Good news: Impressive ‘Plastic Logic e-reader hands-on’; bad news: not shipping until early 2010
The Plastic Logic e-reader, a potential Kindle-killer, won’t ship until early 2010—months later than many of us had expected. But to go by PDA Today, source of the video, this e-paper marvel will be well worth waiting for. Of interest:
–Samples to emerge in mid to late ‘09.
–Came across as a polished product. Very impressive hands-on.
–Screen contrast about the same as the Sony PRS-505. Darn. I was hoping for something better, and maybe rival hardware makers will offer it. Still, contrast will be at least adequate for most users.
–Quick page response, according to PDA Today. Some people had worried about this, and still do.
–Expected to ship with DRM-supporting formats (or a format?). Which one(s)? Unknown.
–E-reader app running on Win CE. That’s e-reader in the generic sense—not necessarily eReader. What we do know is that the PL device will handle the ePub format. This could be another way to beat out the Kindle. Update: ePub it handles!
–About magazine sized at 8.5 by 11 inches.
–Weighs less than a pound.
–Soft keyboard.
–Price isn’t known. Earlier there had been talk of its being in the range of the Kindle (now $359).
See PDA Today for more snapshots and another video. Also see Google News roundup, including a PC Advisor article.
Related: Earlier TeleBlog mentions of Plastic Logic.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
> Quick page response.
Huh? First it takes 500 ms before there is any hint of a reaction from the thing, and after that it takes an additional 600+ ms for the page to redraw completely. Considering the maximum “acceptable” reaction delay (for the brain to interpret a response as a reaction) is ~100 ms it’s unbelievable that these people claim this copiously slow thing is “quick”.
In the video above it’s clear that it’s unresponsive and completely lacks any kind of useful command feedback. The user taps, then leaves the finger there while unsure whether the device registered the tap or not, and only after the screen’s redraw-dance starts he/she removes the finger. This shows that the user puts a significant cognitive load on operating the thing, which is very bad. I’ve seen the same thing with all e-ink devices, but it’s especially noticeable with touchscreens.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Hi, Marcus. As I see it, the response could be faster, but I don’t think it’s as much an issue as you think. Honest difference of opinion.
I’d welcome thoughts of other readers, who, like us, can watch the video I’ve embedded.
Thanks,
David
P.S. I’ve updated the post to link to your comments.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Take a closer look at the videos available and you’ll notice that the device display a message about ePub support.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Updated with ePub info. Thanks, Hadrien! D
January 9th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
> As I see it, the response could be faster, but I
> don’t think it’s as much an issue as you think.
> Honest difference of opinion.
That unresponsiveness increases the cognitive load is pretty much a fact, not an opinion. The exact maximum delay for what the brain considers reactive varies from person to person, but this is also not an opinion. OTOH, whether people get annoyed by it or don’t even notice their slightly decreased concentration could be up for debate, I guess.
Personally I feel like I’d have time to boil an egg during a page flip on all e-ink devices I’ve seen. I found my phone’s 200 ms page-flip time to be way more than what my brain considers reactive so page-flipping caused small “mind-hickups” (not nearly as big as the ones the user clearly suffers from on the video above, though) and it was on the verge of being annoying.
Anyway, I understand that a full frame refresh of an e-ink display might be slower than some find acceptable, but at least there are many ways to fix the reaction delay without needing a faster display. E.g., if Epson’s new display controller is able to make localized updates in less than 100 ms then the device could paint a small circle where the user taps, immediately when the tap is recognized, before refreshing the whole page. Or the screen could produce a slight vibration. Or it could emit a soft beep (that can be disabled, of course). Or a LED beside the screen could blink. There are so many ways a device could indicate that it has received a command that there is absolutely no need for the “umm.. did it recognize my press? I’d better press again.. there.. no, wait, it recognized the first one.. did I now press twice?”-type horrors we see in pretty much each and every e-ink live demo video.
January 9th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
As a real life user of an e-ink device (The PRS700) I find the response time nearly equal to how long it would take me to flip a paper page in a book. Looking at the videos of this device, and considering the larger size, I think the response time is acceptable and I’d like to buy one now. Most of the scepticism I see about funtionality and response times are from non-users like Marcus. I look at their opinion as speculation, not based in reality. I’m hoping I get picked to demo one of these devices so I can show a law firm how it can eliminate some of the paper we generate in a month. I think that, for the professional user, this is a great leap forward, too bad we may have to wait to 2010 to actually see the finished device for sale.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
You’re not making sense. The response time is the time between an action and the response. There is no single response time of flipping a page in a p-book. E.g., you receive the response of grabbing a page when the nerves on your fingers sends the sensory pulses to your brain that the page has been grabbed and perhaps concurrently get confirming inputs via your eyes.
