The hardware is lustworthy, though the resolution could be higher, it's just a shame there's no SDK. The buttons on the front look very old school Androidish.
> The hardware is lustworthy, though the resolution could be higher, it's just a shame there's no SDK. The buttons on the front look very old school Androidish.
I have a 10" e-ink device with 1200x825px which is perfectly fine for A4/letter-designed PDFs, so I'd say the resolution should be fine. I also have a 10" notebook, and the readability is considerably worse at about the same resolution, so I guess e-ink resolutions are not really comparable with lcd resolutions (the pixel layout is quite different: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2286311679_f98bdba47f_m....).
Don't know about the GP, but I have an iRex DR1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Reader_1000) which was perfectly sized for reading A4/letter papers. But it is bulky and has no wireless connectivity.
I noticed that the battery life is 3 weeks. Given the size of the product (not large), it's safe to say that they get that battery life by doing as little as possible. It may be that they don't have enough processing power to run any sort of apps, or if they did, it would drain the battery so much that it would ruin the device.
With that said, it would still be cool to try. It should at least be able to support a calculator.
As long as you don't busy wait and only update the parts of the screen that change it's not too hard to write software which doesn't impact battery life too much.
EDIT: To add, obviously minimise network connections. And if you do need them, batch them.
Nah. Nook Simple Touches can be rooted and run Android just fine. As long as wifi is off (thus disabling the vast majority of app background syncing / periodic updates) it easily lasts a couple weeks. For that you can run a surprising number of apps just fine in a ridiculously-limited available RAM space. I can't imagine this would be anywhere near as slow as a NST, so it should be able to do just about everything except play 3D games and visit crazy-bad websites.
The test model I used for a month only needed one charge, it works a lot like the black and white kindle and the document stays static on the screen and the device only really turns on when you write on it or turn pages.
Indeed. As a PhD student that reads and annotates a ton of scientific papers, this really seems like something that could help me do my job much better.
Please, if any of you manage to get your hands on one, I would love a hands-on review with a lot of pictures.
The price is really high, that's true, but I can see top people in academia or enthusiasts like me adopting it.
I'm a sucker for being able to write notes by hand, and when I tried out the surface pro 2 I was pretty blown away by how nice the handwriting felt. Also seems to be in the same price range, and you end up with a full blown PC (which may not be what you're shooting for). One more thing that I liked is how natural it was to use one note to make notes, cut a part out, and move it around. When I'm sketching ideas out, or learning math stuff, it's always nice to be able to move a snippet over really quickly.
I also used to review and edit a lot of training materials that were being designed, and I was using an ipad 2 with PDFExpert, which was pretty great for that, but I always hated how crap the ipad was for writing things with a stylus or a finger. If I could go back and do it again with a surface pro 2, I would in a heartbeat.
I tried other larger form factor e-ink devices like the Kindle DX and such, but if the screen wasn't big enough to fit the entire page on the screen at once, it didn't matter how big the screen was. The device just ended up being too slow. I liked the ipad because I could swipe around, highlight, circle things, make notes, etc.
Obviously the battery life on the surface pro 2 wouldn't be in the same universe as this thing, and it's bulkier, but just thought I'd throw it out there. Kind of rambly, heh, YMMV
I have a DX in the closet, and even if the screen is big enough, it's still too slow.
The other huge problem with the DX or any other e-ink reader so far is the lack of note-taking. I hoped the DX would be good for academic papers, but it just isn't.
I beta tested it and it was so slow and cumbersome that I gave up on using it because it just got in the way of trying to do anything.
It was super light and cool but it's so damn big and fragile feeling that it didn't feel safe putting it into a bag. It was just one more thing to carry around.
You had to connect it every time to transfer files on or off of it, could not even email it out. Supposedly the only service it was going to work with via wifi was Evernote. We asked for dropbox but that didn't seem like an option. Felt like the future in concept but more like using a palm pilot.
Screen and OS is more like the black and white kindles, it loads an image to the screen and records what you draw on it. It's not live or fluid. There was a distinct screen flash when it updated new content.
It looked like the guy giving the demo was very careful to not rest his wrist on the tablet. Writing without resting your wrist rarely gives good results, in my experience.
