CES 2011: Energy-frugal color e-book readers promised for mid-year

As expected, e-book readers with both color screens and energy-frugal screens were announced at CES, for promised availability in mid-2011.

But as I had also suspected, the color rendition on both devices I saw was very much a work in progress. Most promising—and certainly most interesting—is the newest iteration of Qualcomm's reflective Mirasol technology, an earlier version of which I'd seen at an e-reading conference at which I was a panelist earlier in 2010.

Qualcomm was showing fairly smooth, 30-frames-a-second video on a prototype 5.7-inch frame. As with the earlier demo I saw, the colors were muted and pastelish, though passable. And since the technology depends on reflected light for its illumination, the intensity of color increased when I took the device out of the Las Vegas Convention Center and viewed it on a sunny sidewalk outside.

I also saw a demonstration of a Mirasol screen that includes what the company is calling "front lighting," LED illumination that rings the inside of the screen to allow reading in the dark. Similar to the lighting introduced (and then dropped) from Sony's Reader line a few years, the front lighting is far less hungry for power than the LCD backlighting of other color e-book readers—which you also can't turn off, as Qualcomm points out.

Qualcomm plans a launch in mid-year of at least one touchscreen device with a partner, or partners, that it hasn't yet announced. The company expects pricing to be competitive with color LCDs of comparable size. Qualcomm plans to manufacture the screens itself for its partners, having just invested in a sizable production plant for Mirasol.

The chip manufacturer sees e-reader screens as a stepping stone—essentially, an R&D platform—for refining the Mirasol's screen technology and ramping up production. That's a planned prelude, it hopes, to getting Mirasol screens into smart phones—where it sees them as helping solve the power crunch from expanding screen sizes and more sophisticated apps, some used more continuously.

The other entry I saw, the 9.7-inch Hanvon ColorWISE reader, was again shown only as a pre-production model. But that was enough to see color rendition that seemed more pallid than that of the the Mirasol device, and to use (albeit in a limited way) controls and navigation that seemed akin to some of the lower-scoring e-book readers in our Ratings (available to subscribers). Hanvon has not announced pricing for the ColorWISE.

—Paul Reynolds