A Practical LCD Writing Tablet 171
An anonymous reader passes along a word about an innovative LCD writing tablet. The Boogie Board costs $30, can be written on with a stylus or a fingernail, and uses no power in the act of writing. Only erasing consumes power — from a watch battery, which lasts for 50,000 erases. The total cost per "page" comes out to only 1/15th that of steno paper. The writing surface is pressure-sensitive and "highly responsive to variable amounts of pressure," so you can make thick and thin lines.
Shipping kills it (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, they want almost $45US for shipping an 11oz tablet to the UK.
USPS airmail from the US to the UK for a 1lb parcel is slightly over $10.
So, it's $30 for the tablet, and $35 for the handling fee. Shame.
Ok then, why not paper???? (Score:4, Informative)
You can. It's called a camera. Same as taking a picture of a whiteboard or blackboard.
Or a piece of paper!
It still gives me NO reason to use this device over something that needs no battery, and serves as archival hard copy of my idea.
Without the extra step of the camera, an electronic notepad would be very useful indeed to quickly produce pages of material that then got sent elsewhere. But needing that extra step just kills it from being more useful than paper.
Totally agree (Score:4, Informative)
I've been searching for the ideal "electronic graph paper" and I have yet to find anything.
That's all I want too! I don't need it to play music or videos or browse the web, or even receive anything for that matter. Just let me use it as an off-line digitizing pad and I'll be happy.
The diagram neatening would be interesting but I could skip anything except recording where I pressed, preferably with some degree of pressure sensitivity as this offers.
That said this looks like this product probably can't even address pixels.
I wondered about that too, but there's got to be something that happens when you press that causes the state change, if it would even store that raw input and have software to assemble it back into an image later that would be fine by me.
Magna Doodle? (Score:2, Informative)
Shortly before reading this article, I was playing with my son's Magna Doodle [wikipedia.org], making a sketch of our dog. Somehow I was still impressed when I read this article. Nonetheless, the Magna Doodle is still cool. It takes no batteries to erase and even works under water! And it has for 36 years.
Re:Ok then, why not paper???? (Score:2, Informative)
Since it's ink/lead-less, it could be useful for cleanrooms where special non-shedding paper and pens are necessary.
As the site notes, it's useful in many of the same instances where small marker/chalkboards works - sports sidelines, shopping lists, fridge reminders - but doesn't require a pen or marker, much less dry-erase ink or chalk, which is also a benefit for people sensitive or allergic to marker/chalk dust.
The ability to write with a finger can help people with wrist/hand disabilities who can't easily grip a writing implement. Can't speak, can't hold a pen, but still have even rudimentary hand dexterity? You can write on this, but not a pad of paper.
Since it doesn't, and can't, store what's written on it, and erases without a physical trace, the tech could be useful for secure handwriting.
For paper-wasteful, short-term notes that are pointless to save and end up in the trash - brainstorming, thought organizing, memorization through repetitive writing/muscle memory - this is far more efficient (and part of the reason it's so heavily marketed to schools).
I do agree that it has several flaws and missed opportunities. On top of the obvious inability to save and dependency on a battery, it's not backlit, which could make it a fantastic piece of dynamic signage. Like any LCD, it's temperature sensitive - its listed operating temperatures are 14F-145F, but I'm not sure I'd trust it below freezing, in a hot kitchen or for extended periods outdoors over 100. Erasing is, like an Etch-A-Sketch, an all-or-nothing affair, and isn't instantaneous. I have a hard time buying into the "green" paper-saving aspect when the board is apparently not designed to be user serviceable (when the battery dies, Improv says to buy a new one) and paper is far more recyclable than any component of this pad. And perhaps most disappointing to me is the lack of any form of digital input - if it was possible to make it display monochrome image files, you'd immediately have a lovely piece of equipment for things like circuit reference, blueprints or other sorts of repair documentation. It's a pain to have a printer exclusively for that purpose, and digital devices of that size are too expensive to care about.
But to dismiss the tech altogether demonstrates a lack of imagination. There's quite a few practical uses for this, especially at the price point.
Re:Looks Great! (Score:3, Informative)
You mean $9+the-cost-of-a-computer more. The boogie thing is completely self-contained. Plus, you can see what you're drawing -where- you're drawing. With a cheap digitizer for the computer, you have to watch the computer's screen and draw somewhere else. Yes, people do it all the time, but there's a reason people are willing to spend thousands on a Cintiq instead of pay 1/10th as much for just a regular digitizer.
Yeah. Worthless without connectivity. (Score:3, Informative)