A first look at a new product from Dasung turned up on YouTube today.
Dasung has been making E Ink monitors for the past few years with their Paperlike line. Now it looks like they’re going to release an E Ink tablet of sorts soon.
The device sports an unusual name, the Dasung Not-eReader.
The video description says the Not-eReader is the world’s first E Ink mobile-phone monitor and PC monitor, whatever that means.
There’s a coming soon page for the “Not-eReader” at Indiegogo.
The page reveals a few more interesting details. It says the device has a 7.8-inch E Ink screen with 300 ppi, and it has a cold and warm frontlight.
The Not-eReader runs open Android 6.0, with a quad-core CPU and 2GB+64GB (presumably RAM and storage space).
It appears that Dasung is marketing it as a 5-in-1 device. It can be used as an ereader (despite the name suggesting the contrary), a tablet, a video player, a PC monitor, and a mobile phone monitor.
The YouTube video below only shows the device being used as a video player.
Call me crazy, but I just don’t understand why anybody would want to watch videos on a black and white E Ink screen. Why wouldn’t they at least use color E Ink? The colors are flat and washed out but it’s still better than monochrome for watching videos.
They seem to be starting an indiegogo campaign soon, there’s a page for registering for notification when the campaign starts.
Looks potentially interesting, of there’s an easy HDMI connection (sounds like it), it might be useful for my planned use case of taking the device along with a small 7-8 inch laptop when traveling and use this as second monitor when working in libraries/hotel rooms etc. (or as main monitor working in sunlight).
looks like this has quite a large battery with 5000mah, wondering how heavy it’s going to be.
They don’t give many details, and really – you are REALLY taking your chances with any indiegogo or kickstarter campaign. “Has” is not the same as “will have” or “is intended to have” or “planned to have.”
I suspect it’s going to be very similar to the upcoming Onyx Boox Nova and the Boyue Likebook Mars hardwarewise. Since they say quad core CPU it seems likely that the CPU will be the same or very close to the one found in the various newer onyx readers.
I haven’t found a comparison of the CPU used by onyx with that of the Likebook Mars yet, although from Geekbench results it seems that the onyx one might be slightly faster (the eight cores of the Likebook might be advantage in some contexts, don’t know).
From the announcement I’d guess that the Dasung might lack a micro sd slot, which would be a shame! at least 64gb might help in some use cases. But the Likebook seems the best of the bunch in that respect, afaik it’s the only one of the three with extensible memory.
I think it’s nice that it looks like the different 7.8 devices seem at least to have some things to differentiate them, not simple carbon copies of each other. Of course, we’ll have to wait for actual specs.
And of course DaveMich’s words of caution regarding crowd funding are worth keeping in mind! However, with relatively known Chinese companies, like Dasung are, I wouldn’t be too worried that the whole thing is vaporware, often they will be relatively far in the planning process and just use crowd funding to create hype, so there will normally be a product. Of course, it’s hard to know in advance if the actual product will meet your expectations, that’s a general risk you take with crowd funding.
This looks like a great device for my wife. She gets migraines from looking at a monitor. Their ink monitor got her back writing again. Color would be nice, but it’s likely to be pricey and who knows how it will react with her migraines.
It’s on Indiegogo now. The early bird discount price is $369, full retail is $499. I was interested, but I’m definitely going to pass at those prices. It also says something that they keep using iPhones as an example for their ‘Mobile-Phone Monitor’ but then state there is no iOS support in the description.