Large-screened E Ink devices have been tried by many companies in the past but none managed to gain ground on the academic market. Sony is also not a new player, but they are still trying their luck. Their latest product is a 13.3-inch flexible E Ink prototype device which is targeted at students and offices.

The device is coming with the new Mobius e-paper display technology with lightweight, shatterproof or rugged characteristics. With this new tech, Sony can make bigger display sizes without making the reader too heavy.

The slate measures in at 233 x 310 x 6.8 mm and weighs just 358 g, and it’s coming with 4GB of on-board storage (with a microSD slot) and a 1200 x 1600 resolution screen that’s an electromagnetic induction touchscreen, which allows you to do page swipes and menu selection. It also supports stylus input for making notes. And there’s WiFi for sharing notes, and its rechargeable battery is said to last for three weeks (with the wireless tech turned off), but the device currently supports only the PDF file format.

The device will be trialed at three Japanese universities, after which the final product will be available on the market but that might take a year or more.

But the question is whether this device will be appealing since there are many tablets out there with fast processors and high-resolution screens, as well as third-party apps. Sony’s own Tablet Z is one of the many options currently available. But if the price is not too much (the Sony Reader PRS-T2 costs $129.99), this new e-reader could be useful for many.

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This comes straight from Walmart PR:

Recently, Walmart Stores, Inc. made a business decision to not carry current Amazon products beyond our purchase commitments and existing inventory.
Our customers trust us to provide a broad assortment of products at everyday low prices, and we approach every merchandising decision through this lens.
We will continue to offer our customers a broad assortment of tablets, eReaders and accessories at a variety of great price points. This decision is consistent with our overall merchandising strategy.

So, what are we supposed to glean from this? Well, we could think that it has to do with sales figures and the Kindle isn’t performing on Walmart’s shelves as well as they would have liked. It might also have to do with money in that Amazon might not be offering Walmart the kind of margins that it would like to have either. Then again, there could be a much more compelling reason.

Amazon directly competes with Walmart in just about everything. You want a physical book? Amazon and Walmart both sell that. You want a video game? They both sell that too. You want furniture, groceries, textiles, shoes, luggage, watches, light fixtures or bicycles? Both Amazon and Walmart sell all of that. In a sense, by stocking the Kindle family, Walmart becomes a bit of an Amazon showroom. This could be the same reason why Target decided to pull the Kindle from its shelves too.

Of course, I could be reading far too much into this, but I think it is amazing how Amazon has its hands in everything. You buy the tablet from them, so you can buy the digital content from them. Even if you buy an iPad or some other device instead, you can buy that product from Amazon too and there’s a good chance that you might get the Kindle app to buy more content. They get paid at every step of the way.

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It seems that the new Kindle Touch has been revealed, although unofficially, ahead of Amazon’s upcoming press event. What’s new for Kindle Touch? Kindle Touch with Paperwhite is essentially the Amazon equivalent of the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight.

The new display is higher contrast, higher rez and has integrated lighting. Not to mention that the newest gen of the Kindle Touch also has a two month battery life.

What do you think? Interested in the new Kindle Touch or would you rather set your sites on Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet successor?

September 6^th can’t come soon enough for Amazon fans. Are you looking forward to whatever news breaks from the event?

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When it comes to reading in the digital age, generally most users either turn to an e-ink reader or use a tablet. For those that love e-ink, Sony has a brand new Sony Reader PRS-T2 which includes 2GB onboard storage, microSD for expansion, public library leading and new enhancements which include paper-like page turns and optimization to its 6-inch screen that is supposed to work better for long-term ad-free reading. For good measure, a few new social features are coming to the e-reader as well.

The PRS-T2 has a 600×800 E-Ink Pearl V220 antiglare screen with 16-level gray scale that is supposed to dramatically improve Sony’s e-reader line. The device also has built-in WIFI, a claimed two month battery life (with wireless off), and a new feature that lets you upload a short passage from your book directly to Facebook right from the device.

The Reader PRS-T2 features a 6-inch, 600 x 800 pixel resolution E-Ink Pearl V220 antiglare touch screen with a 16-level gray scale that promises improved continuous page turns and a smoother in and out pinch zoom. It comes pre-loaded with two English language and four translation dictionaries and supports ePub, PDF and TXT e-book formats, as well as JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP image formats. There’s built-in Wi-Fi and a claimed battery life of up to two months with the wireless unit turned off (based on an average 30 minutes of reading per day).

The Sony Reader PRS-T2 is supplied comes in red,white or black and is priced at $129.99.

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Many people have turned to their tablets for their e-book reading needs, but the fact of the matter is that an e-ink display is still easier on the eyes. And now you can score a tremendous deal on one of the best e-ink e-book readers out there. Amazon has put the Kindle DX on sale for $110 off.

As a quick refresher, the Kindle DX features a high contrast 9.7-inch e-ink pearl screen, offering 50% better contrast for clearer text and sharper images. Unlike the backlit displays of typical tablets, the e-ink display looks and reads like real paper, giving you the best visibility in sunlight with no glare. The 3G wireless is included (Whispersync), so you’ll never have to make a monthly payment to download more content. Subscribe to a magazine and have it magically delivered to your device while you sleep.

The Kindle DX has enough storage for up to 3,500 books and has a battery life (wireless off) of up to three weeks. The global wireless coverage includes not only the United States, but throughout 100 countries and territories around the world. And yes, it has a keyboard for ease of text entry too. The regular price is $379, but you can buy it today for $269, including free shipping.

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Before you get too excited about curling up this e-reader to stuff into your backpack, realize that the flexible e-paper display here is still inside a reasonably stiff chassis. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without its benefits.

