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I was curious so I went searching earlier. I figured I'd open the thread back up and link this:
http://www.eink.com/display_pr...

Inside the Triton section, root around. There's some partner showcases that have some color stuff. Some of them are kind of neat. There's some developer kit here:
http://www.eink.com/developer_...

The first one is $70 and looks like it might be fun to play with. The second link looks like it's software and info. Obviously, I haven't looked at it very deeply. I'd just looked because I was curious - I opened the thread again to share what I'd found.

Here are some concepts but it appears that they work.
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

It only does something like 16 colors and 11 shades (something like that) so you get 4096 colors total to use.

I'm an automotive enthusiast so these piqued my interest as they're sort of in-line with a concept I've been mulling over for a while:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Here's an e-reader that's a rugged model, note the colored icons on the right:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Hmm... It looks like it's something that can be done but is likely still cost prohibitive for most people. I've fired off an email concerning the last product listed to see if they've share more information. It's not yet on the vendor's page so it's surely still in concept stage. If it's any good, I'd love to have one.

I was curious so I went searching earlier. I figured I'd open the thread back up and link this:
http://www.eink.com/display_pr...

Inside the Triton section, root around. There's some partner showcases that have some color stuff. Some of them are kind of neat. There's some developer kit here:
http://www.eink.com/developer_...

The first one is $70 and looks like it might be fun to play with. The second link looks like it's software and info. Obviously, I haven't looked at it very deeply. I'd just looked because I was curious - I opened the thread again to share what I'd found.

Here are some concepts but it appears that they work.
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

It only does something like 16 colors and 11 shades (something like that) so you get 4096 colors total to use.

I'm an automotive enthusiast so these piqued my interest as they're sort of in-line with a concept I've been mulling over for a while:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Here's an e-reader that's a rugged model, note the colored icons on the right:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Hmm... It looks like it's something that can be done but is likely still cost prohibitive for most people. I've fired off an email concerning the last product listed to see if they've share more information. It's not yet on the vendor's page so it's surely still in concept stage. If it's any good, I'd love to have one.

I was curious so I went searching earlier. I figured I'd open the thread back up and link this:
http://www.eink.com/display_pr...

Inside the Triton section, root around. There's some partner showcases that have some color stuff. Some of them are kind of neat. There's some developer kit here:
http://www.eink.com/developer_...

The first one is $70 and looks like it might be fun to play with. The second link looks like it's software and info. Obviously, I haven't looked at it very deeply. I'd just looked because I was curious - I opened the thread again to share what I'd found.

Here are some concepts but it appears that they work.
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

It only does something like 16 colors and 11 shades (something like that) so you get 4096 colors total to use.

I'm an automotive enthusiast so these piqued my interest as they're sort of in-line with a concept I've been mulling over for a while:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Here's an e-reader that's a rugged model, note the colored icons on the right:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Hmm... It looks like it's something that can be done but is likely still cost prohibitive for most people. I've fired off an email concerning the last product listed to see if they've share more information. It's not yet on the vendor's page so it's surely still in concept stage. If it's any good, I'd love to have one.

I was curious so I went searching earlier. I figured I'd open the thread back up and link this:
http://www.eink.com/display_pr...

Inside the Triton section, root around. There's some partner showcases that have some color stuff. Some of them are kind of neat. There's some developer kit here:
http://www.eink.com/developer_...

The first one is $70 and looks like it might be fun to play with. The second link looks like it's software and info. Obviously, I haven't looked at it very deeply. I'd just looked because I was curious - I opened the thread again to share what I'd found.

Here are some concepts but it appears that they work.
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

It only does something like 16 colors and 11 shades (something like that) so you get 4096 colors total to use.

I'm an automotive enthusiast so these piqued my interest as they're sort of in-line with a concept I've been mulling over for a while:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Here's an e-reader that's a rugged model, note the colored icons on the right:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Hmm... It looks like it's something that can be done but is likely still cost prohibitive for most people. I've fired off an email concerning the last product listed to see if they've share more information. It's not yet on the vendor's page so it's surely still in concept stage. If it's any good, I'd love to have one.

I was curious so I went searching earlier. I figured I'd open the thread back up and link this:
http://www.eink.com/display_pr...

Inside the Triton section, root around. There's some partner showcases that have some color stuff. Some of them are kind of neat. There's some developer kit here:
http://www.eink.com/developer_...

