Plastic Logic are demoing their Reader at WSJ’s All Things D conference. They also earned unfettered loyalty by giving every single attendant a free Plastic Logic Reader. The reader is actually out Jan 2010 and surprise, surprise - all the reporters who are going to get one free are fawning over it (have to admit it does look good, except for one big flaw).
Here’s a Plastic Logic Video -
Impressive, with an Achilles Heel
Its an impressive device with a rather vulnerable Achilles heel (4 second pageturns – more on that in a second). First, the strengths -
- A 10″+ screen. When a journalist asked about 10.7″, the Plastic Logic spokesman seemed non-committal though he confirmed 10.something.
- Touchscreen and the ability to add annotations and scribble.
- Folders, although they keep referring to it as Binders. Folders really do look pretty.
- 3G wireless support and Plastic Logic will have their own store.
- BlueTooth and WiFi support.
- Units will be able to beam documents to each other – hello piracy
- UI is really good - Tabs on the left of the screen let you switch between documents, and toolbar on the right lets you do things like turn pages. You can hide these. Tabs could very well be a killer feature, and having an on screen menu is a great touch too.
- Flexible – although the CEO claimed that they had to make it “stiffer” because people preferred it.
- Charges from PC and connects via miniUSB.
- Supports Word, Powerpoint, PDF, and a lot more.
- Battery Life of “days, not hours”.
Price might be the other weakness. The refusal to reveal a price indicates they’re way higher than they would like to be. They are probably working hard to be competitive to the Kindle DX (to whatever extent that’s possible given their technology is different).
Plastic Logic targeting Business Customers
The device is targeted at “mobile business professionals” or in the words of PL’s Maureen Mellon - ’someone with a lot of documents already’. She also said its not competing with the Kindle DX. She also declined to name a price.
Their CEO said something rather interesting (my highlighting) -
“Everything is designed for the business user, and business users require a lot of different types of content. It’s really not about books at all.”
Way to alienate half your potential audience.
While Plastic Logic is quick to ward off comparisons to the Kindle, Reporters would beg to differ -
- Neearly every article is calling it a kindle killer already (to be fair TG Daily called it ‘Kindle Buddy’).
- One reporter actually pointed out that it was significantly thinner, if you believe .27″ is significantly thinner than .33″.
- They gloss over the refresh speed calling it ‘4 seconds’ when the videos below clearly show its more like 6-11 seconds.
Plastic Logic Page Turn Videos
Here’s a video of the Plastic Logic demo video highlighting the page turn speed (to me it seems longer than the claimed 4 seconds) -
Here’s another video showing you can do 7 pageturns (probably more) on the Kindle 2 in the time it takes to do 1 on the Plastic Logic Reader –
Note that counting out the number of page turns and switching from one screen to another (which took 1-2 seconds each time) put Kindle 2 at a disadvantage. Also, rather importantly, Plastic Logic will obviously improve the refresh speed in production units.
Update: Testing my Kindle 2 more and screen refreshes take around a second or less. Don’t really have the equipment or setup to do very precise tests. Has anyone done an in-depth study on what refresh speeds on Kindle 2 are?
Amazon ought to steal the Folders feature and the Tabs feature (they would have to add a touchstrip along the side for Tabs).
Another good article is at TG Daily. LaptopMag have a ton of pictures.
Filed under: plastic logic reader | Tagged: kindle dx vs plastic logic, kindle vs plastic logic
That’s switching between documents.
How long does it take to go back to the kindle home screen to pick a new document?
Also that’s not a “page turn” it’s a “seek” which is done very differently between the two because the kindle works in lines and the plastic logic works in pages.
It’s all software, it’ll be sorted by release for sure.
Look how fast the menu was.
perhaps they sort it out by release. if they don’t they’re in trouble.
i’m surprised they’d do a demo with these slow, slow screen refresh speeds.
two things might make me switch from my kindle2:
1.)3G wireless support , BlueTooth and WiFi support. I love my kindle2, but I cant get on the network at home. have to bring it to work to sync, unless I want to hack it.
2.)Supports Word, Powerpoint, PDF, and a lot more. Good. Amazon’s email it to yourself solution is a step too many for me.
interesting.
the microsoft office support is impressive and necessary given they are positioning themselves as a business device.
the ‘beam documents to each other’ feature is pretty impressive too.
[...] Plastic Logic Demo finally revealed. Looks great except for page turns slower than a lazy snail. [...]
[...] alternative (the Plastic Logic reader form factor and feature set look great, however the performance might be a bit of an issue – having already gone through one horrible reader, I don’t [...]
So the software can fix this, and the reasoning goes as follows, if you watch the beginning of the video you can see that between “views” the screen is a standard e-ink display and can re-draw in about a second.
So the physical hardware can refresh faster, what is the software pipeline? Well it looked from this video and others that the PL Reader was doing the render “on the fly” which is to say it got the page you wanted, then internally rendered it, then displayed it. While flexible that can be slow, a much better solution is to pre-render to the screen format and keep the pre-renders around. However …
And this is also telling, switching between documents was kind of slow and that suggests one of two things, either their storage solution is really slow, and/or they have really kept a lid on RAM (probably to save battery power).
As an engineer I also recognize that “make it work, then make it fast” is a mantra often repeated. I wish they hadn’t made the decision to vertically integrate since I’m sure that a dozen entrepreneurs each putting their software on the same platform basics would (and may in the future) generate a much better system overall.
great point – thanks for the comment. agree with you totally on the vertical integration. though they have said they’ll have 3rd party apps.
Seriously, this is comparing apples and oranges. As Bryce said, Plastic Logic demo shows document switching and page seeking. Not simple page turns. I didn’t see any noticeable lag between Kindle and Plastic Logic page turns …
The whole article is going on about 4 seconds page turns – which is wrong. OK you like Kindle, so do I. But if you want to write a reasonable review, please try to be fair.