Fujitsu's FLEPia e-reader features color display, WiFi

While cranking out a couple of new e-readers may be big doings for some companies, it's just what we've come to expect from Fujitsu. Adding to its collection of e-ink-related niceties, the FLEPia "portable information terminals" will reportedly be available in an A5 size (weighing 480 grams) and an A4 flavor (320 grams), and both are just 12-millimeters thick. While details are admittedly scarce, you can reportedly read "up to two year's worth of magazines" on a single 4GB SD flash card, but you'll be recharging the battery every 50 hours or so along the way. Additionally, users will enjoy the convenience of WiFi connectivity built right in, and the six control buttons (plus a scroll key) should keep your pages aligned. The device is slated to land in white pearl, silver, and the obligatory pink pearl motifs, but considering the presumably lofty pricetags attached to each of these desirable units, we can't imagine too many early adopters diving in just yet.

[Via Pocket-Lint]

[Kev50027 @ Apr 20th 2007 12:21PM]

So it's just an LCD? That's useless, I want color e-ink!

Why is it so much if it's an LCD?

[Kev50027 @ Apr 20th 2007 12:22PM]

Eh.. According to the site it is e-ink. If this is the case, why is the battery life measured in hours? I thought they only used battery when it switched images.

[suntiger @ Apr 20th 2007 12:29PM]

50 hours. For comparison, a PDA has like 6 hours. Even an iPod, which has a pretty small display, gets 15 at most. And laptops get like 2.

50 hours is about in-line for e-ink.

[Josef F @ Apr 20th 2007 12:28PM]

Or you could just buy books.

[Boynamedsue @ Apr 20th 2007 1:49PM]

Well Josef, if you plan to live in your hometown forever that certainly is viable.

Have you ever tried to move with box upon box of books?

I'd rather have a nice crisp e-ink book with the resolution of printed text to carry around hundreds of books at a time on.

Its like saying vinyl sounds better. Yeah but that doesn't mean it isn't nice to have an mp3 player. welcome to the future motherfucker.

[Kev50027 @ Apr 20th 2007 2:08PM]

No, it's not. e-books have nothing to use battery when there are no pages being turned, so there is no reason it would run for a certain number of hours. It would run for a certain number of pages turned, that is unless they were using wifi, but they would not leave wifi on when testing the battery, so that is a non-issue.

[Chris @ Apr 20th 2007 12:32PM]

$12k? you sure that isn't for like 500 of them?

[shady @ Apr 20th 2007 12:44PM]

Why does the A5 reader weigh more than the A4? That's backwards!!!

[chay @ Apr 20th 2007 12:45PM]

I thought it was saying that the price was for 10 units, but that might just be wishful thinking.

[comreich @ Apr 20th 2007 1:19PM]

Could it be that the prices are in Yen, not USD? That puts the A4 model at $180USD which I would think is a reasonable cost.

[chay @ Apr 20th 2007 12:48PM]

Nice resolution on these, 768 by 1024 but the page turn on the colour one is 10 seconds, ouch.

[bobartig @ Apr 20th 2007 1:47PM]

There's no way they're $180 USD with an internal battery, 4GB SD and wifi. The competition is lacking almost all of those features and costs ~$600, along with using proprietary ebook formats that nobody publishes in.

[suntiger @ Apr 20th 2007 2:34PM]

Heh, I've moved boxes of books back and forth between Oregon and Connecticut a couple times. There's a reason I just pirate digitized books and read them on my Palm now...

I love books. Books are great. But my T|T3 weighs half as much as a paperback, is smaller, and with a 512mb SD card, can hold and give me access to the equivalent of hundreds of paperbacks. To the OP: I have a stack of paperbacks that's around 7 feet by four feet in my bedroom (with the covers out.) Try fitting that in your pocket!

[Cupajo @ Apr 21st 2007 10:48PM]

Yes. I've moved several times with boxes an boxes of books. It's no big deal. Just put the bag of Cheetos down and step away from you marathon Warcraft session every now and then and grow some muscles.

In other words, man up Nancy.


