Heading into CES this Year I really wanted to get my hands on two particular ‘gadgets’. These were my hope to relieve my back problems that have been coming and going for the last several years. I tend to have at least two or three books in my laptop bag at any time as well as the eponymous 17“ laptop itself. Anything to lighten that load and at the same time increase the volume of volumes of reading material would be excellent.
So I went to find all I could about two e-readers that have been in gadget news for a while now, nearly years in the case of one.
Light and Focused
The Plastic Logic Que e-reader is and excellent device. I was expecting a good device but the level of refinement in hardware and software was on par with some of Apple’s products. It is a VERY clean, with no buttons and a full touch screen that uses a e-ink variant built on a plastic substrate, thus the company’s name. There are also no expansion slots so the memory in the device is all you get.
The lack of metal or glass drops the weight considerably and gives you a device the size of a modest magazine that weighs the same or less that a single issue. This is the kind of device that we will need to go to a paperless office and landfills.
Data moves in and out of the device over the air on WiFi and 3G provided by AT&T. They Will have a full email client once they have full data plans setup with the data provider. Presently you ‘Que’ data to the be beamed up to the device taking a detour through the cloud to process the documents you want to see on the Que.
The large screen is about 10.5” on the diagonal, which IS NOT 8.5“ x 11” contrary to all the press coverage of the device. Plastic Logic seems to think it is ok to include the dimensions of the bezel in the advertised dimensions, which I have NEVER seen any other retailer do. It is a beautiful screen but when people get it into their hands and compare it to a sheet of 8.5“ x 11” paper I guarantee there will be many upset customers. The touch sensitivity and response time was excellent for an e-reader, and the small font resolution was able to put a lot of text clearly on the screen with a 944 x 1264 pixel resolution. I like to look at as much data as possible when reading.
The developers seem very keen on making the Que a multipurpose device. It will never have a super foist video response rate suitable for action games, or youtube videos, but they are working to have the API’s for developers out soon so that an application ecosystem can grow around the device. They just finished development on the Home page that shows all the documents, folders, smart folders and books, as well as calendar appointments and other information of use to a corporate user. They want to aim this device as squarely as they can at corporations that want to save cost, financial and environmental, that a paperless or more likely paper-reduced office can provide. At the planned price of $649-$799 for the 4GB and 8 GB models the economics likely add up faster than expected.
Typical copier paper can cost about about 10 cents per side per sheet. That is a running cost that accumulates over time. If a single device is used to store 8000 pages which is a considerable but not bad when you think about stock reports, business plans, tax reports, and marketing and sales presentations, then that cost over the lifetime of the device, makes it a good choice. When you add in the environmental savings by removing that paper from landfills and the copier ink associated, and the hell that a broken copier can cause, there are a lot of winning reasons to move to this kind of device even with that level of cost.
The underlying OS on the device is WinCE and should therefore be easy for other apps to integrate with. If they get some strong apps that make using it in the office helpful, not just practical it may have a very strong niche to build a market. And, once people are used to the interface a consumer level device might be very popular.
Part II will discuss the Entourage Edge dual screen E-ink/LCD hybrid reader that is aiming directly at the consumer e-reader and netbook market with bookstore integration, full video playback and expansion ports for USB devices and SD cards.
