Plastic Logic
Plastic Logic has canceled the QUE proReader.
Plastic Logic is a company that has announced a new flexible large size eBook Reader for delivery in 2010 (samples - 2009 Q3 or Q4). Plastic Logic has raised over $150M in financing from top-tier venture funding sources in Asia, Europe and the U.S. They are using the funds to complete product development in Cambridge, England and Mountain View, CA, USA, and to build a specialized, scalable production facility in Dresden, Germany.
Plastic Logic had previously announced research in oled displays.
[edit] Announcement
See QUE proReader for the detailed description.
The reader is designed specifically for business reading. The overall device size is targeted at 8.5" x 11". The display is smaller of course but still fairly large at 10.7 diagonal inches. The e-paper display has a plastic backing and a touch screen so that it is more rugged than a regular eBook reader. An earlier SVGA demo unit had 150 dpi. Weight is about 360g (from TGDaily video). It is less than 3/10 of an inch (7mm) thick. There are two almost invisible buttons on the device face, with touch screen support using position sensitive strokes and a virtual keyboard available for adding notes to documents and other uses. Charging by micro-USB or a charger.
The Plastic Logic reader will support the following document types: PDF, ePUB, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, RTF, TEXT, HTML, JPEG, PNG, BMP. PDF and ePUB will use Adobe Digital Editions. A recent agreement with Barnes and Noble may add eReader support. Adobe and eReader formats will support DRM.
It has an easy gesture-based user interface and powerful software tools that will help business users to organize and manage their information. Users can connect to their information either wired (via USB) or wirelessly (via WiFi or via AT&T cellular broadband network in the US) and store thousands of documents on the device. The reader incorporates E Ink technology for great readability and features low power consumption and long battery life. The Plastic Logic reader is scheduled to start pilots and trials with key partners in the 2nd half of 2009, with general availability in the first quarter of 2010.
From (the CEO) Richard Archuleta's video: weight is "ounces not pounds", battery life is "days not hours", its instant on, organize documents the way you want to (it has binders), markup via touch screen, sticky note via virtual keyboard.
We think it is running WinCE, based on Windows Office document support and also a posting for a Windows CE Software Engineer: To design and implement a number of Windows Embedded CE (v6.0) applications, targeting ARM9 (and later ARM11) based processors. To a lesser extent, design and implement a number of XP & Vista Windows applications, targeting PC platforms.
