Going completely paperless just got a bit easier with an LCD tablet that – wait for it – actually seems to be an affordable and useful way to replace paper pads.
The Boogie Board from Improv Electronics features technology from Ohio’s Kent Displays called “Reflex LCD,” a pressure-sensitive, flexible plastic that requires zero power to retain what’s written on it and only a small watch battery to erase the screen.
According to the company’s press release:
“Because all Reflex LCDs are reflective and bi-stable, the Boogie Board tablet requires no power to generate or retain an image, and only a small amount to erase (supplied by a small watch battery, which will execute over 50,000 erase cycles). At a retail price of $29.97 USD, the Boogie Board tablet’s cost per erase is 15 times less than the per sheet cost of paper in a comparable steno notepad.
Written and graphic images are created with an included stylus or any other instrument that will apply the desired pressure (even a finger nail). Unlike traditional LCDs that have a poor response to pressure, the Boogie Board’s Reflex LCD is highly responsive to variable amounts of pressure. This allows different line thicknesses to be easily created (great for sketching) and provides a writing experience very similar to paper and pencil.”
That’s the key right there: “the Boogie Board’s Reflex LCD is highly responsive to variable amounts of pressure.” You’re able to write on it similarly to how you’d write on a regular sheet of paper. Now if only the company would produce a version that let you transfer what you’d written to your computer. Perhaps that’s in the pipeline.
Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet [Improv Electronics]
Looks very nice and the price is great – on my wish list!
perfect for my dart board score keeping.
Wow, Can you save any of your “doodles”? If not, add that feature and see for $50 and you have the best thing EVER!
Improv Electronics is working to enable saving via computer.
They should slap some magnets on the back, this would be perfect for a refrigerator notepad.
you can buy magnets especially for it on amazon
Magnets are available on their website and Amazon.
Well… By save… i mean save to sd or something. I am sure it cannot be put back on the display without serious effort.
So it replaces a white board or chalk board not a note pad since you can’t save it without transcribing it onto something else. Paper saved: 0 I’d say it better than a chalk board (no dust) but being B/W its worse than a white board.
Yet another article written to quickly without enough forethought.
yet another comment written without enough thought. It could easily replace a notepad for me.
Scenario: Monday Morning meeting. List of tasks taken down on boogie board. Transfered to Remember the Milk, synced to phone. No paper used at all. That is currently how I use a legal pad most of the time, so it would be a net win.
Do you ever run more than one page during the meeting? They make sheets of the dry erase plastic that are paper sized and thin. And you still have to transcribe it.
No, Ben, you’re correct. This is a concept in search of someone who is too lazy to erase. Now, considering the erase is “perfect”, it does have one merit versus white boards in that it wouldn’t leave dry erase residue. That is a small gain versus the fact that this thing is single color.
Worst case, you can take a picture of your boogie board with your camera phone.
notebook paper saved: all of it.
I take pics of notes etc and stick them in evernote (www.evernote.com) for the most part they are searchable then too as it has OCR capabilities.
I like the Boogie Board though, good for our daily Who’s In? list
I agree that there needs to be a way to capture (beam?) the writing from the board, that would make it an awesome product. In fact it could make for a great little reader (add a SD slot or WiFi), but I suppose that would defeat the purpose of its simplicity.
Ya, and you aren’t even considering that this costs $30 and not $200. This is great for writing down random to do tasks for the week. On the phone. Anything that you need to centralized. You can always transcribe the information that you feel need not be erased.
well, 30$ is way more expensive than pen and paper. So it is pretty useless provided you can not save anything. If you could save it would be an other story. but anything more than the cost of paper is too much for me if I can not save it…
I’d like to know where you get your office supplies. $30 for 50,000 sheets of paper and enough pens to use on it is a pretty good deal.
” … I’d like to know where you get your office supplies. $30 for 50,000 sheets of paper and enough pens to use on it is a pretty good deal. …”
But, it’s not 50,000 sheets of paper. It’s one sheet of paper and a pencil with an eraser.
True.. but you can’t write and erase a single piece of paper 50,000 times with one pencil/eraser. Anyway, I see this thing more as a whiteboard without the need for markers that get lost, dry out, etc. Also, I have a hard time believing it would survive 50K cycles
No, but you can’t fold and put 50 of these into your pocket after the meeting is over either. As a replacement for paper, it’s useless unless the contents of the board can somehow be saved digitally. If it was black on white instead of green on black, you could at least set the thing on a copy machine and save your data to actual paper.
Capture? Like, with your phone cam?
This is actually a pretty good idea… there is no way I can think of to add a save/transfer function to this without making it a way more expensive device.
But what about a software solution that works with webcams and phone cams? It could detect the frame and specific colours of the Boogie Board and then auto-crop and adjust the photo for a good clear snapshot of the writing surface only.
Perhaps I’m showing my age… I seem to remember when I was a kid the local shop used to sell little writing pads for like 20 cents (USD) with a little captive wooden stylus. It had a plastic sheet on top that laid atop a stiff cardboard backing coated with a waxy substance. You write on it and it keeps what you write in black-and-white until you take the bottom of the plastic sheet and lift it away from the backing.
Then there was a little “zip” sound when you lift the clear sheet away. Now you have a clean slate to write on. It was great for passing messages around in the classroom. If you got caught, just lift the sheet and zip; the written evidence is gone. If enough students had one or more of these pads in their possession, having a blank pad was not sufficient evidence of a passed note.
