For many things, sure. But the existing 6″ E-Ink displays are the same size as the printed area of a paperback. They are good enough for a lot of uses, and they are here now. Smaller devices are going to be cheaper to produce which brings us to the next point:

>Price: Expected at one point to be in the general range of the Kindle’s. The company is officially mum on price.

What they mean is, more than a Kindle – and because it is larger, they think these can be priced higher, too.

These devices really have to drop in price – if the eBookwise devices can sell for US$100, why can’t these? The goal should be prices lower than the Kindle. Get the sales volume up.

>Ruggedness:

This is a big deal, especially for this type of device.

>Interface: The Plastic Logic uses a touch screen, unlike the Kindle. With a quick swipe you can turn pages.

Yuk, I’m not a fan of touchscreens for navigation while reading (I have multiple touchscreen and digitiser devices for everything else, though. And I like them).

Terms like “simple” and “quick” raise alarms every time I see them used.

>Content: We know that Plastic Logic has been in touch with newspaper and magazine publishers

Now, why should PL need to do this? What business model are they pursuing here? Not a Kindle-type subscription model I hope.

>Wireless issue:

I have no doubt that we are going to see more devices with Kindle-type wireless built in, until eventually they become ubiquitous. But I don’t want to pay a premium for this, and neither do I want to be restricted in content or other uses of the device because of the business model required to support this. I also don’t want a battery life penalty.

I think that the absolute minimum requirements for next generation hardware are: small size, rugged, long battery life, clear display, easy to use, easy to manage content, complete format support.

I don’t care about colour, and the speed of existing e-ink is good enough.

That means that from the description of the PL device, they really only bring light weight, ruggedness and a touchscreen to the party; price is very likely to be too high; usability, content and interface are unknown at this point.

Despite it’s potential, PL aren’t really ticking a lot of boxes here.

Speaking of the Sony — was in my neighbourhood Sony store yesterday, and the salespeople were encouraging me to look at the older model of the reader v. the PRS 700. Interesting, no?

They say the back-lit version drains batteries for a much shorter life, and has other drawbacks. Maybe just trying to clear inventory?

Even after you’ve tried both? No way, I don’t believe you. Even if you’d try to fool yourself to think it’s cool or whatever I simply can’t believe that you would prefer that 100 times more cumbersome motion than pressing a button. Not even if we’d ignore the smudge-problem.

> If you look at a video of the PL device they just
> use a small movement of their thumb to turn the
> page.

In the one video I just looked at it looked awful. The swipe itself looked very hard to do with one hand (and I’m sure many people will drop these things trying to turn the page without holding on to it with the other hand at the same time). There also didn’t seem to be any kind of feedback, and certainly not any tactile feedback. With buttons you usually get both tactile and audible feedback, the former of which is by far more important.

> Certainly that is no more effort than turning a
> physical page,

So? Turning a physical page is a nightmare compared to pressing a button. I’m read mostly sci-fi and the novels are pretty thick, and I used to drop them all the time when trying to turn the page with one hand. It’s not that it’s particularly hard most of the time to move the other hand into position and turn the page (and I’d prefer that over those awful 2000ms page-flips any day), but almost as often as not I have better things to do with my other hand (e.g. holding on to something so I don’t fall over when the bus suddenly hits the brakes).

> but a lot more natural than pressing a button.

No way! People press stuff all the time. People very seldom swipe stuff. My mother used to swipe stuff when inspecting how well I had cleaned my room, but even she didn’t seem to like it particularly much.

And if you try to hold the thing with one hand by holding the device with your thumb vertically while trying to swipe horizontally with the same thumb it’s one of the most unnatural motions you can do with your thumb.

Really, the only problem with buttons are that due to the small motion it’s not very visible when you press a button, so there might be a small problem if you need to demonstrate pressing a button to a large group of people (not that I’ve ever seen anyone do that, but I’m sure someone has done it at some point). However, even that can be easily fixed by providing visual feedback e.g. using a glowring around the button.

Dealing with A4 pdf well (a factor of size) is an important transitory virtue. Not because paged fixed epublishing has a future, but because it taps into an established form of epublishing into a reading device where flowable text makes better sense. That had to be done and a number of eink devices are scaling up.

That is where glass vs plastic starts having a major effect. The bigger the device screen the more stress on the glass, thicker stronger glass is needed — the weight of the glass has to go up even if better stronger glass is used.

Flexible plastic has many advantages — scaling up, even to desk size is practical. Hinging two devices together for a book-like device is also practical.

I think this will take off.

Read: It takes so long to turn pages that we had to at least partially mask the horrible delay by requiring a large and slow (and screen-smudging(!)) physical action to initiate the page-turning.

I can’t believe there are people that actually would prefer some odd “wipe” instead of just pushing a button. Even if the wipe could be performed with one hand (and if it can’t then it’s so braindead I want to cry) it’s still a very awkward action whereas pushing a button is not. And if it can be performed with one hand, can it be performed also so that wiping won’t cover the text at the bottom of the screen (which usually is the text you’re trying to read precisely when turning the page)?

I have looked at the PRS 700, and think that Sony has completely botched the screen. The touchscreen turns the display awfully milky and soft. When put side by side with a PRS 500 or the Kindle, there is no way I would choose the PRS 700.

As for Plastic Logic: everything could happen. They have built this huge hundreds-of-million factory in East Germany, probably raking in lots of government subsidies. It is entirely possible that nothing useful comes from them next year–they have been at the early prototype stage for pretty long, and no-one knows how well they can do software and UI. Then again, perhaps they will be at Leipzig Book fair in March and completely blow our minds!

Also: There are several other companies, some of them probably in stealth mode, which are designing Kindle competitors. If the economy does not collapse in 09, this is going to be a great year for eBook readers.