A Taiwanese company called Readmoo has announced the upcoming release of the first commercially available foldable ereader called the MooInk V that they co-developed with E Ink.
The MooInk V features an 8″ E Ink Gallery screen that is capable of bending down the middle in order to fold the device into a size small enough to fit in a pocket. It took them 9 years to develop the product, and it passed 200,000 bending tests.
Unlike most color ereaders, the MooInk uses a Gallery 3 screen with actual colored micropixels instead of a Kaleido screen with a color filter array over a regular monochrome E Ink screen. Gallery screens have better color quality, but on the downside they don’t have black micropixels so text isn’t really black—color E Ink always comes with some drawbacks.
The outer casing of the MooInk V is made from aluminum-magnesium alloy, and the body has a matte texture on it. When it’s folded it has a unique appearance that you wouldn’t suspect is an ereader. It looks pretty thick when folded but they don’t give any dimensions whatsoever, but it does weigh approximately 255 grams.
Apparently the MooInk doesn’t have a frontlight, according to the writeup on this tech blog, which also has some additional pictures showing comics and ebooks on the screen.
There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but I wouldn’t expect to see these for sale outside of China, at least not initially. Maybe if there’s enough interest, but this seems like another small niche within a small niche.
With 6″ ereaders being the smallest size on the current market, most of the major ereader companies aren’t prioritizing portability like they used to so I’m not sure if there’s going to be much interest in foldable screens, especially if they cost a fortune, which is most likely the case.
Would you be interested in a foldable ereader?
Based on the images on the Tech Blog link, this looks terrible, especially the middle of the screen.
It looks as if two portrait format display halves would fold out to form a square format display. The only use case I see for that would be to imitate a “real” paper book with one page on the left and the next page on the right half of the display.
That would be a real benefit for some “coffee table” books or fancy magazines which feature large images spreading over two neighbouring pages.
It will be of little advantage,however, for “normal” books since the ability of displaying two pages of text simultaneously without the need to turn pages would come with a higher price tag, higher weight, more clumsy handling and more delicate mechanics that probably won’t like beach or pool use…
Nah, not for me. A novelty item for early adopters and nerdy gadgeteers. As far as mobile devices are concerned, I prefer sturdy and potentially long living gadgets.
From my point of view the mechanics here are just another part where the device can eventually fail.
Gallery 3 screen is a bit better, but still not as good as a BW Carta.
Interesting and going in the right direction of my dream reader of a roll up screen.
Not a thought for me. The book form is meaningless for me. A great single screen is preferred to a clunky two paged device. Even flipping pages has lost its appeal. A two page device has to be fairly large and heavy to be able to see a decent sized page on each size, with wasted double margins. Hinges that wear out…not for me.
At some point, I started to prefer a single screen to an actual book…choice and size of fonts and formatting. No need to look from one page to another or flip a page.
I’m more interested in the Gallery 3 screen than the folding part, Gallery 3 ereaders are rare, the Bigme one was bad (and discontinued) and the Remarkable is very limited in what it can do.
Maybe Gallery 3 screens are much more expensive? It’s strange no other brands have developed another ereader from it
It’s expensive and slow. It’s just not worth it yet.
Last year kobo and amazon came out with their first generation color e-readers. With a 3rd generation of Kaleido screens. That speaks for itself.
I am in agreement with David. Refresh time seems to be the biggest issue. Also no true black pigment.
I’m not interested in folding screens peroid. Not for a phone, tablet, or eReader. I don’t trust the durability nor do I like how the screen looks on the crease.
As someone that use a folding phone (Z Fold5), the crease is just part of using a folding phone. Some people “get used to it”, but I always notice it. I just tolerate it. I’m guessing it’s kind of like the darker screen of color eink displays. It’s tolerated because the feature necessitates this downside.
This device is so thick and they explained that eink layers are always going to be thicker than OLEDs. This is one of the main drawbacks, it’s just too thick.
I also find it interesting they claim no gap between the screens when folded, unlike folding phones. This is so 2-3 years ago. The picture they had is probably the Z Fold4, which is like 2-3 years old now. All modern folding phones fold flush and have no gaps between the screens.
If the Gallery color display is truely 300 ppi (I’m assuming they are saying it’s 300 ppi color) and higher contrast that they don’t need a frontlight, then it’s good news when this screen does come to mainstream ereaders.