Linfiny has announced that they will release their 13.3-inch E-note with Kaleido 3 colour e-paper in 2024. Linfiny was established in October 2017 as a joint venture company between E Ink Holdings and Sony Semiconductor Solutions. In April 2023, Linfiny became a 100% subsidiary of E Ink Holdings Inc. Linfiny specializes in B2B, so although they won’t release the product themselves, they did state that major brands will be releasing products this year.
Digital Paper has three primary applications: A note-taking app, a PDF viewer app, and an NFC tag cooperation app. In addition to this primary function, Linfiny has optimized the system to acquire data recorded by on-site workers and information such as handwriting stroke meta information and operation history on workers’ terminals.
Therefore, customers can progress in improving efficiency by digitizing general field operations. In addition to linking and analyzing the acquired data with higher-level systems, our Digital Paper can bring much value to your true operational management innovation for companies and workplaces and even create new business and service models.
The 2024 Digital Paper is not just another e-note. It features a 13.3-inch 4,096 colour Kaleido 3 Flexible e-paper display with a resolution of 1650×2200, capable of displaying 4,096 colours. With a Capacitive Touch Panel sensor and Electro-Magnetic Resonance-type touch pen input with 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, it offers a truly immersive digital writing experience.
Underneath the hood is an i.MX8M mini (Quad-core Cortex A53 1.8GHz) processor, 32 GB of eMMC storage and an indeterminate amount of RAM. The wireless internet is brought to you by IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (WAVE2) MIMO 2.4GHz/5GHz and has Bluetooth 5.0 for audiobooks. USB-C is the connector for charging and transferring data. It has NFC 13.56MHz / FeliCa, which is usually utilized in Japan. This is the type of tech that the Fujitsu Quaderno employed, so they will likely do something with this new Digital Paper sometime this year. It is powered by a 2000mAh battery. The dimensions are 222.8 × 301.1 × 5.7 mm and weighs 368g.
Who will bite and use this e-note in a commercial release? I have seen the 3rd Generation Fujitsu Quaderno A4 at various tradeshows in the past few years. Readmoo was the first brand to bring this to the market, but it retailed for over $1000.00. Onyx will likely do their version of this tech later this year.
What I find interesting is since last year, Sony sold their stake in Linfiny to E INK, so I wonder if Sony is officially out of E INK production and has exited this space entirely?
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.