I wonder if wrist pressure confuses the tablet about where the pen is?
being able to rest your wrist on the device is vital. I find that to be the biggest anoyence on my galaxy note 3. However there is one app that Samsung includes where you can wrest your hand on the device and it does not start drawing blobs on the page but sadly it's not the app I want to use to take notes.
I've been looking for a second pen for my Surface Pro, but I can't get myself to buy the Feel because it doesn't have an eraser end. I find myself using the eraser all the time.
Yeah, sadface too. Because unless that screen has killer touchscreen firmware to reject stray palms and wrists it's going to be completely unusable for anything other than a reader.
Just taking a guess here but that pen is probably passive and the screen is capacitive. Unless there's some multitouch capability in the reader that's just not ready yet, placing the wrist or palm on the screen would definitely screw up the pen pointer.
Didn't they just kill their e-book store recently?
Also, from the images it does look like it would be "e-ink" but I see no mention of it on the page. Is it really "e-ink" (like Kindle) or just "e-paper", which is just a transflective LCD (Pebble, Notion Ink Adam, etc).
"e ink" is a trademark of the E Ink Corporation. Other vendors of e-paper displays can't use the same name, regardless of what type of display technology they use.
I'm looking for a relatively paperless legal workflow, and I have been surprised at how hard it is. It's hard to pull out a laptop in a meeting to take notes, if only because in a 1:1, you are often in someone else's office and don't have a desk handy. I've been looking at the Livescribe for digitizing handwriting, but to date the software has been shitty. The new version that integrates with iPad/OneNote seems to be a step up, though.
The problem with the iPad, however, is that it's not good for marking up documents. It's great for reading legal cases, but not for marking them up and taking margin notes. Personally, I'm one of those people that gets a lot more out of having paper in my hand and scribbling on it than I do just reading something off a computer screen. I'm really intrigued by this product: http://www.thedigitalink.co.uk/products/capturx-markup-for-p..., which lets you print out PDF's onto special paper so that when you write on it with a digital pen, the markings are reintegrated onto the digital copy. Unfortunately, it's really expensive!
Also, 10" is on the small side for what's ideal. A standard piece of paper is 13" diagonal. I've been looking at the 12.2" Samsung, which also has a digitizer, but Samsung's Android skin is just god-awful. It's a shame nobody makes a 12"+ Baytrail Windows 8 tablet with good battery life...
This product seems to really tackle this niche. Apparently Sony is going to be showing it off this week at the ABA tech show in Chicago.
I almost pulled the Trigger on a Surface Pro 2. The big problem for me,[1] is that the 16:9 aspect ratio is annoying for reading documents. A 12" 4:3 device would be a lot better. I'm very curious to see what MS has in store for this fall. A native Metro version of Word launching with Surface Pro 3 might seal the deal.
[1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination, with the clunky obsolete desktop married to the slick, intuitive Metro interface. Having to flip between the two just to use Word is a sick joke.
Also, I had one; think of the hinge. You can't use it on your laptop in a chair like a normal laptop. Check out the Samsung 700TC, it's 12.2 inches and has a removable 'Asus-like' keyboard with a real hinge. I haven't used it in a while(I'm really liking 8 inches for a tablet) but it was pretty good.
You can buy one of those iPad style cases for the Surface that make it easier to use when it's in your lap.
I think the Surface is basically for the segment who either use it on a table like a computer or an iPad when it's not -- like me. The good thing is that there are lots of competing products that satisfy other use cases.
>> The big problem for me,[1] is that the 16:9 aspect ratio is annoying for reading documents.
But isn't 16:9 more akin to a legal page than 4:3? ;)
>> [1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination
YMMV, I guess. I'm primarily a Mac user, and I don't mind W8 at all. Keep in mind that the Metro version of OneNote is pretty bad. The desktop version of OneNote is leaps and bounds better. And because of that, you wouldn't have to mode swap to get into the desktop version of Word.
> which lets you print out PDF's onto special paper so that when you write on it with a digital pen, the markings are reintegrated onto the digital copy.