The first to use a new line of flexible screen displays from LG is the Wexler Flex One. The 6-inch monochrome panel has a resolution of 1024×768. While you can’t exactly fold up this e-reader, the flexible plastic display–at 0.7mm–is about a third the thickness as an equivalent glass e-paper display. It’s also just 14 grams and has proven to be quite durable.

There is an unofficial (below) that demonstrates some of its functions and you can see the e-reader can be bent and flexed a little. Aside from that, you have a rather blasse e-reader. It supports the usual range of formats, like EPUB and DJVU, and you navigate through the menus and page turns using the provided physical buttons; this is not a touchscreen. LG’s e-paper tech will soon find itself in other e-readers too. We just have to wait for the one we can wrap around our wrists.

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The world of e-paper and e-readers has had a lot of new changes heading towards it recently, this includes color technology and now even an e-Ink Kindle that has a built-in backlit display. According to Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch, who managed to catch a glimpse of the device, it’s light was a real game-changer for reading in the dark but it was a much softer glow than the harsh lighting that it found with typical backlit LCD screens.

While many are starting to turn to tablets for e-reader use, due to the vast amount of Android/iOS apps, it is still hard to deny the fact that e-readers are much easier on the eyes than an LCD-based tablet. If Amazon’s Kindle does in fact have a color model and a new less-harsh-than-LCD backlit model in the works, then e-readers have certainly found a few extras that will help keep them relevant against the growth of tablets being used as e-reader replacements.

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Now an Ectaco jetBook Color 9.7″ tablet may change the landscape for e-ink readers.

Geek.com and other blogs report very interesting features of this tablet coming to US in January 2012.

The unit is based on the Hanvon C920, which utilizes a 1600 x 1200 Triton color E Ink display that’s capable of interpreting two-finger touch gestures. Wi-Fi support is built in, and there’s a stylus onboard for those who want to take advantage of the jetBook’s handwriting recognition abilities to leave notes in the digital margins of their books.

The jetBook can handle loads of different file formats, including EPUB, PDF, MOBI, DOC, XLS, and HTML — JPG and PNG photos are also supported, as are MP3, WAV, and WMA audio files. Opera’s web browser is included, as is a text-to-speech engine, and there’s a microSD expansion to hold your ever-expanding library.

A pre-order page at Ectaco presents detailed specs of the device:

• Triton Color E Ink screen
• 9.7″ Display
• 1600×1200 resolution
• Load Your Own Content
• Support for: Adobe DRM 9.1, ePub, Mobi, PRC, RTF, TXT, PDF, FB2, djvu, JPG, Gif, PNG, BMP (more to come)
• Wi-Fi enabled with browser
• Fluent Text-to-Speech can read you any book
• 10,000 page turns on a single charge
• Support via microSD for up to 32GB
• Sleek protective carrying case included
• Underline and highlight text
• 50-state reading list
• Fully interactive SAT course
• “Overdrive” library access
• Wireless access to online textbooks, www.ck12.org and other resources
• Speed Reading course
• Talking Oxford Dictionaries
• Course of English and foreign language grammar
• Speech recognition and speech analysis Language Teacher and U-Learn courses that teach you a language step by step
• Pictured dictionaries for 38 languages
• Cross translator for 180 languages
• Vocabulary Builder
• Linguistic Crosswords
• Reference materials for Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography and Earth Science
• Interactive Periodic Table of Elements
• Graphing and scientific calculators

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First, it’s an inclusion of “night-reading” mode (white type on black background) available on Kindle for iOS from the start. If anything, readability of -e-books in this mode is questionable, at least, but it’s good to have an option anyway.

Another update introduces a better possibility for full screen, no page margins text layout. This feature is quite important for customers who used to read their e-books from smallish iPhone screen. Though here again a “legacy” feature of traditional books called page margins, or borders keeps its stake as a more convenient option with better readability for iPad with its more or less normal book size.

Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek are the new and very fine fonts added to iBooks in this update as well.

Here is a sample of one of the new texts, Seravek:

Traditional font repertoire for iOS was always excellent, but adding more beautiful, finely tuned fonts will appeal even more to many aesthetically-minded readers. Still LCD screens, even sporting high resolutions, are not the best displays to attract a reader that can devour more than couple dozen pages at a time.

There’s more upgraded and added features for public domain faux covers renditions, then there’s a redesigned annotation palette as well. Free e-books on the iBooks shelves, look more expensive now, with the textured covers and whatnot. Upgrade 1.5 to iBooks has also added pop-up footnotes.

All in all, the iBooks upgrade 1.5 brings reading on i-devices closer to the experience gained from major Android -e-readers such as Aldiko, Cool Reader, FBReader and a dozen more capable of understanding up to 20 e-book formats and offering many services required by avid book worms. Then, the Amazon Kindle’s functionality for specific uses of instructional “digital” materials  such as textbooks, workbooks, manuals, etc., is still not in line with the iBooks capabilities catering mostly a casual reader.

The lower hook on small “l” in Seravek is a great feature anyway.

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Even though many people have started to use tablets, the e-paper technology found within several e-readers is still quite remarkable. A group of scientists from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute have developed a new form of rewritable electronic paper that does not require any electricity at all.

Well, sort of. It doesn’t require any power to retain an image that has been put on it, but you will need some power to change whatever has been written on it. That’s nothing new, but what’s really interesting is that the erasing and writing process is thermal-based, not unlike old school fax machines. The e-paper itself is rewritable up to 260 times.

Yes, it needs thermal energy, but that could still prove to be much more eco-friendly than printing on traditional paper or consuming the electricity needed to power a traditional LCD screen. The display is also flexible, which would help to give it a more paper-like versatility. The goal is to have this new technology, dubbed i2R e-paper, ready for mass market consumption within the next couple of years.

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