Sony's Featherweight Tablet Sports Huge 13-Inch E-Ink Display

With its newest E-Ink tablet, Sony has taken another step towards the paperless office. That's because this device has a supersized 13-inch display, can hold thousands of books and recognizes pen inputs, yet weighs less than a pound.  

Targeted at the eduction market and business executives who need to carry reams of documents, the Sony Digital Paper DPT-S1 is the largest device of its ilk on the market. It's more than 3 inches larger than the discontinued Amazon Kindle DX, which had a 9.7-inch screen, yet weighed almost 6 ounces more than Sony's device.

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Measuring 12.2 x 9.2 x 0.27 inches, the DPT-S1 is about the size of an A4 piece of paper, and weighs 12.2 ounces. Its 13.3-inch E-Ink Pearl screen has a resolution of 1600 x 1200-pixels, and can display up to 16 shades of gray. It also has capacative sensors, so you can swipe left or right to switch pages, much like other eReaders powered by the same technology. 

Also built into the DPT-S1 is an inductive digitizer, which can be used in conjunction with the included stylus to annotate pages. In our hands-on time, the display was fairly responsive in recording our scribblings. It also has 4GB of internal storage, plus an SD card slot, Wi-Fi, and should last up to a month on a charge. 

About 1,000 of these eReaders were sold in Japan at the end of last year, and Sony is looking at selling them in the U.S. later this year. Pricing has not been announced.

LAPTOP Reviews Editor