While our generation doesn’t have jetpacks, starships, or colonies on Mars like the science fiction predicted—yet—we do have electronic paper, and we’re very close to having touchscreens that we can roll up and carry around like newspapers. Sony has just released its Digital Paper tablet, a touchscreen that uses the famous E-ink display to let people write and annotate right on the screen.
As a nerdy writer, this excites me way more than it should.
Sony’s new tablet, which will be going on sale sometime in May, uses a brand-new version of E-ink technology called Mobius. Mobius is built on plastic instead of the previously used glass substrates, which were heavier, thicker, and much more rigid. This makes Sony’s Digital Paper tablet about half the weight of a tablet using a glass substrate, while maintaining a 1200×1600 resolution dot display.
The tablet was developed for office use, displaying Adobe PDF documents that can be written on using the accompanying stylus, along with 4GB of storage you can supplant with micro SD cards. As with paper, users can rest their hand on the tablet while they write, without the touchscreen freaking out like a normal tablet would.
Sony showed off prototypes of this design last May, which demonstrated an incredible amount of flexibility. However, the version that’s going on sale is in a plastic case, so it won’t have nearly that range of motion. According to BBC, Sony is currently working on designs with even more flexibility, which we'll have to look out for.
My only problem with the tablet is its $1,100 price tag. I don’t want to talk about it.
Source BBC
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