It is really too bad that the guys at Plastic Logic have executed as poorly as that have. I've followed these guys pretty closely from the huge Demo Con reveal in 2008 [1] through their multiple death experiences. I concluded you could give these guys gold bars and they wouldn't be able to figure out how to build product out of them. It is a testament to the potential that I am still mad at this nearly 5 years later!
If they had shipped one freakin' product, that thing where you print to it like a printer and all it did was provide a screen to select which "printout" you wanted to view. That met a huge need. A professional need too, have you seen how many documents a lawyer carries around?
Sadly they were not mentally in a place where they do anything, and that was perhaps saddest of all. Such a waste.
Argh! I had just forgot about that demo and have been dreaming of a similar device ever since I saw it. Makes me quite sad that no one seems to believe in a market for such a device.
If it weren't for the iPad I believe we would have gotten so much further with eink devices.
I continue to think this would be a pretty awesome ipad/kindle app. The whole 'remote printer' where you implement lpr in the app, can turn it on and off when you need it and then 'print' to it as probably pdf documents.
Instapaper does this pretty well for web sites but if you could include folks who had legacy applications/machines which just wanted to review the printout 'offline' it would be pretty cool.
>>If it weren't for the iPad I believe we would have gotten so much further with eink devices.
No. EInk had more than a decade before the iPad was announced, but nothing happened.
I've been waiting for an A4 eInk reader that could switch pages faster (so I could browse documentation) since 1998. Now I use a retina iPad -- and for the first time in my life, I easily read books and documents off a screen. I used to print everything.
If they had shipped one freakin' product, that thing where you print to it like a printer and all it did was provide a screen to select which "printout" you wanted to view. That met a huge need. A professional need too, have you seen how many documents a lawyer carries around?
Sadly they were not mentally in a place where they do anything, and that was perhaps saddest of all. Such a waste.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/11/plastic-logics-e-reader-v...