I was looking at the e-ink website and found a product gallery. In there are most of the products I already knew about that are based on ePaper.
There was one that surprised me. A Chinese company named Jinke. They have two models of readers available. The first, model V8, has a 6″ 800×600 ePaper display and supports WOLF, HTML and text files. There is also a convert to move DOC, PDF, Excel, PPT and various image formats to WOLF. The best part is, it runs $299 and it’s available.
Now, the downside…it’s available in two versions. The first can read Chinese and English documents and has a Chinese interface. The second can read Russian and English documents with a Russian interface. It seems to me that the US/European markets would be much larger than the Chinese/Russian markets.
Jinke also has a model V2 that’s Linux based and is only available to OEMs. It looks to be the same size and specs. With the exception that it supports all western languages and the basic file types without a converter. Hmm…maybe there’s a market here…
These devices are kind of interesting. With the slow refresh of ePaper, user interfaces are kind of clunky at best, so they have added a second display using LCD technology. This allows for a snappy interface where it’s important and the great readability of ePaper where it’s important.
There are a series of soft buttons down the side and an integrated flip cover to protect the display.
Maybe I could help them create an English/English version…