Fujitsu shows off colour e-book display
As I was writing about the Sony Reader the other day, my housemate looked over my shoulder and asked "why would you pick an e-book over a traditional one?" Given that he's a student, I rolled out the usual justifications of being able to carry all your textbooks in one far smaller unit, easier bookmarking, faster searching. Although he could appreciate that, at the same time he said he would find it difficult to justify the Reader as a) it's in greyscale, and b) you can't annotate it. Well, Fujitsu have just knocked that first negative into a cocked hat, with their new colour "electronic paper".
Unlike the Panasonic Words, which uses a traditional LCD panel and as such suffers from a mere six hours of battery life (which might be a long time for a laptop but imagine if your paperback expired that quickly!) Fujitsu have created a cholesteric liquid crystal display with the same kind of "memory effect" as the Sony's greyscale one. That means it only consumes power when it's changing; in the Sony's case, that means up to 7,500 page turns on a single charge, with otherwise limitless display of static pages. The Fujitsu currently has a 640x480 resolution and is visible even without backlighting (another power-hog).
Apparently the prototype e-book Fujitsu displayed at CEATEC Japan this year was quite slow in page transitions, but that will improve as the technology matures. Okay, so there's no annotation, but we're one step closer to a practical addition (if not replacement) to the world of paper books.