Samsung’s eInk Papyrus … Thing

Hands On Video With Samsung’s Papryus E-Ink Device

Sierra did a great of unearthing Samsung’s Papryus E-Ink device. It has generated a lot of comments and interest from the community. Today, I spent some some hands-on time with the device and shot this video. It’s worth pointing out that Sierra happened across a black one, while the one I played with was green. Still no word on price and availability.

There’s a video there, but WARNING! It brought my PC to its knees. GottaBeMobile apparently encodes at a very high bitrate and resolution. Too much for this crappy 1.8GHz(!) Celeron to deal with.

I had to download the video and convert it to a DiVX AVI so I could watch. I also took some screensnaps:

It’s open to the Notes applications.

Side view: stylus well at bottom, micro-USB post.

Front, “about the size of a Moleskine.”

Side again, with stylus in its spring-loaded well.

It requires use of the included stylus to write on the screen …

… fingertips and other styluses won’t work. Odd!

Calendar view of month.

Year calendar.

Choice of ink thicknesses. Lots of icons!

Top. Notice how it’s clamped to case. Notice too: NO storage card slot!

“GBM” written in two line thickenesses.

All those icons and the gray remind me of the original Everex Palm-size PC interface!

Icons of some apps.

Fuller front view.

This is a very strange device. No mention of eBooks. Is it basically an eInk-screened PDA?

The size seems to be almost identical to the jetBook, execpt slimmer at the side. That’s a five-inch eInk screen.

I can’t help wondering what it would be like to have that.

Samsung had to have put a good deal of money into its development. I guess they’re not ready to market it for anything yet. If they could get it to do ePub eBooks, it’d be a real contender against both the Sony Reader and the jetBook.

However, knowing how Samsung likes to graft “additional value” onto its even most basic products (see how overpriced the budget-specced Q1 UMPC became!), I expect they wouldn’t sell this without a cellphone radio and WiFi in it — thus giving it a ridiculous price of $400, if not even higher.

I neglected to mention that it was jkk of jkkmobile fame who first alerted me to the GottaBeMobile posts. Thanks, jkk! (He is offering a scaled PDF of the VAIO P! Print one out actual size to play with! Post — not PDF — link.)