The first one is $70 and looks like it might be fun to play with. The second link looks like it's software and info. Obviously, I haven't looked at it very deeply. I'd just looked because I was curious - I opened the thread again to share what I'd found.

Here are some concepts but it appears that they work.
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

It only does something like 16 colors and 11 shades (something like that) so you get 4096 colors total to use.

I'm an automotive enthusiast so these piqued my interest as they're sort of in-line with a concept I've been mulling over for a while:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Here's an e-reader that's a rugged model, note the colored icons on the right:
http://www.eink.com/concept_sh...

Hmm... It looks like it's something that can be done but is likely still cost prohibitive for most people. I've fired off an email concerning the last product listed to see if they've share more information. It's not yet on the vendor's page so it's surely still in concept stage. If it's any good, I'd love to have one.

"Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode"

none of those are present in a Kindle.

Those were generic examples. A better one for a mobile device might have been that the contacts on the charging port wears out. Based on the rest of your post I'm skeptical that you know anything about the components used to make Kindles, but I didn't design it so I won't speculate further.

I apologize for the LCD/E-Ink confusion. But it doesn't make a difference because neither of them are designed to last for 100 years. According to the company, they expect that "over 90% of E Ink displays will last more than 10 years with typical usage", where "typical usage" is defined as room temperature. Kindles are rated for operation between 0 - 35 C (32 - 95 F), and discussion on Amazon suggests that this is a real limitation. That range is similar to what LCDs can handle. I suspect that both are limited by a chemical breakdown process (which would happen exponentially faster at higher temperatures) but I don't know enough about displays to say for sure.

you cant get more "temperature extreme" than what [Voyager 1] experiences. and it has "electronics" in it.

If you think that a space probe is in any way comparable to a consumer e-reader, then I'm afraid you don't understand anything at all about electronics or engineering. Had you kept reading on Wikipedia, you might have found stuff like this:

The Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) and a single eight-track digital tape recorder (DTR) provide the data handling functions.

The digital control electronics of the Voyagers were based on RCA CD4000 radiation-hardened, silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) custom-made integrated circuit chips, combined with standard transistor-transistor logic (TTL) integrated circuits.

Electrical power is supplied by three MHW-RTG radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). They are powered by plutonium-238 ... and provided approximately 470 W at 30 volts DC when the spacecraft was launched. Plutonium-238 decays with a half-life of 87.74 years ... Additionally, the thermocouples that convert heat into electricity also degrade, reducing available power below this calculated level. By 7 October 2011 the power generated by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had dropped to 267.9 W and 269.2 W respectively, about 57% of the power at launch ... As the electrical power decreases, spacecraft loads must be turned off, eliminating some capabilities.

Voyager-1 was designed from the ground up for reliability in a hostile environment. I can't find a price for the hardware itself, but you can bet it was a more than $100, probably by several zeros. And even so, it's looking like the power supply will fail before it turns 100. A Kindle is nowhere near that level of reliability. It doesn't need it and nobody wants to pay for it.

E-ink itself is pretty damn rugged:

http://www.eink.com/rugged.html

I wonder if my Nook Simple Touch has laminated glass for the touchscreen later; it feels like plastic...

Missed Opportunity.

For both BlackBerry and their "professional grade" but too-small PlayBook tablet, and for E-Ink and their lack of color devices on the market. To be fair, there is the jetBook Color which is targeted at the educational market... but it's the only one and I doubt anyone has made any additional aviation apps for it. Too bad they couldn't have leveraged their branding for the aviation market.

How is 1 cm any better? Different displays are a different number of cm in width, and fonts are different sizes in relation to cm, so the same amount will look different depending on the display and font size. em is a little better, but different displays are different numbers of characters in width as well.

You are correct!

1 cm = 1 cm

15 px can equal 3 mm or 1.5 cm depending on the resolution of the screen displaying the print. One screen might have 28 pixels per centimeter (72 ppi) while another can display 118 pixels per centimeter (300ppi).

If you define your paragraph indentation as a fixed 15 pixels, on one display that indentation might only be 5 mm in from the margin, while on another display it might only be 1 mm from the margin.

A better unit of measurement is the em, which is recommended for web design by the W3C for standardization of web page display. Em is now defined for digital use by being relative to the point size defined by the display in use. With the font-size set in points, this means that the em is defined in a relative manner to the size of the font being displayed, thence the display screen resolution, and is thereby scalable. The result is, if you set your indentation to a given number of em, then no matter on what display your text is showing or the font size selected, the paragraph indentation will always be the same number of characters in from the margin. Another advantage using the em is that if one decides to print the text on paper, it should appear on the paper as it did on a digital display without any modification. (That's the theory at least. We all know that famous quote by Yogi Berra: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.")