What I do is print out PDF's onto regular cheap paper, mark them up by hand, then run the paper through the scanner. Voila!
It would be neat to have some software that compares the scan and the original PDF to extract just the annotations, then add those as a layer on the original PDF.
This looks fantastic. When the e-reader craze was going on, I avoided buying one because I wanted one pretty much like this. Most of my e-books are PDFs that display really well in a larger format device. My wife had a nook, and I tried it out for a bit, but the size/resolution made viewing PDFs designed for letter sized paper look just below adequate.
Is it wrong for me to also admit that ever since the "Root Kit Debacle" from Sony, I cringe a little at the idea of plugging a Sony product into my PC? Or am I just being paranoid?
It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you!
But yes, I have been waiting for a device like this for ages. I tried a smaller e-ink device, but trying to view PDFs on that was painful at best. I'm even wondering if 1200x1600 resolution is good enough for scientific papers.
(Un)fortunately they quite often make some fantastic hardware. I'm just disappointed that the whole horror of the various computer misuse/hacking laws weren't thrown at them for those CDs.
I agree, Sony has produced some excellent products and some of their laptop designs have made me very tempted to purchase their PC products in the past.
I own a few Sony products, but I tend to flinch a little with any Sony product that: (A) Probably has a DRM scheme associated with it (as most e-readers do, I assume this one does as well). or (B) Requires me to plug it into my PC and install Sony produced software.
It may have been a long time ago, but I tend to be one of those guys where trust is easy to establish, easy to break and serious loss of trust is nearly impossible to recover from. The Rootkit Incident was a serious loss of trust to me, so I'll steer clear for now. It's too bad, even at $1100, it'd be worth it to handle my collection of printed-to-pdf notes, documents and books.
> (B) Requires me to plug it into my PC and install Sony produced software.
That there, is a big turn-off for me. What business would Sony making a device like that which requires their own specialised software to interface it with a normal computer. There are standards for these things. The USB mass storage device standard is well-established already.
While Sony certainly deserved the infamy for letting the 2005 rootkit debacle happen under the Sony name, it's worth keeping in mind that it was Sony BMG – literally a different company from Sony Corporation, which makes consumer electronics, and also a company that hasn't existed since 2008, when Sony bought out the rest of BMG and formed Sony Music Enterntainment.
It was also nine years ago. We have to move on eventually.
2005: Sony BMG rootkit.
2006: Exploding batteries.
2008: Sony DADC is responsible for SecuROM.
2010: OtherOS removed; Hotz sued over jailbreaking.
2011: PSN data breach.
Also, they killed Lik-Sang just for selling across region boundaries.
I remember when http://noteslate.com/ launched their site & demos and being excited, checking back weekly, then monthly, then realized that it was all a big cloud of vaporware.
I hope Sony actually goes through with this. I currently use an ipad mini & notesplus with a jot pro - it's a good setup and works well, but I still find myself reaching for legal pads half the time.
I waited and waited for NoteSlate to come out. So disappointed when it became clear it was vaporware.
I currently use a Surface Pro with OneNote (full version, skip the W8 app store version), and it's fantastic. I have actually stopped using the hardcover sketchbooks I normally carry around, and the Surface takes up space than those books.
StylusLabs Write is a pretty great app too, and it's available for most major platforms.
You might want to consider one of the smaller tablets that have a real Wacom digitizer, i.e. Samsung's Note / Pro series or Asus' new W8 8" tablet. I don't know about how good the Dell Venue Pro 8 is, since its stylus isn't a Wacom.
If this thing supports epub as well it would be perfect. I have been looking for a full A4-sized e-ink reader for ages now but aside from my Kindle DX, (which has to be hacked to read PDF's and epub) there has been very little.
I am not interested in the note taking, although it may prove useful at some point, I want it as a large e-ink reader for technical books.
Onyx made something like that already; the software is terrible (although hackable) and there is no place to attach stylus to the reader, but it is only ~300USD
If they really wanted to go after the note-taking market hard, they should have created a way to have the "eraser" in the opposite end of the stylus rather than have to go through a menu system to modify notes.
