Plastic Logic teases QUE proReader with 8.5 x 11-inch touchscreen
By Paul Miller 
posted Oct 19th 2009 12:01AM
posted Oct 19th 2009 12:01AM
Premiering January 7 at CES: QUETM proReader by Plastic Logic
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – OCTOBER 19, 2009 – Plastic Logic revealed today its plans to unveil QUETM, the first proReader designed for business professionals. Premiering January 7, 2010 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Central Hall of Las Vegas Convention Center at Booth 11840 anchoring the e- Book Techzone), QUE is an essential tool for busy professionals, providing access to a dynamic ecosystem of content.
With QUE, Plastic Logic is expanding the eReader category, which to date has focused on leisure reading devices and casual users. QUE is designed to simplify the multi-faceted lifestyle of the modern businessperson, and to quite literally lighten their workload. In addition to connecting its users with their business and professional newspapers, books and periodicals, QUE supports the document formats business users need (including PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents) and features powerful tools for interacting with and managing the content.
"The QUE brand stands for a premium reading experience," said Richard Archuleta, CEO of Plastic Logic. "QUE enhances business performance and gives you a competitive edge. More than an eReader, QUE means business."
Extra thin, lightweight and wireless-enabled, QUE is the size of an 8.5 x 11 inch pad of paper, less than a 1/3 inch thick, and weighs less than many periodicals. The innovative QUE proReader features the largest screen in the industry, an intuitive touch screen user interface, and provides access to a file cabinet's worth of documents, plus your favorite-and most necessary-publications.
QUE stands out in a crowd because it's a business reader, but it's also unique for its shatterproof plastic display. This exclusive technology from Plastic Logic, along with E Ink Vizplex® technology produces an outstanding reading experience. Its battery can last days, instead of hours.
QUE users will be able to connect to content and download wirelessly via Wi-Fi and AT&T's 3G network, the nation's fastest 3G mobile broadband network. QUEreader.com will offer the most significant collection of business reading available on any eReader. The QUE store is powered by Barnes & Noble, the worlds' largest eBookstore.
Full product specifications, availability and pricing of QUE will be announced on January 7, 2010 at CES.
The QUE for CES starts at http://www.QUEreader.com.
About Plastic Logic
Plastic Logic's mission is to lead a revolution in the way people acquire, organize and consume information. We are using our proprietary technology leadership in plastic electronics to create a range of innovative products. Our first product, QUETM, the proReader for business professionals, will enter the marketplace in 2010. Founded in 2000 by researchers out of the Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory, Plastic Logic has research and development in Cambridge, England; high-volume, state-of-the-art manufacturing in Dresden, Germany; and executive management, product engineering, sales and marketing headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Plastic Logic, please go to http://www.plasticlogic.com.
Media Contacts:
Krause Taylor Associates (for Plastic Logic)
Betty Taylor
650.480.4060
bettyt at krause-taylor dot com
Dana Smith
510.524.2066
danas at krause-taylor dot com
omg first nerdgasm!
* Disregarding the loser above me *
Dang, this thing is thinner than an Adamo. It looks like I will still be able to get paper cuts, even with an E-reader...
So "Pro" means, stupidly large?
I think "pro" means suitable for things above and beyond pleasure reading. For reference materials especially, a bigger screen can be helpful.
And will cost near or make no difference $1000.
You just watch.
I'm fine with that.
I'm not, I actually want to have money for books, otherwise it'd be a bit pointless...
I say $450. Just watch. And listen. And touch(if you're blind).
Its not about books although you will be able to read them on it. Think of it as getting rid of your printer.
$599
Is this the future of all first promo shots.
I kind of want it if it has pen input and not just finger input.
It would almost have to, to be truly useful, which I believe is the reason for the "how much damage (if any) that touchscreen sensor does to readability" comment.
@Kurt Huber, for that size I would hope it would ignore a palm when using the stylus or it could quickly become pretty bad.
It looks to me like it might have a stylus stuck in it; the little bit sticking out a bit on the right side of the pic.
I think it's the present; after the new Adamo this is simply not as impressing.
hopefully it allows periodical subscriptions!
yes it will. all manner of magazine publishers have been lining up as well as newspapers.
