First Look at Mysterious New “E-Card” Smartphone eReader (Video)
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My daily YouTube rummaging turned up a video of an interesting-looking new E Ink device called the E-Card.
According to the description, the E-Card is a smartphone reading companion that can display ebooks, comics, and other content from a mobile phone via Bluetooth.
Basically the E-Card is like the Oaxis InkCase and PocketBook CoverReader, minus the cover. It’s a secondary E Ink display that can be paired with a smartphone. This helps preserve the phone’s battery life and make reading more pleasant, especially outdoors in bright sunlight.
The description also suggests that the E-Card supports notifications for incoming calls, text messages, emails and alarms, and can displays the weather, date/time and images.
The video demonstrates reading a comic book on the E-Card. It looks similar to the other E Ink smartphone readers that use a special app to send content to the device. Then you control page turning on the E-Card by pressing forward and back sensors below the screen.
This is an interesting new take on the E Ink smartphone combination idea. Instead of integrating the E Ink screen in a special cover or into the phone itself, the E-Card is an entirely separate gadget. That certainly helps make it more widely accessible on different types of phones, but makes it a little less convenient and easier to misplace.
Other than the YouTube video, there’s no information about the E-Card anywhere that I can find. The weather widget shows Shanghai, but the E-Card app’s interface is in English, as the picture at the top of this article shows.
Looks Taiwanese to me, since the phone interface and the comic are both in traditional Chinese. I really hope we’ll be seeing more of this technology soon though!
That looks brilliant. I’m ready to buy one right now.