Sheeesh, I shouldn’t have posted this. Now Apple, Micro$oft, or 3M will immediately patent the concept via the corrupt USPTO and sue everyone that comes remotely close with a product.
So it’s like an electronic magnadoodle?
I was thinking a Magic Slate http://images.google.com/images?q=magic slate but yeah :).
without savig what you write what’s the point ??
it’s rubbish without a storage to save things.wish they put a micro sd or something like that and a software to keep things in PDF like formats.
Isn’t the name “Boogie Board” already taken? You know, those surf board type things you lay down on.
I didn’t see any active trademark for the boogie boards you’re referring to… I did see Kent Displays though… I’m guessing that’s these guys.
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4010%3Amlqru8.1.1&p_search=searchss&p_L=50&BackReference=&p_plural=yes&p_s_PARA1=&p_tagrepl~%3A=PARA1%24LD&expr=PARA1+AND+PARA2&p_s_PARA2=boogie+board&p_tagrepl~%3A=PARA2%24COMB&p_op_ALL=AND&a_default=search&a_search=Submit+Query&a_search=Submit+Query
You can’t always prevent someone from using a name you use, especially if they are English language words.
Surf stuff and Computer stuff don’t compete in the same market; just like (for example) Apple (computers, a New York bank, the Beatles record company, a science fiction film, a defunct auto manufacturer, hundreds of local businesses, etc).
Broadly speaking, you have to sue to know for sure, but generally you lose. That’s why Apple Computer and Apple Records always settle out of court; neither really wants to win, chances are the courts would allow both to continue, and it would be disaster for either to lose.
great product, looking forward for the new version with saving and USB
the only bad thing is the shipping outside US, costs more than the product’s price.
Oh lord please let them develop classroom-sized whiteboard replacements from this…
I can see a big one like this, to replace a white board’s nasty expensive chems that don’t work very well anyway.
As for archiving you could always take a picture with your cell and email to yourself.
The only thing about replacing full sized white boards is that there’s only one color. Once they add multiple colors and some transfer mechanism, it’ll fly off the shelves.
Okay, maybe geeks are just not that grounded in reality. I didn’t see a crucial piece of info in the summary article …. guesses as to what that was?
Okay, then I browsed through all the comments. Surely a gaggle of geeks, posting about practicality, usefulness, what it would and would not replace, etc would ask this question for me. Well, we’re still at the guessing stage, dear reader … no-one asked so you have a second chance. What could I possibly want to know?
I want to know what the dimensions are. This should be a part of every review of every thing. Period.
So … how big of a piece of paper can it replace?
Quoting from product site (the link to which is provided at the bottom of the article):
“Measuring 8.8 x 5.6 inches, there is as much writing space as a half sheet of letter-size paper”
The article says 8.8″ x 5.6″
That’s about 22.3 x 14.2 cm or about an A5 paper (21 x 14.8 cm). It’s 1/8″ thick (0.31 cm) and it weights 4.2 ounces (119 g).
If it only had a sd slot it would be perfect. Even a usb slot for a pendrive would be ok.
The “article” is what appears above these comments; it says nothing of the sort. The Press Release, which this “article” is just a rehash of, mentions not a word.
The only way to discover that info, is if you go to the manufacturer’s website, be bombarded with superlatives and unbridled excitement, and drill down a few pages; then you can find it.
That’s not reporting, that’s shilling.
Personally, I prefer my “articles” to do at least some of the ‘who what where when and why”. Guess I’m asking too much.
It’s not so green after all. From the FAQ:
> The LCD does not clear when I push the button.
[...]
> If you have frequently used the Boogie Board tablet for
> a long period of time (years), the battery power may
> have been depleted. In this case, the tablet may be
> discarded.
So it seems that the battery can’t be replaced. Why should we throw away a perfectly functional device just because the battery is depleted?
So they can sell you a new one. $30 is really in the throwaway zone, but I agree it’s sick the way we make stuff with the intent of it breaking in a year, two at the most. Look at Apple and all the devices they sell with batteries that cannot be switched out by the user.
yeah but $30 for maybe like 13 years of use? you’ll probably break it or lose it before you ever have to throw it away for the screen not clearing.
It’s like a wii version of an etch-o-sketch!! It says you can erase the screen.. but can you correct a minor error, maybe a typo or word?
Considering the price, the fact that writing does not use any power and that you cannot erase part of the screen, I suspect that this thing doesn’t not actually have any memory.
I seriously doubt there will be a version that can save to a memory card.
You mean, like, a scanner?
Improv Electronics has officially sold out of the Boogie Board (both U.S. and international orders). They say there will be more available to ship starting in the first part of February.
Guys, if we really think about this, there are many pros to it, it first of all is a very green product, and it doesn’treplace a giant whiteboard it will be an indvitual product, this is just a new product these guys are probably still making adjustments, i think this could be the next big thing
Well, no way to save a page ? On a paperboard I can simply get the page and bring it with me.
If they manage to add a way to save the screen (controler + SD card slot) this thing would become a killer device !!!
Without saving feature, this is pretty useless … only a fun product for a while for kids.
Or, you could use a MagnaDoodle
Full review of the Boogie Board can be read at
http://terracode.com/KD_BoogieBoard/KD_BoogieBoard1.html
Cool product, looking forward for the new version with saving and USB. The only bad thing is the shipping outside US, costs more than the product’s price. This is really bad :(
Steven
I might be interesting buying this! But will see and decide later on! Good article and thank you!