Honestly, a LxW dimensions of a paperback and I'd be interested, not interested in something the size of a piece of paper
This is not a replacement to the paperback. The same company is coming out with a much smaller eReader for that. This one is targeted at businesses as a way to save cost on printouts. PlasticLogic's website has a lot of details about it. If they can get the content editor/manager to be decent(I'm hoping pen input) I could see picking one up to grade papers on as a teacher. Let's just hope the content editing is half-decent and the price not too astronomical.
Printouts?
That size in color with a touchscreen would actually be good enough to replace textbooks.
Exactly Pontelon. Think of a lawyer/judge with all those briefs/ motions to read teachers with papers to read, mangers with reports etc etc etc
Tough choices...a tablet with Pixel Qi's technology, or an elegant e-ink reader?
Most likely no replaceable battery, no expandable storage, and reduced contrast due to resistive touch-screen. The company had previously mentioned wireless access via bluetooth tethering to the user's phone, which probably means no 3G connectivity.
Next time, RTFA
"... and has 3G wireless capabilities"
Oops, forgot about the announcement with AT&T from July. No mention of bluetooth so I wonder what they meant when they said at the October Semicon Europa conference that their reader is designed to be combined with a smartphone for wireless connectivity. Perhaps a locked-down business version? http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220301369
If they use a wacom digitizer under the e-ink layer it would allow for stylus input without any glare or impact on contrast. Downfall is that you would then only be able to use the stylus and not your finger. A trade off some folks might be up for if they use the thing for annotations and such.
In the last demo video (check Plastic Logic website) this ran on Windows CE and the president refused to comment whether it would cost less or more than $500.
homina homina homina. Here's hoping they do some sort of deal with universities so that students can afford it too -- perfect size for reading (and annotating) textbooks and handouts...or for anthropologists, etc., for taking (what would usually be) piles and piles of books out to the field.....
I hope tech companies realize soon that thinner does not equal better. Our hands are not made to hold such thin things.
um....what? Think about the documents/legal pads/files that you hold and read at work.
And anyway, a lot of exceedingly awful things have come from misguided efforts to bring wildly irrelevant characteristics of books to these readers. (See, e.g., the wonky first generation kindle: "people totally fold books over when they read them! yeah! so we should make our reader awkwardly asymmetrical, and, oh yes, ass-ugly. It'll be JUST like reading a book!" ...Yeah, no.)
The reasons you cannot compare the two is numerous:
A thin packet of paper is held much differently than something that has no give to it. When you hold paper, it bends, it moves and you naturally adjust it to a position that is comfortable to your hands. A flat piece of plastic with a screen on it is something completely different, and the product's dimensions ans shape has to change accordingly.
Thin products like this one decrease the consumer's confidence in the product. Have you ever heard the term "I feel like I'm going to break it"? This is often directly related to how thin the product is. Even if the product IS stronger than it looks, it has to look the part and feel the part in order to gain consumer confidence.
And about designing to mimic a book... Books do have quite a lot of practical advantages to them. They fold, they're easier to read in a casual manner, you can bend a corner of a page up if the light is glaring off of the pages, and they offer a tactile experience that is quite rewarding. Now, I am not one to say that the designers of these E-readers should strive to copy a book, but ideas can be derived from this. Maybe by making the reader a little flexible, or adding a really interesting and natural way to "turn the page" rather than press a button. Now, in your mind these design aspects make the book "ass-ugly", but if they make the product more usable, more enjoyable to use, and friendlier to the person picking it up for the first time, will that matter to the customer? Yes, a product has to look great. But if a good looking product fails at functioning properly, what good is it?
This seems like it is just following suit with the other design directions going on these days in consumer electronics. "How thin can we make it, and how can we make the screen as much of the product as possible?". In a nutshell, that is the basis for physical design in a lot of product spaces right now, and it has little to no grounding with designing for real function or for the product's users.
Check out Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss.
Those are all really good points -- but they actually play up my point, which is that not all the desirable aspects of book-reading can (or should) be replicated in these devices. I love dog-earring my books, but I don't have any particular desire to have the companies engineer a way for me to dog-ear my e-reader. I love annotating my books (so necessary for students!) and I so fiercely desire that characteristic of books to be replicated in an e-reader that I absolutely will not buy one that lacks a pen-based annotation system.
