E-readers are in a strange place right now. While the devices were once the bees knees of consumer electronics, they’ve since been eclipsed by the meteoric rise of LCD-based smartphones and tablets.

Color!

Which is why it’s not a big surprise to hear that Samsung is looking to sell Liquavista, the E-ink company it purchased in 2011. Even more interesting is the potential buyer — Amazon, a company that could do a lot of interesting things with its own e-reader display unit.

While Samsung hasn’t yet confirmed that it’s looking to sell Liquavista, it’s not a big secret why it would want to dump the company. According to IHS, E-reader shipments will sink 27 percent to 10.9 million units this year, largely because the things haven’t changed a lick since they were introduced (minus some improvements with contrast and refresh rates).

The reality is this: While they’re nice to read on, e-readers’ lack of full-color means that reading is just about the only thing owners can do with them. And at a time when people prize versatility above all else, that just doesn’t fly.

This is where Liquavista fits in. Liquavista specializes in so-called “electrowetting” displays, which combine the benefits of LCD screens (i.e., color, video playback support) with the energy-saving properties of e-ink.

Consumers may not actually want a full-color Kindle eReader, but an Amazon buy of Liquavista purchase could help give it to them.

The applications for E Ink, the electronic ink technology used in the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, are multiplying. Sriram Peruvemba, the chief marketing officer at E Ink, showed off the world’s thinnest watch this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Made by Central Standard Timing, the watch has an E Ink display that simply displays the time in a black-and-white, flexible digital display.

The watch has a stainless steel band that wraps around your wrist and is only 0.8 millimeters thick, which is thinner than a credit card. It weighs 12 grams, or  less than five pennies.

You can change the time on the watch using an external dock, which can charge the Thinnergy microenergy cell battery in just 10 minutes, and it will last a whole month, Peruvemba said. The battery has a lifetime of 15 years, and it says you can recharge it more than 10,000 times.

E Ink saves space with the display. It takes two pigments, black-and-white, and puts them in a microcapsule the size of a human hair. It applies a voltage to the capsule, and it appears as black-or-white when viewed from above. Each display has millions of such capsules.

Central Standard Timing assembled the watch by laminating thin and flexible components into a 0.5 millimeter pocket etched into a single piece of steel. You can order the watch and back the project through a crowdfunding effort. So far, Central Standard Timing has raised $281,593 — more than its $200,000 goal — and it still has 42 days to go on Kickstarter. The watch will go into production in the second half of the year.

E Ink is coming in a number of other products coming, including a plastic e-book reader from Wexler. On top of that, some phones are using E Ink in the backs of smartphones. These smartphones can display something like an airline ticket code. The image of the ticket stays on, even if the phone is turned off. So you can scan your airline ticket at a ticket counter, even if your phone has run out of battery.

Here’s our video interview with Peruvemba about the thin watch.

The much-delayed Pebble E-Ink smartwatch is almost here. The Pebble team just sent out invites to a press conference taking place at CES at 9 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday. It will also be streamed online at the company’s site.

Pebble raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter, leading some to herald it as a champion of the crowdsourcing model (especially since traditional investors passed on it). The watch connects to your smartphone to show incoming data like caller info and calendar entries, and it can also run a variety of apps. We’ve seen many attempts at smartwatches, but for some reason the Pebble struck a chord with its more than 68,000 backers.

But after missing its initial ship date of last November, and with few updates from the Pebble team, it also quickly became an example of the dangers of crowdsourcing. A ton of funding, after all, isn’t going to teach an inexperienced company how to manufacture at a large scale.

The last we heard, Pebble’s lead designer Steven Johns was “stuck in Asia” trying to get the watch out the door.

VentureBeat will be on the ground at Pebble’s launch announcement next week, as well as for the rest of CES 2013.

If you’ve held off on ordering Amazon’s new Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, you’ll now have to wait more than a month to get your reading on.

Amazon began shipping out Kindle Paperwhite preorders Monday, but now the e-reader is showing an expected ship date of four to six weeks. From the looks of it, the delay applies to all Kindle Paperwhite models, which include the Wi-Fi and 3G versions as well as the versions with and without ads.

While Amazon could conceivably receive a new load of Kindle stock in the next few weeks, I wouldn’t bet on getting your hands on one until next month. Best Buy and other retailers will also offer the e-reader soon in-stores.

We’ve contacted Amazon about the Paperwhite delay and will update if we hear back.

Amazon announced the Kindle Paperwhite alongside its new Kindle Fire tablets in early September. The company touted the e-reader’s sophisticated front light as the key feature, but it also includes improved E-Ink technology and better touch response. Up until now, Kindle e-readers had no built-in lighting, you either had to read them in a bright room, or with some sort of light accessory.