The E Ink Pearl imaging film, which both the Kindle and Nook use, has an imaging resolution of over 200 DPI (dots per inch). As the Kindle and Nook--depending on the model--use screen resolutions roughly around 150 PPI (pixels per inch), it means that those ebook readers are using 1.3 dots per pixel to render characters. If another ebook reader only uses a screen resolution of 100 PPI, then one em on that display will be different from one em on the Nook or Kindle, so the fonts would be sized differently on the different displays. But 1 em on any given device should still display and indentation of the same number of characters relative to the screen of that device, from one ebook to another. In the event of different screen resolutions for the same ebook, the user is going to have to make adjustments to the available font-size to make the text readable from one device to another.

Nowadays, screens with fixed character width are very rare, outside simple digital displays on equipment or devices such as a calculator. Even those are now using pixelated displays rather than each character having a fixed display unit. Dedicated ebook readers today do not use fixed-character displays.

I must admit, my initial post could have been better worked out. I was writing quickly being pressed for time. So, I figured using the fixed value of 1 cm vs. the pixel would be easier to follow by the readers than trying to explain the em. Good catch!

For the record, I set the CSS in the ebooks I fixed to 1.25em for the text indentation for paragraphs on my Nook Simple Touch.

Of course a colour e-ink display would help tremendously too, especially on the DX, but I don't know if the technology for that even exists.

It does.

I'm surprised actually, because E Ink does have a colour product available. Maybe it just came too late for Amazon product development.

http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html

On the subject, Martin Woodhouse claims that it's feasible to combine a sheet of e-ink together with a sd reader, solar cell and battery for $25.

Since Esquire ran their e-ink cover I've been thinking the parts must be relatively cheap.

It doesn't seem possible to buy e-ink though for less than $3000. Is this a situation where sales are only going to large companies or is there another reason it's hard to buy e-paper?

They have -- in fact, E-Ink has been demonstrating the technology for four years:

http://eink.com/press/releases/pr86.html

and that's not the only similar tech. Wired had a summary of several back in June:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/blackandwhite_ebooks/

Commercial availability of E-Ink's color displays is expected in late 2010. I would bet pretty strongly that the Kindle 3 uses 'em.

Why not use colour e-ink displays? Surely they've got the kinks ironed out by now...

Then can you explain this?

And that's not even mentioning color electronic ink from other companies.

The Kindle 2 screen is the exact same size and resolution as the Sony Reader (PRS 500/505/700). Adding a few more shades of gray does not a good product rip-off make.

This is not an innovation, it's the continuing exhausting E-ink's initial c. 2000 inventory of 6 inch 170dpi 600x800 screens. http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr26.html

See here, on this page: http://e-ink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html Where it shows 8" and 9.7" displays? Yeah, those be known as "better". Guess what the diagonal is on a typical paperback? Oh wait wait! Pick me! I know.. EIGHT INCHES. NOT SIX.

Noobs. Ever heard of a touch screen? Oh yeah, like Sony has on the PRS 700 and it uses the same exact screen?! Gee, what else uses a touch screen instead of a hardware keyboard? Oh right, the iPhone.

I think you'll find a lot of mass production products on E ink's website (see the products of Citizen and Seiko for examples of bended screens).

I think you are misunderstanding the technology. Review: http://www.eink.com/technology/howitworks.html They are very much pixels, dots, or "e-ink microcapsules" which means you should be able to draw any image you want. In the howitworks they seem to have 3 shades: white, black, and grey. When you say you can only show what it was designed to that sounds like if it has an "1" you only get 2 bars like on a calculator. That is really misunderstanding what is actually going on here.

maybe you could make your own display with one of these. Although it looks like 9.7" is the largest currently available, and it costs $4K.

Actually someone did make a USB flash disk with an E Ink display.

http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr90.html

Kind of easy to do on FAT too, just scan the FAT and count the zero entries.

Actually for a 1GB disk you could have ~65000 clusters or 16K each. That's 256 sectors of FAT, each holding 256 entries. When the drive is plugged in, scan the whole FAT and work out a free cluster count and total cluster count for the drive.

