Jeff Bezos was forthcoming about some aspects of the Kindle’s near future at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday. He said that the Kindle will continue to be focused on reading, not become a multipurpose device like the iPad. He also said that a color kindle is a long way off—color e-ink is not ready for prime-time, and the color LCD reading experience is not as good as e-ink. (Though all the people buying books on the iPad already seem to have few problems with it.) It’s odd Bezos should be so dismissive of LCD given that...

Found on the Baen Bar e-books forum: NewEgg is offering the Aluratek “Libre” LCD e-book reader at a sale price of $129.99 (with free shipping), discounted from its “original price” of $199.99. We previously mentioned a Gadgeteer review of this unit, which seems (according to comments to that review) to be a rebadged Ectaco Jetbook. It supports PDF, TXT, FB2, EPUB, MOBI, PRC, and RTF e-book formats, and Adobe Digital Editions DRM. While it is an LCD unit rather than e-ink, the review finds it to be quite readable and without the annoying “e-ink flash.”...

E-Ink-Info has a detailed interview with Johan Feenstra, Liquavista's CTO. The display can operate in transmissive, reflective or transflective modes and is extremely power efficient. Here is one of the questions: Q: Why do you offer both color and monochrome displays? Isn't it better to focus on color at this stage? Clearly being able to offer full-color is a big differentiator w.r.t existing technologies. The transition from monochrome to color is relatively easy for our technology. We feel, however, that the monochrome version already has significant user benefits in the much faster UI and the improved optical performance. Our expectation is...

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog links to DisplayMate’s blog entry comparing the LCD of the iPhone to the OLED of Google’s Nexus One. It turns out that the Nexus’s OLED is found wanting, featuring a good deal of posterization and artifacting. In a picture of a Martian sunset, there was a great deal of false contouring and image noise, but the iPhone display was “the same as it looks on a studio monitor.” The implications for pictures are obvious, but what about text? Though the test does not get into this, part of the use of the...

This is a four page article and the first one I've seen to give a good description, with diagrams, of how the screen works. She has near-term plans to improve Pixel Qi’s current display, making it more efficient and offering it in different sizes. And then it may be back to the developing world, this time to spread the influence of television. “People, primarily in India, are coming to me saying, you know, make us a 10-watt TV,” she says. A battery-powered HDTV may sound frivolous but, Jepsen explains, India’s musical movies are a cultural institution that many people get left...

With both e-ink and LCD e-book readers in the news, the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has investigated which type of display causes more eyestrain (which I also addressed here). Not surprisingly, the answer is “it depends.” Michael Bove, director of the Consumer Electronics Laboratory at the M.I.T. Media Lab, says different screens make sense for different purposes. “It depends on the viewing circumstances, including the software and typography on the screen,” said Mr. Bove. “Right now E Ink is great in sunlight, but in certain situations, a piece of paper can...

Last week, Amazon bought a touchscreen start-up whose technology would work with color LCD screens. Today, the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has some interesting new glimpses at possible changes to the next model of Kindle. Robert Brunner, founder of the design company Ammunition, worked with Barnes & Noble to create the Nook e-reader and says he believes that the Kindle will actually become two Kindles. “I think they are going to have to split their line. They can’t abandon E Ink screens, but they will need to create a color device too,” said Mr....

One fairly big news item to hit today involves Amazon’s purchase of Touchco, a 6-person startup company with a new multitouch-capable, completely transparent touch-screen overlay technology. A number of the blogs and news sources linking this story remark on how this technology is capable of use with the current multi-color LCD technology that drives the iPhone, iPad, and other forthcoming tablet PCs. They speculate that Amazon may be planning to go head-to-head vs. the iPad and deliver a multimedia experience with its next iteration of Kindle. However, it is worth noting there is no reason this...