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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.
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?
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"
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.
I'm not sure. The reader pictured is very definitely a PRS-505. My guess is simply that the reporter was clueless and didn't realise that it was an older Sony product rather than something new out of an LG lab - the only part of that picture that belongs to LG is the solar panel itself.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
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.
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 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!
Every other electronic device besides calculators.. that is.
Remember those things? Calculators? I think they're kind of like abacuses- people used them before they had phones/laptops.
Somehow, I get the feeling you don't understand economies of scale.
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?
Not to mention the rest of the device -- I'm sure you've seen what happens to plastic left in the sun! That clear plastic screen will look great once it turns yellow. Of course, I imagine it's a) mainly a gimmick and b) designed to die (so we can buy the newer model) long before sun damage...
Given the most e-ink readers last about a week or more on a single charge, and can charge from a USB port, I'd say the chances of this being a gimmick are pretty high.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Modern solar cells don't need "full sunlight" to charge, artificial light would do. Even $1 calculators haven't needed UV in years.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
minus the UV the windows filter.
Must be the Linux crowd complaining :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.