For me then, it would go from "yeah, its kinda neat" to "I really ought to consider giving them my money for this"
Indeed! To expand a little, can I also download a text from Gutenberg public domain classics, convert to pdf (via LibreOffice for instance) and read on this machine along, as you say, with all the public domain articles and books I have in the same format?
Very cool. Except the "Click here to be contacted for more information about Digital Paper" leads to a "Contact Us" form. Do I use a "Contact Us" form to ask Sony to "Contact Me" whenever it releases this?
Thanks, the idea of using a shared GNU Screen session is nice. This means that actually instead of an RPi and additional keyboard, the e-ink screen could simply be laid on a laptop.
It's thoroughly disappointing that they're sticking to PDF for this. In every other way, it looks like progress, but not supporting EPUB is a pretty long step backwards, imho.
"In addition to PDF source files, MS Word®, PowerPoint®, and Excel® files can be converted to the PDF format, then saved, viewed, and annotated on Digital Paper."
Don't worry, though, in addition to PDFs, you can convert other files to PDFs!
This would look great if it wasn't made by SONY. They have a history of building devices that seem great, but on closer inspection it usually turns out that the user interface is horrible, overall usability is poor, and to use the device you have to install a proprietary piece of Windows-only SONY software that might be maintained and updated for a while — or not. So after a couple of years you might be left with no way to access your data.
After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
I'm just worried about Sony's long term viability. They don't seem as competitive as they once were, and as you say, they have this not-invented-here culture similar to other old line companies that are no longer dominant (Nokia, IBM).
In 2013 (or 2012, not sure anymore), they made more money off their financial services than all of their combined product lines. That says how much Sony sucks at making products nowadays.
To be fair, that could also mean that the market for financial services is extremely high margin or has an extremely large potential size rather than being an indictment of Sony's product lines.
Ha, does that keep you up at night? I'm surprised any company, save Apple (for cultural reasons), produces this sort of angst in people. What's your emotional attachment to the long term success of Sony? Where does it come from (serious question)?
Well, Sony used to make cool products (the first Walkmans were cool. Even the first Playstation was cool. The Sony Trinitron TVs were fantastic. The Sony VAIO line of PCs were hotter than Macs back in 2000...) - but that time is long gone. Maybe it's nostalgia?
I think there are some major changes being made to regain this position and it is backed with some really cutting edge products, along with smarter financial decisions. I think the only thing they are lacking is the respect due to past mistakes, mistakes that have been removed from the line completely over the past year or are in plans to cut in the next few months. They plan to marked high-end only and it looks like serious thought in filling the need of better software and developers. I have no inside, but I would not be surprised if you start seeing HackerNews worthy projects popping up from Sony Developers in the next few years.
I feel strongly that Sony has been changing in the past year and finally getting in the game again with genuinely great products. PS4 (best console), Xperia Z2 (best smartphone), Project Morpheus (forward-looking innovation), and now this.
The PS2 was also the last Sony thing I purchased. Shortly after that, the music disc rootkit scandal became public, and I have never forgiven them.
Every so often, I see something like this by Sony that looks so cool, but then give it a pass because it is too expensive and because a forever boycott is forever. Later, I find out that I saved myself some minor amount of aggravation when Sony screwed up the software and/or user experience in some completely boneheaded way.
While it looks like a fun toy, I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning and it no longer supported EPUB, with no warning or explanation.
I want to love SONY products. But for the past decade, it seems as if they actively try to piss their users off by building a perfectly good product and then crippling it with arbitrary vendor-specific lock-in.
Remember ATRAC for Minidiscs? If I recall correctly, Sony's first flash-memory music players tried to force you to use ATRAC instead of MP3.
I wonder if this lock-in makes sense in the local Japanese market and it's simply a matter of poor international understanding. Or if their local market gets similarly annoyed.
> If I recall correctly, Sony's first flash-memory music players tried to force you to use ATRAC instead of MP3.
Yeah, and they were even claiming "MP3 compatible" which was blatantly false advertising since you had to convert your tracks to ATRAC with Sonicstage before you could transfer your MP3 on your device. My ass still hurts. Sony, never again.
l remember having to dish out twice as much for memory stick and memory stick duo when everyone else has cheaper SD card support. Minidisc player was pretty cool but was a luxury before it because obsolete.