Whenever a FAT sector is overwritten just work out a delta between the old and new count of free clusters value in that sector and add it to the free cluster count for the drive, and update the display based on that. The cool thing is you don't slow down access at all, unlike if you need to rescan the FAT. You don't need to keep anything in presumably scarce controller RAM either, just a 32 bit free cluster count and a 32 bit total cluster count. And you don't need any software on the PC.

For a file system like NTFS or EXTx which uses a bitmap to track allocation each 512 bit bitmap sector gives the allocation status of 512*8=4096 clusters. The algorithm doesn't really change though - whenever there is a write to one of the bitmap sectors, work out a delta and add it to the free cluster count for the drive and then use that to update the display.

The drive firmware would recognize filesystems based on the boot sector and decide which sectors to monitor and which algorithm should be used to count the free clusters in the FAT or bitmap sector being monitored. For an unrecognized filesystem I'd blank the display, or maybe turn on a few segments in an error code pattern.

Of course in practice you'd probably only support the fuel gauge on the preformatted version of FAT, for support cost reasons. You don't want ReiserFS users yelling at you when the flash drive firmware dies when they reformat from Reiser4 which you do tested with to Reiser5 which you didn't because it wasn't released when you were testing. Same with people reformatting the drive with Vista and changing the NTFS version to one you haven't tested with.

If you check the "customers" page on eink.com, you can see all the current e-Book producers and go to each site and check them out.

I have done this and I feel that the iRex Iliad is the top dog. You can read the specs here

Not counting the sweet ability to write with it using the built-in Wacom Penabled touch screen, here are some other plusses:

* It uses the 8.1 inch, 768x1024 pixel screen. All other e-book readers currently on the market use the 6-inch, 600x800 pixel screen.

* It claims 16 shades of grey (4-big). All other e-book readers are at 3-bit (8 shades)

* Decent Processing power with a 400mhz X-Scale processor

* Built-in wireless-G with support for 10/100mbs ether.

* IT'S HACKABLE! There appears to be an active dev community for it and even a sanction dev site

My OLPC just arrived today (less than an hour ago in fact) and I'm planning on using it as my eBook reader. But if I manage to 'outgrow' the OLPC as an eBook reader, the iLiad will be my next one.

It's obvious that there would be a market for a low cost alternative to, well, almost any ebook reader, so I just went to have a look at eInk's website to see if there is a developer kit. There is, here and even the prototype they have there looks pretty cool. So I went to have a look at the shop...
I don't know much about the hardware business but I would say that $3k is way too big an entry cost for a developer kit. OK, they probably haven't got to mass producing the screen yet, but the rest of the hardware is common enough, the OS is Linux and the drivers and applications are open source. So what are we paying for? How much does a production licence cost? I'm all for eInk making an honest profit out of their work, but this looks like a stumbling block for the development of an open alternative.

A more modular design of laptops would indeed be progress (also resolving upgrade/replacement/service issues), e.g. these open source, LEGO-like computer modules that run LINUX, perhaps in combination with components which stack on a shelf, combined with electronic paper displays when in 'mobile' mode. Perhaps a future as discussed earlier here.

CC.

This comment is well informed but has some important details wrong.
What Philips did sell to PVI is a business that uses E-Ink http://www.eink.com/ technology. E-Ink uses an electrophoretic technology, where tiny capsules contain both black and white particles with opposite electrical charge and fluid. Applying a voltage across the capsules makes them look black, white or grey from the users side. No coloured oil involved.
SiPix http://www.sipix.com/is similar, but uses only one kind of particle and a coloured liquid.

A spin-off from Philips, namely Liquavista http://www.liquavista.com/, developed the oil and water based displays and is currently marketing and mass producing this type of display. This technology is also known as electro-wetting. The principle is that an electric field is used to change the surface tension and thereby change the pixel electrode from hydrophilic (loves water and will be covered in water) to hydrophobic (doesn't like water and will be covered with the oil). The material not covering the pixel electrode is stored in a small reservoir at the side of each pixel.

What is new in the LG-Philips.LCD patent application, is not the oil and water idea, but the application and/or the exact implementation in a flexible display.

so is it that different from this tech? Eink has been around for quite a while now.

appearantly you haven't been paying attention to E-paper advances.

http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr101.html

"We have put it all together and today we are unveiling our first-ever color research prototype that can play smooth color video."

