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E-readers keen to see Mirasol in the Making
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 16 December 2010, 20:17 IST
Bangalore: Mirasol's concept of the e-reader product has caught people's attention on a huge note. Its colour, the high tech reflective display technology readable in direct sunlight and the capability to display full motion video are some of the reasons of the e-reader being the eye-candy of consumers, as stated by David Carnoy.
Mirasol is a Qualcomm company which was assumed to be building a new factory in order to produce Mirasol displays at a cost of $2 billion in August. Since last year, a lot of non-existent products of Qualcomm have been in the talks. Although a Mirasol factory is being built, with the failure of Mirasol e-reader to be launched in 2010 even though the company stuck to its plan of a licensed technology, the question has raised about any company announcing it's got a Mirasol e-reader scheduled for release in 2011 along with the cost.
Just a few weeks ago, the PocketBook USA seemed to jump the gun, announced that it planned on releasing a new Mirasol e-reader simply called the Mirasol, but subsequently it retracted the statement, which gave no details about the device beyond its name. Mirasol exhibiting at the Digital Experience press event at CES on January 5 is the exact fact and would provide a lot of feature information as well.
Along with Mirasol, Hanvon, a Chinese company has also stepped in the new e-reader screen technology market. Hanvon has made the announcement about the company to be the first to ship a color E Ink e-reader next year. The E Ink in direct sunlight can be viewed as it's not as sharp as LCD, and it's not capable of running full-motion video. Hanvon says its first color product will have a 9.68-inch touch screen and be available this March in China, starting at $440. That's about $150 less than what the entry-level iPad goes for in China.
The other color screen technology to keep an eye on is Pixel Qi, which blends backlit LCD and e-ink display technology. The Notion Ink Adam tablet, powered by a custom, more tablet-friendly version of Android, was announced at the end of 2009 but finally became available for preorder very recently (in limited numbers). As editor Donald Bell reported, the "mythical tablet" comes in six models, ranging from a $375 Wi-Fi version with a standard LCD up to a $549 version using 3G and Pixel Qi touch-screen technology.
With a multitude of new tablets hitting the market next year--and many of them on display at CES--plenty of questions over whether consumers being interested in multifunctional devices like the iPad or affordable dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader are expected to arise. The recently released $250 Nook Color straddles the line between e-reader and tablet, and Barnes & Noble is expected to unveil a series of new apps early next year without allowing customers to access the full Android Market.
Along with the talks about color screens and Android, the continued evolution of monochrome e-ink, with higher-resolution devices that offer faster refresh rates is also expected to be existent. Few more dedicated e-ink e-readers that use touch-screen technology are expected to be present along with Sony's touch-screen e-ink readers that work well.