> and to use the device you have to install a proprietary piece of Windows-only SONY software that might be maintained and updated for a while
Let's not forge the Sony Music CDs which installed a rootkit on your computer to prevent you from trying to copy the CD. Where they went is just unimaginable.
> After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
Even if it were not for that experience, the Sony Ebook Readers have been very, very poor and very slow every time I looked at their latest models. Sony is supposed to be a company run by engineers, but seriously I'm wondering if they know their shit.
Sigh, poor Kodak. I was in their offices 3 years ago giving a presentation and the place was a boarded up ghost town. It was surreal to see how many floors were simply closed off.
Oh, they do (I know, I worked on software for Sony). But there are two major problems:
* There is no such thing as "Sony". It's just a marketing name. In reality it is a loosely-coupled group of companies, each of which has internal fiefdoms. There isn't much cooperation, efforts are often duplicated and groups compete with each other. So, for example, the particular business unit that created the E-reader device probably has little incentive to work with anyone else in the company: it is likely the software was developed internally by that particular group. While there are groups within Sony that are capable of producing excellent top-notch software, not all of them are that good.
* There is a whole culture of being proprietary and locking customers in. Just read the other comments in this thread to see examples of how Sony takes this to an extreme. And before someone compares this to Apple: Apple doesn't lock your data in, while Sony has often done so (an example: a sony dictation recorder that requires a Windows application to read the data and export it from a proprietary format into something readable). So even if they contract the software out, I'd expect a specification of a fairly tight system.
That's why when I was looking to buy an e-reader I settled on a PocketBook. Yes, the Russian ones. It's the most-open e-reading device I've seen. You literally just plug it into your pc with a standard USB cable and it appears as a normal drive that you can upload whatever you wish to. Including normal binaries. There's no rooting steps involved or anything, it's plug-and-copy-an-ELF. It runs a normal everyday Linux.
There's a vibrant community (though you might need to be somewhat familiar with Russian) of all manner of customization possibilities and different applications you can install.
It also comes with snake.
When they start offering A4 devices, I'll definitely buy one (unless someone gets an incurable brain tumor and makes them closed).
I've got a PRS 950. Back when I bought it was really good. Bigger screen, supporting SD cards and reading ePub and PDF. The other options like the Kindle were very locked-up.
Considering Sony just shut down their Reader platform I'd like to say: Dear Sony, fat chance. Having been one of the only heavy-weights in the eReader market that focused on a good ePub experience I'm disappointed the product didn't mature.
This just looks like a bad product migration to me and I will make sure to steer clear of Sony's niche products that don't make it more than a few years.
yep. i'd venture a guess that the screen will be plastic, and it won't have a built-in flip-cover, and no micro usb port so you can't manage the contents from a computer
Don't know about the screen or cover, but it does have a Micro USB port and transferring files is done through file explorer. Simple drag and drop stuff.
Some grep would be nice, and I don't mean the kindle touch search experience: tap, wait, tap search, wait, type, wait, type, wait, type, enter, wait, browse results, tap to scroll, wait, browse results, tap to scroll.
eInk based ebook readers have been around since at least the iRex in '06. My current jetBook in the same format as the Sony here even has 4096 colors. The thing that always kept theory from practice for me was the high latency when doing the actual annotations. 150ms is too much when writing and your pen is 3 strokes ahead of the display.
Is this reader any different? Just looking at the page, I don't quite get what makes it different and HN worthy?
The hardware seems really great. Sony has a ton of experience in e-readers, I trust their capability to pull out marvelous hardware, and this is a product that feels a really valuable spot on the market.
Except, there is so few informations on the software.
It seems the supported sync service is worldox [1], as it's the only link in the sidebar and there is no explicit mention of any other solution. Does this means one has to contract this service provider just to wirelessly sync this device ?
Of course, no mention of an SDK or any third party integration.
As usual with Sony, the hardware seems perfect and the software an afterthought.