E-ink had color flexible e-paper on display years ago.

http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr86.html

There are a hell of a lot more ways to create e-paper and paper-like displays so it is understandable that there is some confusion about who is doing what first. Next week is the Society for Information Display show, and there will be at least 20 e-paper developers displaying. Almost all of them will have color prototypes at their booth.

http://www.sid.org/conf/sid2007/sid2007.html

But seriously, current LCD, cholesteric LCD, plasma, e-paper, inorganic EL, DLP, LCOS, elecgtrowettting, and EL display tech is so mature and competitive that any new display tech better be f*cking perfect or it will never have a chance.

According to eInk's website, their current generation speed is 740ms.
It's for B/W screens, I don't know if colour screens will be as "fast".

http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/imaging_film.h tml

Still, when you read a book, it might be fast enough. You won't be playing games on those soon, however.

Motorola are making a phone designed for outdoor use, using an eink/epaper display, according to some articles.

You could buy some eink stuff for test purposes, and see if it's as good as they make out.

It most certainly is much too expensive for the OLPC project, but just out of curiousity: how would a display made with E Ink technology behave in a laptop? It will be too slow for playing games, but can it be used to do word processing etc on? Power consumption will almost certainly be lower than that of an LCD screen I think.

There are still people like me that still found unpleasant reading articles or books from pdf files on your LCD (or anything with light on the back). What they propose is a display that looks like paper. I was recently in a seminar from e-link and I found it really nice.

Try look for the Sony Reader. They are recently going with color screens that look amazing as portraits and the power consumption is really low.

The 'paper' could even be combined with electronics to create a flexible display.

I would expect that "paper" made with e-ink would be much more suitable for the role of "Temporary display of digital information" than specially coated paper - not only is e-paper reusable, but the user can choose when to erase the old "printout".

I kinda doubt that e-paper will ever replace books but for applications such as the one stated in the OP, it seems ideal.

If you don't like either Sony's reader or the iLiad (my personal e-Ink favorite) you can make your own!

Awesome.

If you check

http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html

you'll find full specifications for this toy. Like screen resolution (800x600) and refresh rate (500ms for black & white and 1s for grayscale). So any hacks that can make it play videos or anything related to animations are futile. Other thing is that it drains batteries quite fast - but only during refreshing of pages. So if you want to skip let's say 50 pages one after another it can dent you battery quite badly...

Nevertheless - it's enviroment friendly (think about all those dead trees you read from every day) and if marketed properly (slim chance with Sony) it can make a big change.

It's nice to dream sometimes... :)

jackharrer

Hey, it is made out of E Ink. It is a type of refelctive display. The next big thing in the display industry. It is suppose to mimic paper, hence no back light. That is why you turn on the light to read a book or ebook. It is much more natural and easier on the eyes. Check out http://www.eink.com/index.html

You did not RTFA,or even the intro on top!

Cell phones don't have to be as small as they are; the hand-set size of ancient rotary-dial phones was that size for a reason.
Well, if that size was used as a grip behind the body of the unit (with various hardware inside it, of course), then the face of the unit could be a fairly decent-sized touch-screen.
It can even be a decently low-power screen, once companies like this one and this one and this one finish their R&D in things like full-color and size-scaling.

I'd also like to mention that There was a buzz-phrase a number of years ago, "wafer scale integration", and I posted my own thoughts about it
here, in Nov 2003.
While they might not be using silicon as the substrate for this modern version of WSI, I have little doubt that something like what I described is what they are doing. Perhaps I should seek a royalty... :)

10. Semi-permanent LCD. Sounds like e-paper / e-ink (or here) to me.

9. Eye-move pc. All the projectors I've seen get pretty toasty, which translates to power usage. In a battery powered device this small (what kind of batteries?), I would think the projected display would be either too small or too dim for use by actual humans for any length of time. This feels like one of those ideas that's waiting for a miraculous invention (by someone else) to appear.

8. Flash required. The future does not contain Flash... Ignore...

7. ... same

3. ... same

2. ... same

6. Transparent toaster. Oh great. Another highly-specialized kitchen appliance taking up already limited counter space, and consuming another outlet. At least make it where it can do bagles. Until then it goes with the electric hot-dog roaster, the electric fondue maker, and the electric cheese straightener. All I really need is my microwave, and my expresso setup.

5. Foldable display. Take a look at something that's been folded and unfolded a couple thousand times. Like piece of paper money. It gets pretty ugly after a while. toss....

4. Self-cooling [whatever] can. Great. I can't wait to see a couple hundred million of these in the landfill after the next World Cup or Superbowl.