Josef

[Boynamedsue @ Apr 23rd 2007 11:17AM]

thats so wrong its funny.

that aside, my last roommate had enough books to fill up ten, floor to ceiling bookshelves about... i'd say four foot wide? our whole basement was a library. I put my stuff in storage at my parents and moved out west with 2 suitcases and my motorcycle.

so while your generic net of a taunt (good try though, if you keep using it you're bound to find someone it fits) is off the mark, moving a hard drive is still easier than moving a library... even for non cheeto eating non rpg'ers

[suntiger @ Apr 20th 2007 2:28PM]

CPU. Memory has to be powered, or you'd have SD read delay every time you paged. As you said, Wifi.

There are things that use battery when the screen's not being refreshed; it's just the screen that doesn't. Yeah, page turns might be a much better measure of battery life, but Fujitsu obviously prefers to create an average, so that their "Hours" might be easily comparable to other devices with which they compete. They probably did testing and figured, okay, the average person turns "x" pages per hour, and the device supports "y" pageturns, so that's z hours. This way, they can say "50 hours!" and have the marketing advantage of a much longer quoted battery life than non-e-ink readers.

PDAs and other readers don't have a life measured in page turns, so if they quoted battery life that way, people wouldn't know what devices had better life.

What's the battery life on the Sony e-ink reader, just out of curiosity?

[Boynamedsue @ Apr 20th 2007 2:55PM]

i've heard you can run the sony reader for about a month without charging it.

something like 60,000 page turns? i know that i don't turn that many pages a month. But it also plays mp3's so if you used that you'd probably have to charge far more often.

[Kev50027 @ Apr 20th 2007 3:05PM]

Ah, i see your point, however wouldn't it only need the CPU, memory, etc when it turns the page?

You make a good point though, the question is just that we have no idea how many page turns that is, so we can't compare it to the Sony Reader. We don't know how they tested it.

The Sony Reader's battery can hold out for 7,500 page turns.

[suntiger @ Apr 20th 2007 3:00PM]

Hm. If I think about how often I read ebooks in a month... say, maybe 25 hours? 30 if that?

[suntiger @ Apr 20th 2007 3:17PM]

Yeah, I kind of suspect that that's the point - we don't know how they tested it, so 50 hours is probably absolute-best-case-scenario.

Also, different screen sizes, so there will be different amounts of text onscreen, so people will turn pages at a different frequency.

[Tim @ Apr 21st 2007 1:37AM]

Kev, I think you're confused how a device works. It can't turn off the CPU while idle, that's like turning off your brain while idle. The same with the RAM, because once that's turned off it forgets all the pages you're currently reading. Only non-essential parts like WiFi would be able to be turned off.

[spam_from_engadget @ Apr 20th 2007 5:20PM]

The 50 hour number is based on 1 page turn per minute in 8 colour mode, and equals 3000 page turns.

The weights are transposed: A4 is 480g, A5 is 320g.

As for the update speed, it is 2 secs for "8 colour mode" and 10 secs for "4096 colour mode".

It has an XScale CPU.

More here: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontech.fujitsu.com%2Fservices%2Fproducts%2Fpaper%2Fflepia%2F&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

I still have no idea how the colour e-ink works though....

[murray @ Apr 20th 2007 11:01PM]

I think you got the weights switched. At least, I hope you did. 'Cause A5 is smaller than A4.

[Kev50027 @ Apr 21st 2007 3:29AM]

No, I think perhaps it is you who is confused. I don't mean to put you down, but the way the Sony Reader works is that once you turn the page it uses no electricity. Leaving it on one page is better for the battery than turning the device off. Since there is absolutely no need for a processor to process anything at all when you're not using the device, there's no reason to keep it powered.

[Tim @ Apr 21st 2007 8:48AM]

Kev, the e-book's display is only one component of the device. It still needs RAM powered up to remember your current page (at the very least), and the CPU needs to be running to respond to button presses. These things can be optimized but never turned off completely, unless you literally power down the device.

[noot @ Apr 24th 2007 1:30AM]

In response to Tim;

There are plenty of memory devices that could be used to store the current page, or other details, without requiring any power or charge whatsoever. It would be as simple as adding a 2byte chunk per (max) 64k page e-book onto the SD card to remember the current page...

[Led @ Apr 24th 2007 11:26AM]

e-Ink is yesterdays news, they have to be direct driven like a TFT which make them really expensive. Check out Nemoptics BiNem® instead which can be matrix driven like a standard STN-LCD.

http://www.nemoptic.com/