And the difference here is crucial: Princeton's e-reader trial program (for example) did not reject the Kindle because of all of the many, many ways in which the experience of reading on an e-reader is inferior to reading on paper, but for a few particularly salient ones, the awkwardness of its keyboard-based annotation among them.
Anyway, all this is to say that I agree with you that there are some design failings here, but that I disagree with where you locate them. (Plastic Logic did, after all, start with exactly what you describe -- a reader that bent and gave *exactly* like a document would -- but retreated from that design due to objections that echo yours: objections about consumer confidence in the device's sturdiness.)
Actually Tommy you make some points addressed by plastic logic themselves. the screen is on a plastic substrate with some plastic electronics- the whole forte of the company. Thats what makes this so durable. Also originally it was designed to flex nearly like a note pad BUT consumer groups FELT uncomfortable with that so the device has been made more rigid to convey a more solid feeling even though durability is unchanged.
Turning a "page" is accomplished by swiping your finger from the right to the left mimicking turning a paper page. Originally it was a forward left to right swipe but it was pointed out to them that that was a computer centric gesture and that the right to left swipe was more intuitive for moving from reading on paper to epaper.
As far as the thinness - they could actually make the edges thinner but the size it is will feel more like holding a magazine or legal pad.
"... diversification in the ebook space sounds like a good thing on paper."
I see what you did there.
In other news, as a musician who often totes around a stack of 8.5x11 dead trees with musical information printed on it, I'd love to have a reliable, responsive 8.5x11 e-ink PDF reader that simply displays my PDF originals at full size with no repagination. I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
"The unit uses E Ink Vizplex tech in a shatterproof display the size of a regular piece of paper at 8.5 x 11-inches"
Please read the fine print, the size of the device is the size of a Letter paper, the actual display is smaller!
And 'regular paper' is A4, not your crazy letter size. Get with the times America!
Furthermore, the touchscreen does cover the whole screen, but it appears to give it a shiny hexagonal pattern.
I don't think the trees in the US come in that size.
Joking aside, you're preaching to the choir, but this is unlikely to happen for the same reasons as the metric system, cellphones compatible with the rest of the world, modern large home appliances, and so on remain unknown in most parts of the US.
the display area of the device is equal to the normal display area of letter-size paper. think of the screen bezel as the "margins" of the printed paper.
But clearly there needs to be more accuracy in engadget reports...
i read, on average, 1 book in 3 years...
will the ebook be a good investment?
By investment, do you mean something you get now but you won't enjoy the benefits of until much later, if ever? If you are not a reader, this is probably not for you. You should probably invest in your other more frequently used reading device, such as buying a bigger nicer monitor. And gadgets are outdated soon after you get them so you must be able to enjoy them right away, or are you the type to store tons of unopened impulse buys in the garage for when you have time?
E-book readers are only green if you read a lot of books. Go the greener way!
If they are marketing the device, then portions of their FCC filing should become public, so maybe there'll be some nice internal/external photos up on the FCC website tomorrow.
I thought the PlasticLogic reader was going to be competitive with the Kindle? That would place this in line with the DX at around $500, which I could stomach. I'm assuming that this is THE Plastic Logic Reader, not an addition to the line - there's no mention of the white prototype they were using over at their website anymore.
This is huge! Good for reading A4 sized documents, but less portable.
Correction: the size of the DEVICE is 11 x 8,5 inches. That's NOT the size of the screen.
If this a supposed to be a device for business users, why do they conveniently leave off any reference to the most important business requirement: SECURITY!
Can it open password protected PDF and Office documents? Is there any sort of password protection to access the device? Just ONCE I would like to see Engadget address this in an ebook reader preview/review. It's critical for any enterprise that might want to give an ebook reader to mobile users.
"via the AT&T network" what about the rest of the world?!
Hurrah, wifi. That makes the 3G almost redundant for me.
I'd really like to see more wifi only ereaders. I have no desire for a cell radio, and no desire for the browsing limitations (or cost padding) that tend to come with it. Just give me wifi and cut out the limitations.
International availability of both device and content!?
Outlook PLEASE!!!!!!
PL's format list http://www.plasticlogic.com/ereader/document-formats.php