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Photos: Polymer Vision's Readius with rollable display

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Last year we saw Sony's Reader out at CES in Las Vegas and it left a lasting impression. It just looks so much like paper and it has a massive battery life. The problem, however, is that it's not the most pocket-friendly device ever made.

Fortunately, a company called Polymer Vision, which spun out from Philips in 2006, has come up with an ingenious solution. It's called the Readius (pictured) and it's an E Ink display that's similar to the Sony Reader, except for one important factor -- it's rollable.

You can roll the 127mm (diagonally) E Ink display into a compact form factor that measures 56mm wide, 100mm tall and 21mm deep, so it will fit into a jacket pocket. The Readius can display 16 shades of grey and it has 4GB of on-board memory, so you can store all your books, emails and PDFs on it. It also features USB, as well as GPRS/EDGE and DVB-H connectivity, meaning you can download data wirelessly, too.

What left the biggest impression, though, was the ten-day battery life, which means you can literally read an entire book on it without needing to recharge. Although the Readius is a standalone product, Polymer Vision explained to us that what they're really interested in is teaming up with portable device manufacturers to integrate this technology into a variety of different devices.

This is probably one of the most exciting products out at 3GSM because it potentially could revolutionise the mobile phone industry. In five years' time it may be possible to use E Ink to display full videos in colour on large rollable screens. The benefit of this would be that screens could be made much larger without compromising on quality and power.

The Readius will be available some time later this year and we really hope that a mobile phone manufacturer teams up with Polymer Vision soon.

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Comments

MikeDSun 18 February, 2007 5:34pm

Couldn't this download and replace newspaper?

Charles DuffySun 18 February, 2007 5:46pm

I'm skeptical as to the "full-color movies" claim -- did that come direct from the company, or is that something the journalist extrapolated? As I understand it, these devices only draw power when the screen needs to change (and have a refresh rate well-suited to static content) -- but displaying content in constant motion would reduce the power consumption benefits over existing technologies, and unless they've improved refresh rates substantially movies wouldn't look good either. Also, there's the color-vs-resolution tradeoff; I'm not sure whether I'd want a full-color device.

Another question: Will it work with user-provided content?

If I can only use it with DRM-enabled E-books I need to purchase from some party licensed by the device manufacturer, I have zero interest in this device. If, on the other hand, I can load my own content (so I could use it for the freely available Lojban reference grammar, or a collection of webcomics I've cached, or doing a source code review) -- at that point it becomes compelling.

If someone builds a Tablet PC using this technology for the display, it becomes *extremely* compelling -- I would have commercial uses for that, even if it were black-and-white only.

AnonymousSun 18 February, 2007 6:44pm

Who wants to bet they'll _never_ let the unit upload your own plain text or rich-text files?

AnonymousSun 18 February, 2007 8:23pm

If they don't allow user created content, it will not be long before its hacked, like just like the libre.

DanMon 19 February, 2007 7:02am

it says right in the article, "...it has 4GB of on-board memory, so you can store all your books, emails and PDFs on it." So I don't think it will prevent uploading whatever text you like. Maybe it will only read .eml and .pdf, but a txt2pfd converter is trivial.

ErwinMon 19 February, 2007 5:07pm

The Readius cell-book should be available from TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile - they codeveloped it) by the end of 2007 and after in other countries. The initial price should be around 600 euro. You can find more info and links to photos and movies at this page of MobiieRead.com:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=119

BTW: Please note that one of the ebooks displayed on the screen in the first photo of this article is "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone". JK Rowling was and is against releasing the HP books in ebook format for - between other luddite considerations of her - declared fear of piracy. Now THIS is a really good encouragement to do it! :D

Or a good publicity stunt from PolymerVision.

Or JKR changed his mind very recently...

Cheers
Erwin

KieranWed 21 February, 2007 11:30am

"Or JKR changed his mind very recently... "

His?

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