Even though Amazon’s playing catch up to Barnes & Noble’s Nook Glowlight e-reader, I think the Kindle Paperwhite still wins out when it comes to its execution of E-Ink lighting. After a few days of testing out my Kindle Paperwhite, I noticed that I never really had a reason to turn off its light. It obviously helped when reading in dark rooms, but it also made a difference in normally lit rooms as well. I grew used to the ethereal glow of the Paperwhite’s screen — and eventually, I began to prefer it to relying solely on external lighting. (Luckily, Amazon says the Kindle Paperwhite should see around eight weeks of battery life with the light turned on.)

I’ve also been pleased with the new Kindle’s touch response. On last year’s Kindle Touch, the technology just felt out of place — typing and simply maneuvering the device’s interface was a chore because the screen took forever to refresh. But with the Kindle Paperwhite, touch response is almost real time, which makes it feel more like a tablet than an e-reader.

Check back for my full review of the Kindle Paperwhite sometime next week.

Barnes & Noble beat out Amazon and Sony today by delivering the first E-Ink device with a built-in light, the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight. It may seem like a minor victory, but for E-Ink fanatics, the new Nook is a sign of things to come.

I chatted with Nook head of user experience Michelle Warvel about the new e-reader today at a hip New York City hotel. She demonstrated how the GlowLight feature works, and as you can see in the video below, it makes a big difference in the Nook’s readability in low light.

Warvel told me it took B&N some time to figure out a uniform way to light the screen. The GlowLight feature isn’t a backlight like we see in LCDs. Instead, it’s embedded in the device to light the screen from the top. Thankfully, the light is soft and easy on the eyes (hence the name, GlowLight), and it’s far less harsh than LCD screens.

Unfortunately, Warvel wouldn’t reveal when color E-Ink displays would appear, but she notes that that’s been a top request since the Nook first launched. I didn’t expect an answer, but of course, I had to ask.

The GlowLight-equipped Nook Simple Touch is available for pre-order today for $139 and will be available in early May.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon‘s long-rumored tablet, dubbed simply the Kindle, is “very real” and headed your way this November for $250, reports TechCrunch’s MG Siegler.

After about an hour of hands-on time with the tablet, Siegler seems confident that it will be a hot item this holiday season. Of course, that seemed clear since we first caught wind of Amazon’s tablet ambitions, which hinted that the company was aiming for an inexpensive entry, like Barnes and Noble’s popular Nook Color, that was deeply integrated with Amazon’s services.

Amazon also plans to offer free Prime subscriptions with the tablet. The premium service typically costs $79 a year and offers perks like free two-day shipping and access to Amazon’s Instant Video. A free Prime membership alone would net Amazon plenty of interested buyers, but at $250 the tablet seems like a downright steal (that will also ingeniously tempt owners into buying more stuff from Amazon).

The tablet runs a heavily customized version of Android 2.2, and Siegler writes that it “looks nothing like the Android you’re used to seeing.” The main screen features a carousel of all your content on the device (or linked to your Amazon account), and it sounds like the interface shares little with the stock Android setup. The Kindle tablet is so deeply customized, Siegler says, that there’s no Android Market, only Amazon’s Android marketplace, and no default Android apps from Google.

For the most part, this sounds like Barnes and Noble’s approach to the Nook Color, which also runs a custom version of Android with no access to standard Android applications. The big difference with Amazon’s tablet is that it will be marketed as a tablet from the start. For whatever reason, it took Barnes and Noble some time to bring tablet-like features to the Nook Color, like games and an app store.

Hardware-wise, the Kindle tablet sports a slightly rubberized rear, says Siegler. He compares it to the BlackBerry PlayBook — a good sign since I’ve found that tablet to be one of the better-designed pieces of hardware on the market.

As expected, the tablet is deeply integrated with Amazon’s services, like its Cloud Music Player and Instant Video offerings. Indeed, the device seems built for streaming, as Siegler notes that it only has a small amount of storage (around 6 gigabytes, but I’m assuming that’s free space available on an 8-gigabyte storage drive).

The Kindle tablet doesn’t include a camera, and Siegler notes that it may only support two-finger multitouch capabilities (the iPad and most other tablets support 10-finger multitouch). It may also run a single-core processor, which makes sense since it likely doesn’t need to do much heavy lifting, like playing 1080p HD video.

So what of the rumored 10-inch Amazon tablet? That device, which is said to run a quad-core processor and be a more direct competitor to the iPad, is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year if the 7-inch tablet does well enough.

Amazon may forgo releasing a touchscreen version of the traditional Kindle, Siegler says, but that’s still speculation so far. Intriguingly, he also says that Amazon is working on a multi-touch tablet/e-reader hybrid device that runs on an E-Ink screen.

Electrowetting tech allows for displays that are bright, low-power, flexible, and transparent, making for easy outdoor reading. Samsung says the acquisition will further its position in next-gen display technology, and that it will pioneer the use of electrowetting in e-paper and transparent displays. And since the technology can be manufactured by tweaking LCD production lines, Samsung doesn’t have to invest much to start taking advantage of it.

