocker on my desktop.
We have a contradiction here. The purpose of the device is to get GOOD information into your head. Ads are mostly BAD information with a lot of psychological bullshit mixed in.
um
I Agree about advertising, but it's the nature of the beast, capitalism without selling?
Exactly. I never buy into these things because half the time I don't even know what it is. I still have my flip phone that I've had for 3 years and my lap top from school. Take calls, make calls, text and voicemail...I'm good! When a friend first got the iphone he was set on impressing me with how he could play a racecar game on it and you can turn the phone to make the car in the screen turn. My first thought was "WTF would you want to play racecar with your phone? I just never got it. To me, shopping for a phone, or electronics in general is a pain. I do love my iPod though and get a lot of use from it.
I Agree about advertising, but it's the nature of the beast, capitalism without selling?
Wasn't it capitalism before 1900?
We have let Capitalism turn into STUPID Consumerism and take too much bullshit from it. It is like we exist to serve capitalism instead of capitalism exiting to seve us. Double-entry accounting is 700 years old and we have cheap computers but I don't hear capitalist economists saying accounting should be mandatory for EVERYBODY.
Nah, this is NAZInomics.
The iPad is just a Dumb Toy and my PMA400 does the job of the iPod and Kindle.
We have let Capitalism turn into STUPID Consumerism and take too much bullshit from it. It is like we exist to serve capitalism instead of capitalism exiting to seve us. Double-entry accounting is 700 years old and we have cheap computers but I don't hear capitalist economists saying accounting should be mandatory for EVERYBODY.
Nah, this is NAZInomics.
The iPad is just a Dumb Toy and my PMA400 does the job of the iPod and Kindle.
We have let Capitalism turn into STUPID Consumerism and take too much bullshit from it. It is like we exist to serve capitalism instead of capitalism exiting to seve us. Double-entry accounting is 700 years old and we have cheap computers but I don't hear capitalist economists saying accounting should be mandatory for EVERYBODY.
Nah, this is NAZInomics.
The iPad is just a Dumb Toy and my PMA400 does the job of the iPod and Kindle.
I hear what you're saying, I agree with your analysis of capitalism. What we're dealing with here is "Advanced capitalism" Much of which can be criticised from a Marxists perspective such as Gramsci's Cultural hegemony. This is the problem, for depite all that has gone wrong and with the awareness of being manipulated through the good work of film makers like Adam Curtis, we're all still very much wrapped up in this. According to Habermas in Advanced capitalism we favour careers, leisure and consumption in return for "political abstinence" The advertising on the back of feature e-readers I would imagine, would be more insidious then normal think of an advanced Amazon style "people who read The Art Of Electronics also read Teach Yourself Electricity And Electronics widget. The ipad may very well be dumb, in that case so were the ipod and iphone. What apple are good at is putting the cat among the pigeons, how long have touch screen computers been flaundering? Now if only someone can persude Steve Jobs to take an interest in electric cars, icar anyone?
Adam Curtis is a great film maker did you see The power of Nightmares?
Exactly. I never buy into these things because half the time I don't even know what it is. I still have my flip phone that I've had for 3 years and my lap top from school. Take calls, make calls, text and voicemail...I'm good! When a friend first got the iphone he was set on impressing me with how he could play a racecar game on it and you can turn the phone to make the car in the screen turn. My first thought was "WTF would you want to play racecar with your phone? I just never got it. To me, shopping for a phone, or electronics in general is a pain. I do love my iPod though and get a lot of use from it.
I'm betting by the time you're ready to upgrade your phone, all you gonna find are touch screens and no flip phones, same with laptops pretty soon. When I was a kid cell phones hadn't come out yet, I was still able to meet and chat to all my friends, it's unimaginable for todays kids not to have one. Eventually things we thought we wouldn't need or use become normalised, even racecar I should imagine
I'm betting by the time you're ready to upgrade your phone, all you gonna find are touch screens and no flip phones, same with laptops pretty soon. When I was a kid cell phones hadn't come out yet, I was still able to meet and chat to all my friends, it's unimaginable for todays kids not to have one. Eventually things we thought we wouldn't need or use become normalised, even racecar I should imagine
I am NOT looking forward to that. I've gotten enough embarrassing messages from friends singing in the car or talking about their sex life in intimate details with a friend....all because their touch screens butt-called me and their phone left a message. I get at least one voicemail WEEKLY from a friend whos phone randomly calls me if a light wind breezes across it. All that stuff=aggravation. That's why I'm holding on to my flipper for dear life.
I am NOT looking forward to that. I've gotten enough embarrassing messages from friends singing in the car or talking about their sex life in intimate details with a friend....all because their touch screens butt-called me and their phone left a message. I get at least one voicemail WEEKLY from a friend whos phone randomly calls me if a light wind breezes across it. All that stuff=aggravation. That's why I'm holding on to my flipper for dear life.
That's just given me an idea for a multi-million dollar service, that will bring new meaning to touch screen.....random sex life talk there's an app for that! butt-calling there's an app for that too!
E-books,E-readers or whatever the hell they are called are bullshit.
How are you supposed to display your intellectual superiority on the subway,with an e-reader???????
It's all about the book cover,on!
Why I'm an ebook convert
Quote:
But the single biggest advantage to the ebook is this: no one can see what you're reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you're reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. OK, so right now they'll judge you simply for using an ebook – because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 – but at least they're not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.
The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I'd be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not ****ography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.
And coverlessness works both ways: pretentious wonks will no longer be able to impress pretty students on the bus by nonchalantly/ demonstratively reading The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, at least until someone brings out an ebook device with a second screen on the back which displays the cover of whatever it is you're reading for the benefit of attractive witnesses (or more likely, boldly displays the cover of The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard while you guiltily breeze through It's Not What You Think by Chris Evans).
09-02-10, 10:17 PM
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