The user manual states, "By using the WebDAV protocol, you can access a specific network drive to synchronize documents
between the Digital Paper device and the network
drive, or transfer documents from the device to the
network drive. Connect to a Wi-Fi network
beforehand (page 38)." [1]
The demand is no doubt there. This needs to be executed well and priced well also. I'm going to bet it's neither. Sony is notorious for high prices. Also, who's to say the writing feels as natural as they're making it look?
177 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI imagine it's terribly expensive. "Pricing available upon request".
EDIT: That's right. $1000. http://www.golem.de/news/dpts1-sonys-digital-paper-kostet-me...
The hardware is lustworthy, though the resolution could be higher, it's just a shame there's no SDK. The buttons on the front look very old school Androidish.
I have a 10" e-ink device with 1200x825px which is perfectly fine for A4/letter-designed PDFs, so I'd say the resolution should be fine. I also have a 10" notebook, and the readability is considerably worse at about the same resolution, so I guess e-ink resolutions are not really comparable with lcd resolutions (the pixel layout is quite different: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2286311679_f98bdba47f_m....).
Visionect sells developer-friendly (SDK included) 6" and 9.7" devices starting around $500: http://www.visionect.com/
With that said, it would still be cool to try. It should at least be able to support a calculator.
EDIT: To add, obviously minimise network connections. And if you do need them, batch them.
what part? I have a 1440x1080 ereader retailing at $170.
Indeed. As a PhD student that reads and annotates a ton of scientific papers, this really seems like something that could help me do my job much better.
Please, if any of you manage to get your hands on one, I would love a hands-on review with a lot of pictures.
The price is really high, that's true, but I can see top people in academia or enthusiasts like me adopting it.
I'm a sucker for being able to write notes by hand, and when I tried out the surface pro 2 I was pretty blown away by how nice the handwriting felt. Also seems to be in the same price range, and you end up with a full blown PC (which may not be what you're shooting for). One more thing that I liked is how natural it was to use one note to make notes, cut a part out, and move it around. When I'm sketching ideas out, or learning math stuff, it's always nice to be able to move a snippet over really quickly.
I also used to review and edit a lot of training materials that were being designed, and I was using an ipad 2 with PDFExpert, which was pretty great for that, but I always hated how crap the ipad was for writing things with a stylus or a finger. If I could go back and do it again with a surface pro 2, I would in a heartbeat.
I tried other larger form factor e-ink devices like the Kindle DX and such, but if the screen wasn't big enough to fit the entire page on the screen at once, it didn't matter how big the screen was. The device just ended up being too slow. I liked the ipad because I could swipe around, highlight, circle things, make notes, etc.
Obviously the battery life on the surface pro 2 wouldn't be in the same universe as this thing, and it's bulkier, but just thought I'd throw it out there. Kind of rambly, heh, YMMV
The other huge problem with the DX or any other e-ink reader so far is the lack of note-taking. I hoped the DX would be good for academic papers, but it just isn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzIx0InzJIw
It was super light and cool but it's so damn big and fragile feeling that it didn't feel safe putting it into a bag. It was just one more thing to carry around.
You had to connect it every time to transfer files on or off of it, could not even email it out. Supposedly the only service it was going to work with via wifi was Evernote. We asked for dropbox but that didn't seem like an option. Felt like the future in concept but more like using a palm pilot.
But seems like people prefer burning batteries that need daily recharging, or input lag.
I wonder if wrist pressure confuses the tablet about where the pen is?
The Feel is a pretty looking pen though.
Jump to near the end.
Also, from the images it does look like it would be "e-ink" but I see no mention of it on the page. Is it really "e-ink" (like Kindle) or just "e-paper", which is just a transflective LCD (Pebble, Notion Ink Adam, etc).
From the youtube link posted above it looks like e-ink.
The problem with the iPad, however, is that it's not good for marking up documents. It's great for reading legal cases, but not for marking them up and taking margin notes. Personally, I'm one of those people that gets a lot more out of having paper in my hand and scribbling on it than I do just reading something off a computer screen. I'm really intrigued by this product: http://www.thedigitalink.co.uk/products/capturx-markup-for-p..., which lets you print out PDF's onto special paper so that when you write on it with a digital pen, the markings are reintegrated onto the digital copy. Unfortunately, it's really expensive!
