Nikkei Electronics Asia -- March 2010
Feature
[Report from CES] Mobile Gear: E-Book Readers and New Terminals Are Hot!

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Mar 1, 2010 00:07 Fumitada Takahashi, Takuya Otani, Tadashi Nezu, Phil Keys, Yasushi Uchida

Continued from the previous part

This year marks the start of a new era in the mobile equipment field, with a host of new terminals designed to be connected to the Internet 24/7. One of the biggest draws at CES was next-gen electronic book (e-book) readers, followed closely by emerging product categories intended to fill the gap between smartphones and netbooks: portable terminals variously called tablets or smartbooks.

New Technologies Make Large Screens Thinner, Lighter

In the E-book reader market, the Kindle from Amazon.com, Inc. and the Reader from Sony Corp. showed dramatic growth from the end of 2008 through 2009, triggering a flood of new terminal announcements and exhibits. CES itself for the first time featured a special corner for e-books, the "eBooks TechZone," which was so popular it had to be enlarged. One engineer in the e-book field expressed surprise at how fast things had changed, considering that there were almost no e-book readers at the prior CES. The eBooks TechZone featured a large number of the latest readers from companies in the US, UK, China and Taiwan, among others. Most of them, however, looked pretty much alike, with the 6-inch display already common in the market.

Plastic Logic Ltd., however, stood out sharply from the crowd. The company revealed for the first time the product model of the QUE, an e-book reader using organic TFTs on a plastic substrate for the e-paper drive (Fig. 6). The price and release date were also announced. The model with 4Gbyte onboard memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will go for US$649, and the model with 8Gbyte memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3rd-generation mobile communications system (3G) support for US$799. Both will ship in April 2010.

Fig. 6 E-Book Readers Using Organic TFT
Plastic Logic announced the price and release date for its QUE e-book reader (a). The outstanding feature is that it uses organic TFTs on a plastic substrate for the e-paper (b). This is the first consumer electronics product to use organic TFTs.

The outstanding point in QUE hardware is the fact that even though it uses organic TFTs and has a large 10.7-inch screen, it is still thin and light. The body is only about 8.5mm thick and weighs only about 482g. Compared to the Kindle DX from Amazon.com, with a screen size one inch smaller at only 9.7 inches, the QUE is about 1.2mm thinner and 54g lighter. The 6-inch screens common in the market now pose no difficulties when it comes to reading books, but they do impose restrictions on the type of content that can be displayed, as large-area layouts like newspapers and magazines have to be broken up to view. As a result, there is strong demand for a larger screen, and the QUE answers this with proprietary technology.