Polymer Vision has been bought by an Asian company (we do not know the name yet). They will restart the development of foldable E Ink displays. Polymer Vision will retain about 80% of their employees.
Polymer Vision was about to release the Readius - an e-reader with a foldable E Ink display, and will continue development (although it might be a different product).
DisplaySearch forecasts that total e-paper display market will grow to 1.8 billion units and $9.6 billion in revenues in 2018, from 22 million units and $431 million in revenues in 2009, for a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 41% for revenues and 64% for units.
E-book displays currently account for the majority of e-paper revenues. Nearly all e-book devices currently in the market use E Ink's electrophoretic display technology, with a small number--such as Fujitsu's FLEPia--using cholesteric LCD (liquid crystal display) technology. Other electrophoretic display suppliers SiPix and Bridgestone have announced that they will also commercialize e-book displays.
Plastic Logic are working towards a flexible E Ink display based E--Reader, and they say that they will start making the displays soon. The reader itself is expected to be available at the beginning of 2010, for about the same price as the Kindle.
Even though the display is flexible, the product itself will not be - as people do not really want a flexible display - they are afraid it will be easily destroyed... So this will be a regular E Reader, with a plastic based display.
Sony has posted service manuals for two new and announced e-readers... and of course someone found out and posted them. The first is the PRS-300 with a 5" display, 440MB of user storage. The second is the PRS-600, with a 6" touchscreen, audio support, 380MB of storage and SD/MS slots.
Polymer Vision has had financial problems for a while, and back in April they delayed their flexible E Ink display based Readius reader. Now we hear that the company is bankrupt. This is sad - it would have been great to finally have a flexible display reader!
The Readius had a 16-grayscale 320x240 5" e ink based display. When closed the size is 115x57x21mm, and when you open the display, it's 160x115x21mm.Â
Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle 2 reader by 60$. The new price is 299$.
Kindle 2
The new Kindle DX is still priced at 489$, and Amazon are still out of stock (says they will ship within 3 to 5 weeks).
Amazon's Kindle DX is sold out again. Amazon says that this is due to heavy customer demand. It will continue shipping in 4-6 weeks (just a couple of weeks ago, the Kindle DX was sold out, but than it took Amazon only a couple of days to get more inventory).
Amazon kindle DX
It might be that E Ink have problem supplying the large 9.7" E Ink display, or, perhaps, there is indeed heavy customer demand. The Kindle DX costs 489$.
iRiver will soon launch an eBook reader, in Japan only. It will be called the Libre, although it's not yet clear which brand will iRiver use. The reader has a 6" 800x600 E Ink display, is made by PVI, and it uses Foxit software. Data is loaded using USB or memory cards (no wireless).
iRiver hopes to be leading the eBook market in Japan, just like it did in the MP3 players way back. They will sell it online only, and hope to reach 1,000 units sold per month.
TechOn reports that they will sell it for around 300$, saying that PVI sells it for around 150-200$.
News article can be collected by the Foxit software crawler, and PDF files can be read, too. iRiver are in talks with newspaper companies and other content providers.
Amazon's Kindle DX (with the 9.7" E Ink display) has sold out in 3 days. We do not know how many they actually sold, but in any case Amazon will have more devices ready by June 17...(you can see this info over at Amazon's Kindle DX page)
The Kindle DX costs 489$, it's not a cheap device, and it's great to see that it is selling so well.