Also, 10" is on the small side for what's ideal. A standard piece of paper is 13" diagonal. I've been looking at the 12.2" Samsung, which also has a digitizer, but Samsung's Android skin is just god-awful. It's a shame nobody makes a 12"+ Baytrail Windows 8 tablet with good battery life...
This product seems to really tackle this niche. Apparently Sony is going to be showing it off this week at the ABA tech show in Chicago.
You can get the 1st gen Pro heavily discounted right now.
The battery life is not the greatest, but you can now cheat with the power cover.
But like you said, a 12"+ Baytrail would be fantastic.
[1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination, with the clunky obsolete desktop married to the slick, intuitive Metro interface. Having to flip between the two just to use Word is a sick joke.
I think the Surface is basically for the segment who either use it on a table like a computer or an iPad when it's not -- like me. The good thing is that there are lots of competing products that satisfy other use cases.
But isn't 16:9 more akin to a legal page than 4:3? ;)
>> [1] Well the big problem is that the UI is an abomination
YMMV, I guess. I'm primarily a Mac user, and I don't mind W8 at all. Keep in mind that the Metro version of OneNote is pretty bad. The desktop version of OneNote is leaps and bounds better. And because of that, you wouldn't have to mode swap to get into the desktop version of Word.
What I do is print out PDF's onto regular cheap paper, mark them up by hand, then run the paper through the scanner. Voila!
Is it wrong for me to also admit that ever since the "Root Kit Debacle" from Sony, I cringe a little at the idea of plugging a Sony product into my PC? Or am I just being paranoid?
But yes, I have been waiting for a device like this for ages. I tried a smaller e-ink device, but trying to view PDFs on that was painful at best. I'm even wondering if 1200x1600 resolution is good enough for scientific papers.
Why letter size? Isn't that a little bit obscure?
I own a few Sony products, but I tend to flinch a little with any Sony product that: (A) Probably has a DRM scheme associated with it (as most e-readers do, I assume this one does as well). or (B) Requires me to plug it into my PC and install Sony produced software.
It may have been a long time ago, but I tend to be one of those guys where trust is easy to establish, easy to break and serious loss of trust is nearly impossible to recover from. The Rootkit Incident was a serious loss of trust to me, so I'll steer clear for now. It's too bad, even at $1100, it'd be worth it to handle my collection of printed-to-pdf notes, documents and books.
That there, is a big turn-off for me. What business would Sony making a device like that which requires their own specialised software to interface it with a normal computer. There are standards for these things. The USB mass storage device standard is well-established already.
It was also nine years ago. We have to move on eventually.
Also, they killed Lik-Sang just for selling across region boundaries.
Unless you're in the USA, where it's the standard paper size.
Nearly everyone else standardised on ISO 216 paper sizes decades ago, but the USA insists on doing its own thing as usual.
If you are then so am I. I don't knowingly let anything with sony written upon it touch my network.
I hope Sony actually goes through with this. I currently use an ipad mini & notesplus with a jot pro - it's a good setup and works well, but I still find myself reaching for legal pads half the time.
I currently use a Surface Pro with OneNote (full version, skip the W8 app store version), and it's fantastic. I have actually stopped using the hardcover sketchbooks I normally carry around, and the Surface takes up space than those books.
StylusLabs Write is a pretty great app too, and it's available for most major platforms.
You might want to consider one of the smaller tablets that have a real Wacom digitizer, i.e. Samsung's Note / Pro series or Asus' new W8 8" tablet. I don't know about how good the Dell Venue Pro 8 is, since its stylus isn't a Wacom.
I am not interested in the note taking, although it may prove useful at some point, I want it as a large e-ink reader for technical books.
http://www.amazon.com/Onyx-M92-Black-Pearl-Edition/dp/B00BBD...
[off topic] Are there any recent product launches which would not feature a cup of coffee on their landing page?
For me then, it would go from "yeah, its kinda neat" to "I really ought to consider giving them my money for this"
I will go back to school just to use this!
Speed in general? How is it to write notes on? Linux/wireless support?