But OK, you got the terminology mixed up, and you ignore everything I wrote about reaction delays, and instead you see both aspects of the page-flip delays as only one (non-)issue. So let’s talk about generic delays then. We can even ignore that at 1100 ms it takes much longer for that thing to flip the page than the 800 ms it takes me to turn a page in a book. Let’s assume that I flip the page of a p-book in 1100 ms and similarly have to wait the same time (1100 ms) for that device to flip the page. However, when I turn a real page I’m the one doing the page-turning, which means I’m never waiting for anything else. See the difference? The same goes for other things, too. E.g., when I’m climbing a ladder I wouldn’t find the ascent boring, but if I’m in an elevator that’s ascending at the same speed I’d find it extremely slow and be bored out of my mind.
So you know I find 200 ms delays (on the verge of being) annoying but you think that if I had a device with 1000+ ms delays I would not find it annoying? Seriously?
I have tested quite a few different devices and concepts, I have designed different kinds of interfaces, and I’ve done usability-testing and -reviews of various interfaces. So although I haven’t even touched a real e-ink device I’ve seen lots of videos of them and noticed lots of problematic details I’ve seen in other devices (often prototypes) before, and thus I wouldn’t call it “speculation, not based in reality”. Just because it has a novel display doesn’t make everything about it novel. It’s certainly not the first device to have issues with speed and/or response times.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
More precisely, the response time is the time between an action and the start of the response.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:27 am
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahrg 2010
what the *** shall I do now? wait? buy something I don’t really want to buy? hope for the astak’s 2nd gen devices?
January 15th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Yes, seriously. Despite what your calculator is telling you, speed of page changes is not something you will find most users of e-ink devices complaining about. Especially users of the Sony PRS-700 which has the fastest page change speed of any currently available similar e-ink device. According to your experiance with interfaces and testing & design, if it were a problem for actual users, they should be saying so in large numbers. They are not. So you have seen a few videos of an e-ink device, Great, and based on that you launch into a pedantic tirade about response times, ladders and elevators. It doesn’t matter what the terminology is, or the latest ladder to elevator theory. What is important is the experiance of the user. With my Sony PRS-700 I don’t notice the page changes, Period. It doesn’t matter whether it is 100 ms or 1,000 ms. What matters is what you don’t have yet – Any experiance with an actual device in a real world setting. I swipe my finger across about an inch of the screen surface and the page changes (just like with a p-book, I am doing the swipe and the page change appears to be immediate. I don’t experiance a “wait time). The apparent time elapsed is no more than, and sometimes appears less than it would take to do the same thing with a p-book. Forget the theory, and look at the experiance. Than you will get it, maybe. Until then you can pontificate about your many acomplishments and all the videos you’ve watched, but it won’t matter. Anyone who has used a Sony PRS-700 (and some who have used other e-ink devices) will tell you the same thing. We don’t notice the page changes, so it’s a non-issue for readers. There goes your “cognitive load” problem into the imaginary problem bin. For theorists like yourself it may be a major problem, but for those of us actually using the devices, we have far more important things on our next device wish list than speedier page changing.
July 21st, 2009 at 4:01 am
I understand this response is several months late, but I was reading the comments and noticed how The Real BillC stated that PRS-700 users don’t complain about the screen lag. Many users are in fact quite dissatisfied with the general sluggishness of the Sony Readers along with everything else, and a surprising number have ditched their readers for the significantly uglier Ectaco JetBook, which uses a higher-contrast, significantly faster TFT display. In terms of support, it’s not even that good, but the display technology by itself and the relative responsiveness is what sells the device for most people, in addition to the smaller size.
I use a PRS-505 and I can tolerate page turns, though the lack of instant feedback is indeed annoying. No theory here–I use the devices often enough to find them problematic. And that’s not even taking unpaginated large LRFs into account. For lazily reading a book, the delays are pretty tolerable since the activity is largely passive. However, if you intend to engage more actively with the documents (as the Plastic Logic products promote with their “business-oriented” marketing), 500-1000ms+ delays can be infuriating.
The slow and inefficient interface is one of the big problems to be resolved, along with the inferior display clarity and contrast. I have to deal with these hardware problems long before I need to deal with the problems of proprietary software and format lockdown, poor publisher formatting, book selection, etc.
There are a lot of product adopters who have taken to the “Uh, well, it’s never bothered me! Doesn’t bother my friends either!” approach to facing criticism. The problem is there, and it’s not just “theorists” who recognize it.