User Friendly
E Ink devices
Smartphones and netbooks may be the best things that ever happened to multimedia junkies, who can now watch movies and play games wherever they like.
But for those of us who love text, the same gadgets, with their flashlight-bright screens, are a brutal way to absorb the morning’s headlines, never mind The New Yorker or a novel.
Enter the Edge (www.entourageedge.com), an LCD netbook with a separate, easier-on-the-eyes, grayscale e-reader screen.
The Edge, due out in February, is one of a handful of breakout gadgets that will incorporate E Ink’s reflective screen technology (think Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader) in 2010.
Few of those devices, however, will cost less than $500 and embrace open source software (in this case, Google Android), as the Edge does.
The Edge, from McLean, Va.-based Entourage Systems Inc., has two panels. The first, the device’s 10.1-inch color touchscreen, is where you do most of your computing.
But you can also use the Edge’s 9.7-inch e-reader panel to read ePub and PDF e-books.
Entourage has done more than stuff two gadgets into a single sleeve. Both sides work together. You can use a stylus to take notes and mark up the text you are perusing on the e-reader panel. You can also select images on the e-reader side to view on the color screen.
The Edge works with USB and Bluetooth keyboards, and you can switch its color screen from portrait to landscape mode, to do all of your e-mailing and social networking. The device also has a 1.3-megapixel camera, microphone, and speakers.
Entourage says Edge (available for preorder at $490) will support 3G mobile modem connections at some point (once it has a deal with a wireless service, presumably).
prototype speakers
Flexibility - plus high-fidelity sound
As much as I enjoyed playing with Motorola’s new Droid recently, I sure hated how it sounded.With the Droid propped on the dashboard of my wife’s new Beetle, and tuned into Pandora, I felt as if I was back in the 1970s, listening to the single dashboard speaker in my dad’s Datsun B-210.
Speakers seem to be the last frontier for quality in mobile devices. That’s because, as I wrote in this column back in September, they are typically miniaturized, and therefore are tinny cone speakers.
The Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan says it has developed a flexible speaker that can be printed out in sheets and bent - and even cut with scissors - to fit any mobile device.
The institute promises that its Flexpeaker will deliver high-fidelity sound - as does Waltham-based Emo Labs Inc., which produces the Edge Motion speaker ribbon.
The Flexpeaker, which the Taiwanese institute hopes to see incorporated into mobile and medical devices, can also be scaled up - big time.
The research institute has already printed a prototype that is more than 8 feet long and over a foot and a half wide.
Such large sheets could be used in wallpaper and as wearable speakers, the institute suggests.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