If not, what would be a possible e-ink device to display an SSH terminal over Wifi and pair with a bluetooth keyboard ?
...though I might insist on nano ;)
Don't worry, though, in addition to PDFs, you can convert other files to PDFs!
After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
[1] http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2013/shr/pdf/An...
EDIT: Changed to correct link. Thanks e12e for pointing it out.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/430757/rise_fall_sony/
Is there anything in Sony's current crop of cameras that is based on Oly tech? I don't think they've added Oly's five-axis IBIS into any cameras yet.
Sony's investment in Oly may pay off in the future, but I'm not sure it applies to anything Sony currently sells.
http://www.theonion.com/video/sony-releases-new-stupid-piece...
I too have stayed well away from Sony products. Last I bought was a PS2. I don't think i own any Sony products past that.
I've got a Bravia EX that doesn't work properly (random failures, won't record to hard disk) and a dead VPC-J1 all in one at the moment. Spot on.
Every so often, I see something like this by Sony that looks so cool, but then give it a pass because it is too expensive and because a forever boycott is forever. Later, I find out that I saved myself some minor amount of aggravation when Sony screwed up the software and/or user experience in some completely boneheaded way.
While it looks like a fun toy, I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning and it no longer supported EPUB, with no warning or explanation.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sony-unveils-matteblack-box...
I want to love SONY products. But for the past decade, it seems as if they actively try to piss their users off by building a perfectly good product and then crippling it with arbitrary vendor-specific lock-in.
Remember ATRAC for Minidiscs? If I recall correctly, Sony's first flash-memory music players tried to force you to use ATRAC instead of MP3.
I wonder if this lock-in makes sense in the local Japanese market and it's simply a matter of poor international understanding. Or if their local market gets similarly annoyed.
Yeah, and they were even claiming "MP3 compatible" which was blatantly false advertising since you had to convert your tracks to ATRAC with Sonicstage before you could transfer your MP3 on your device. My ass still hurts. Sony, never again.
Let's not forge the Sony Music CDs which installed a rootkit on your computer to prevent you from trying to copy the CD. Where they went is just unimaginable.
> After I had this experience two or three times I figured I'd stay away from SONY products.
Even if it were not for that experience, the Sony Ebook Readers have been very, very poor and very slow every time I looked at their latest models. Sony is supposed to be a company run by engineers, but seriously I'm wondering if they know their shit.
* There is no such thing as "Sony". It's just a marketing name. In reality it is a loosely-coupled group of companies, each of which has internal fiefdoms. There isn't much cooperation, efforts are often duplicated and groups compete with each other. So, for example, the particular business unit that created the E-reader device probably has little incentive to work with anyone else in the company: it is likely the software was developed internally by that particular group. While there are groups within Sony that are capable of producing excellent top-notch software, not all of them are that good.
* There is a whole culture of being proprietary and locking customers in. Just read the other comments in this thread to see examples of how Sony takes this to an extreme. And before someone compares this to Apple: Apple doesn't lock your data in, while Sony has often done so (an example: a sony dictation recorder that requires a Windows application to read the data and export it from a proprietary format into something readable). So even if they contract the software out, I'd expect a specification of a fairly tight system.
There's a vibrant community (though you might need to be somewhat familiar with Russian) of all manner of customization possibilities and different applications you can install.
It also comes with snake.
When they start offering A4 devices, I'll definitely buy one (unless someone gets an incurable brain tumor and makes them closed).
No modding, though.
Interesting. Which model?
This just looks like a bad product migration to me and I will make sure to steer clear of Sony's niche products that don't make it more than a few years.
Is this reader any different? Just looking at the page, I don't quite get what makes it different and HN worthy?
Except, there is so few informations on the software. It seems the supported sync service is worldox [1], as it's the only link in the sidebar and there is no explicit mention of any other solution. Does this means one has to contract this service provider just to wirelessly sync this device ?
Of course, no mention of an SDK or any third party integration.
As usual with Sony, the hardware seems perfect and the software an afterthought.
[1] http://www.worldox.com
[1](http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/assetDownloadController/User_Guide....)