Saturday, January 10, 2009

Samsung's eInk Papyrus ... Thing

Hands On Video With Samsung’s Papryus E-Ink Device
Sierra did a great of unearthing Samsung’s Papryus E-Ink device. It has generated a lot of comments and interest from the community. Today, I spent some some hands-on time with the device and shot this video. It’s worth pointing out that Sierra happened across a black one, while the one I played with was green. Still no word on price and availability.

There's a video there, but WARNING! It brought my PC to its knees. GottaBeMobile apparently encodes at a very high bitrate and resolution. Too much for this crappy 1.8GHz(!) Celeron to deal with.

I had to download the video and convert it to a DiVX AVI so I could watch. I also took some screensnaps:


It's open to the Notes applications.


Side view: stylus well at bottom, micro-USB post.


Front, "about the size of a Moleskine."


Side again, with stylus in its spring-loaded well.


It requires use of the included stylus to write on the screen ...


... fingertips and other styluses won't work. Odd!


Calendar view of month.


Year calendar.


Choice of ink thicknesses. Lots of icons!


Top. Notice how it's clamped to case. Notice too: NO storage card slot!


"GBM" written in two line thickenesses.


All those icons and the gray remind me of the original Everex Palm-size PC interface!


Icons of some apps.


Fuller front view.

This is a very strange device. No mention of eBooks. Is it basically an eInk-screened PDA?

The size seems to be almost identical to the jetBook, execpt slimmer at the side. That's a five-inch eInk screen.

I can't help wondering what it would be like to have that.

Samsung had to have put a good deal of money into its development. I guess they're not ready to market it for anything yet. If they could get it to do ePub eBooks, it'd be a real contender against both the Sony Reader and the jetBook.

However, knowing how Samsung likes to graft "additional value" onto its even most basic products (see how overpriced the budget-specced Q1 UMPC became!), I expect they wouldn't sell this without a cellphone radio and WiFi in it -- thus giving it a ridiculous price of $400, if not even higher.

I neglected to mention that it was jkk of jkkmobile fame who first alerted me to the GottaBeMobile posts. Thanks, jkk! (He is offering a scaled PDF of the VAIO P! Print one out actual size to play with! Post -- not PDF -- link.)

2 comments:

Matthew said...

Try not to take this the wrong way, but you photography skills need a little work. Kind of hard to see what you're talking about because the images are so blurry. Maybe get control of your camera before reviewing the items?

Thanks for posting.

Mike Cane said...

It's not a review, first.

Second, those are screensnaps from a video that I had to downconvert to grab snaps from. I've provided a link to the video which provides sharper images.

Third, I'm a crap picture taker to begin with, but blameless here.