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LG Presents Solar Powered E-Book
MikeChino writes "At first glance, e-readers offer a great set of benefits over paper-bound books – they’re light, versatile, and a great alternative to lugging around a tote full of dead tree tomes on your next trip. However these new reading mediums have one glaring fault — can you imagine the frustration of running out of juice mid-sentence and halfway through Infinite Jest? LG's new solar e-book aims to address this issue by harnessing the sun's rays to power its display. The device features a 10 centimeter wide thin-film photovoltaic panel that can power the reader for a full day's worth of reading after 4-5 hours spent sitting in the sun."
... Warranty void if left out in the sun for prolonged exposure.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Every electronic device you've ever seen has a disclaimer that says "Do not leave in direct sunlight." This is a horrible idea, the batteries won't last two months.
Couldn't the aftermarket industry simply offer up a E-Book sleeve/cover that has a built in solar cell and stays connected to the reader's power jack and bring this 'breakthrough' to any other E-Book desired?
This requires actually being out in the sun. Unless there's a complex reflective tube apparatus streaming live sunlight into the basement it'll never sell here...
Task Mangler
Now all I need is a portable sun to read in bed.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No, actually it doesn't. It feels like you want to jerk off, except you're sitting in church and the priest is looking right at you.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Running out of juice with an e-book must feel as if all the pages that you still have to read are suddenly glued together.
I hate it when that happens. That's why I never lend my copies of Playboy* out to anyone...they always come back with pages mysteriously glued together.
* For all you kids out there, Playboy was a magazine that adolescent boys used to...um...read before the invention of Internet porn.
The e-book itself is using an OLED display. This is different to the Kindle's eInk display which only requires power to update, so it has a battery life of several weeks. Chances are you'd be able to plug it in during that time, so there's not much need for a solar panel.
LG are a big manufacturer of LCD and OLED screens. Adding a solar panel to their e-book is simply to make up for the fact that their display uses far more power than competing products.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I have a cheap ereader that needs to be connected to your PC over USB to put new content on it. And the surprising thing is, that this seems enough to recharge it! I now have it for over a month and the battery indicator still says that it is full. It's amazing how view energy this thing consumes, just connect it to a PC once a week and that's enough.
But I admit that solar power seems nice for ereaders that don't use cable connections, e.g. the Kindle with it's whispernet. The only problem there is that you shouldn't expose e-ink to direct sunlight, which unfortunately turns the solar powered e-reader into a stupid idea.
(If you care, I use a Hanlin v5, it's not exactly perfect, but since Amazon deletes your books and Sony sells you rootkits it's okay)
I'm confused by the photos. Are they comparing it to a Sony PRS-505 reader or is it just a power source for the Sony reader?
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Yay... more e-Book vaporware. How many new, awesome, revolutionary E-Book readers are we going to hear about? Christ, it's getting old... the E-Book hype is getting out of hand. Every company out there seems to have an E-Book "in the works," but so far to date only a handful have actually shipped usable products. LG is only the latest to jump on the E-Book bandwagon, and I'm sure they won't be the last. The whole E-Book field is littered with junk announcements like this. Get back to me when someone actually SHIPS a product, not announces a prototype. Whopee do. In the case of E-Book Readers, if you can't buy it, who really cares? It's just another e-ink or LCD or OLED screen.
Uh...that's a Sony e-Reader, one of the early models. With a solar panel attached to the inside of the protective jacket (which seems like the wrong side...)
Please help metamoderate.
The solar panel adds more bulk than a bigger battery would. It takes up a huge amount of real estate that could be occupied by another display. And, it really only helps you if you are planning on spending time reading outside - an impracticality in most parts of the United States, most of the time. Most of the year, outside is too hot, too cold, or infested with swarms of disease carrying mosquitoes. I go outside plenty of times when the weather is nice - but I'm active then. Sitting still and reading just makes you an easy target for the mosquitoes.
If you're going backpacking or to the third world, it's more convenient to just bring a dedicated solar panel with battery pack and adapters for your gadgets.
The only market for this device is eco-freaks with too much money and not enough sense. Which is usually self limiting - the people who earn the most money usually have enough intelligence and common sense to spot the flaws I just mentioned. The only reason that they might buy a device like this is to give the appearance of being 'green' to their friends.
Pocket calculators used to plug into the wall too. Then they had batteries and now solar. Having e-books go this way makes sense now power requirements are dropping.
As for the "solar won't work at night" people - batteries exist and just need to be charged. The ironic thing for the "solar won't work at night" people is that the real killer application for photovoltaics at the moment is solar powered LED lights replacing kerosene lanterns in the third world.
Is it wrong to want an ebook with a little furnace to burn books as fuel?
Since anecdotes are evidence: I own a Kindle and I can only think of once (in a year and a half) where I've been stuck unable to read. When the battery lasts two weeks and it only takes a couple of hours to charge, its really hard to run out, even when you're really bad about leaving things charged like I am. My phone is much more of a pain when it comes to keeping it charged.
Wow talk about /vertisement. This sounds like it was written by a marketing person. Scary :/
Kindles always spout how great it is you can read in the sun, because their eInk allows better viewing in direct light, but without that technology, this new device will be far less useful.
I thought this would have been fairly obvious, but from TFA: We hope that LG has included a passively-lit e-paper display option in the device.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
It would have to be in full sunlight in order for it to charge, so unless you have a private sun-lit balcony handy, would you sit in the sun 4-5 hours a day just to babysit your expensive solar-powered E-reader? You'd pay a lot more for sunscreen than AA batteries cost.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Give me a $99 ebook reader, not a solar powered one. I'll buy batteries for the bloody thing.
> It feels like you want to jerk off, except you're sitting in church and the
> priest is looking right at you.
It feels like you want to jerk off, except you're sitting in church and the
priest is looking right at you while he's jerking off.
There...fixed it for 'ya!
Ahhh... to be thirteen agan.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
The device pictured is built into a Sony Reader housing. It is, in fact, a Sony Reader. The solar cell is the real LG product, aimed at other manufacturers.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Where do you get OLED from? The press release doesn't include such a notion. In fact, the press release actually only discusses the solar panel itself, which is sensible given that it's the only part of the device that LG makes. The reader itself is a hacked Sony unit that's only there to demonstrate what the solar panel can power.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Playboy was a magazine that adolescent boys used to...um...read before the invention of Internet porn.
But only for the articles.