Liquavista’s technology has a wide variety of uses in mobile devices, including phones, media players, and e-readers. Samsung says that when it comes to e-paper, electrowetting displays are more than 70 times faster than existing e-ink displays, which will allow for color video (something e-ink has struggled to deliver).

Samsung already showed off some flexible and transparent display technology at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, and I’ve seen a large-screen transparent display from the company in action last year. We likely won’t see flexible or transparent displays for retail this year, but I can just imagine how the technology will be implemented over the next few years.

Via Engadget

Hanvon

The company will be demonstrating the color e-reader at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo, which is dedicated to flat panel display technology. In doing so, Hanvon will beat out Amazon’s popular Kindle e-reader, which is still stuck with a black and white E Ink display. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble ended up relying on LCD technology for its recently announced Nook Color.

But don’t expect Hanvon’s color device to beat the iPad just yet. The New York Times reports that the colors are muted, “as if one were looking at a faded color photograph.” And like all E Ink displays, it can’t handle full motion video since the screen refreshes at a slow rate. Still, it will be able to offer killer battery life (e-reader battery life is measured in weeks) and full readability in sunlight — unlike LCD screens.

Color E Ink displays have been talked about for years, but until now they haven’t made it to consumers. Hanvon’s color display was achieved by laying a color filter over the standard black-and-white E Ink panel, so it offers the same battery life as existing e-readers. The color filter does reduce the screen’s brightness, which will likely be a worthy compromise for many consumers.

Both Amazon and Sony are apparently waiting for color E Ink displays to mature before they jump on the technology. “There’s no question that color is extremely logical. But it has to be vibrant color. We’re not willing to give up the true black-and-white reading experience,” Sony e-reader president Steve Haber said to the NYT.

Hanvon plans to release its first color E Ink reader — which features a 9.68-inch display — in China this March for around $440. The company says it may bring the device to the US — it already sells its products through the web and Fry’s Electronics stores.

At this point, Amazon must be feeling the pressure. The company’s $139 third-generation Kindle has been selling like crazy, but now that it’s facing color competition from China, it will likely need to step up its color plans for the Kindle.

Just as with the Nook, Amazon says you won’t be able to read ebooks while they’re lent out. The feature won’t be available for all ebooks either, as it will be entirely up to publishers and rights holders to enable it.

It remains to be seen if Amazon will innovate beyond Barnes and Noble with the feature. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last year criticized the Nook’s book lending implementation as being “extremely limited”, so I suspect the company has some ideas in mind to differentiate the Kindle’s sharing. At this point, the Kindle seems just as limited as the Nook.

What does book lending on the Kindle mean for the Nook? With the feature matched by the Kindle, all the Nook has to differentiate itself now is its superfluous secondary color touchscreen. Sure, it supports expandable storage via MicroSD cards, and it also can read DRM-free ePub ebooks (unlike the Kindle) — but those aren’t exactly features that can combat the widespread name recognition of Amazon’s device.

Barnes and Noble tried to one-up Amazon earlier this year by introducing a WiFi-only Nook for $149, and reducing the price of the Nook 3G to $199, but Amazon fired back a month later with its revamped third-generation Kindle at $139 and $189 price points. While Amazon doesn’t divulge exact Kindle sales numbers, the company noted in its third quarter earnings report that strong sales of the new e-reader model led to significant revenue and profit gains. Barnes and Noble maintains that it has 20 percent of the ebook market and that sales of the Nook have been strong, despite missing analyst estimates in its recent second quarter earnings.

Barnes and Noble still has the advantage of using its retail stores to push the Nook, but Amazon matched that as well by bringing Kindles to Best Buy and Target stores in September. At Best Buy, Kindles are now displayed alongside Nooks and other e-reader devices, and I can’t imagine why anyone would choose the Nook over the Kindle in its current form. The Kindle hardware feels more refined, and it has a more complete ebook library with over 630,000 books versus the Nook’s 166,000 (Barnes and Noble advertises having over a million ebooks, but it’s including nearly a million free public domain ebooks in its figures which are also supported by the Kindle). Amazon has even released an SDK so that developers can create Kindle applications.

I recently picked up a third-generation Kindle, and I’ve noticed that many other e-reader holdouts — both among my circles and general users — are doing the same. The $139 price point is working wonders for Amazon, and it’s also part of a gradual move towards $99 pricing — at which point e-reader adoption will see new heights. Perhaps Barnes and Noble will attempt that lower pricing first (once again), but it can only drop the price so far before it becomes unfeasible.

Despite the release of the iPad, and the promise of even more tablets to come, there definitely seems to be a demand for low-cost portable devices dedicated to reading. I’m certain the Kindle will remain a dedicated presence in the market for some time, but at this point I’d have to say that the Nook’s days are numbered. For Barnes and Noble’s sake, I hope that rumors of a color Nook are more fact than fiction.