1. Video game urinal. Um. How do the girls play? They can't. Guys win. How do the guys with prostate problems play? They can't. Young guys win. How do the young guys who have can't relax and pee in public play? They can't. Young drunk guys win.

hm. Flashing shoes? Am I supposed to be watching my feet while I run? In the dark? Maybe some safety value.

hm. Solar-powered water bottle. For me, a water bottle hanging off a backpack loop and swinging around while I hike is distracting, annoying, and a loss of energy. And the water heats up.

hm. Intelligent spoon? That's ....um.... useful. How about an Intelligent Urinal game with temp, pH, salinity and (dare I even think it) viscosity sensors?

Show me some gadgets not solely based in, and reliant on, a petro-economy and you'll get my attention. Show me stuff that won't choke the landfill with toxic, non-recyclable waste when it breaks after a year of use. Show me stuff that will remove more waste or greenhouse gases from the environment than it takes to produce it. The future is not looking so bright...

Nowhere on their site is there a place to buy just a display, or just the material.

Also - those of you wanting to mark up the documents, etcetera - use another tool for that. E-readers will become cheap enough primarily by focusing on just reading documents, and reducing the costs involved with that.

Sometimes it's better, especially in the early stages of a technology, to have a cheap, single-purpose implementation, than a more expensive multi-function one. For example, the telephone. Early simplicity caused widespread adoption, which then created the markets for later technological improvements.

Nowhere on their site is there a place to buy just a display, or just the material.

Also - those of you wanting to mark up the documents, etcetera - use another tool for that. E-readers will become cheap enough primarily by focusing on just reading documents, and reducing the costs involved with that.

Sometimes it's better, especially in the early stages of a technology, to have a cheap, single-purpose implementation, than a more expensive multi-function one. For example, the telephone. Early simplicity caused widespread adoption, which then created the markets for later technological improvements.

Don't agree with this. The e-ink is a small revolution. Just go to the website for full technical specs. http://www.eink.com/technology/index.html. The great advantage here is that it's more readable than LCD, and probably most interestingly it takes no power to keep an image on screen. It's definite limitation is screen latency which is about 1s. I think the market is mature for this. It is easy to compare this to the arrival of the ipod. Cool device, well-designed, that's not more complicated to use that your old paperback. The industry will love it. Imagine road signs made up of this. Or ads, billboards. In seconds you update the display. We're going to hear more of this. Be sure of that.

How about proposing just that to the manufacturers?

(BTW not that this would be needed in a PDA, but they do have even have color prototypes already...)

How about proposing just that to the manufacturers?

(BTW not that this would be needed in a PDA, but they do have even have color prototypes already...)

The E Ink company sells a prototype http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html for $3,000 running Linux! With Bluetooth, USB, and a MMC card reader.

But you're right, a comsumer product should also be a tablet.

If they're not already using it, they should try this stuff.

A possible major change in how we interact with computers: http://www.eink.com/ has their paper displays - wait for a high-resolution computer display the size of your table, with multitouch input. This would force a change in UIs. The mouse cursor would vanish, things would be handled.

The E-Ink people talk about a new generation with low-cost plastic transistors and flexible substrates, but what they're actually shipping is both expensive and rigid.

You can buy an E-Ink Prototyping Kit for $3000. This is a sheet of "E-ink" material, with the little balls that rotate, mounted on top of an 6 inch LCD panel, attached to a little computer. Runs Linux, even. This gets you a little black and white display. Since there's an LCD panel behind it, this can't be cheaper than an LCD panel. It is sunlight-readable, though.

There are some E-Ink point of purchase displays, but they're fixed signs where sections can be turned on and off, much like the special LCD displays that are used in control panels. These are still a few hundred dollars. Along the same line are the various "E-Ink clocks".

If you want a display that holds its image with power off and is sunlight readable, try Kent Displays. It's not "E-Ink", but it actually works.

Wow. That's all you ask for? I mean, while you're dreaming about technology that doesn't exist, why not go all out?

Nonsense. PADDs, unlike much of Treknology, could be built today.

I think making them thin is just waiting for electronic paper to come down in price. I think we will see PADDs long before the electronic paper is cheap enough for newspapers and cereal boxes.

1/4" thick PADDs with this kind of display could already be built; the display itself is not as thick as glass, and you don't need a backlight. Give them a few gigs of built-in FLASH, plenty of RAM, and wifi, and make them rugged, and leave out the card slots and other extras. A device like that, running Linux, could have at least a 10-year life too; there's no reason for it to become obsolete. Hopefully the battery is replaceable because LiIon's aren't lasting that long.