enTourage eDGe

» see entourageedge.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There is a real problem the enTourage eDGe was built for, and it is a problem I have. You read a long document and you want to write on the page while you are reading it, with the reading surface behaving like paper and the writing staying where you put it. In 2010 one company in Virginia answered that with a hinge.

The eDGe was two screens in a folding case. On the left, a 9.7 inch e-ink panel at 825 by 1200, grayscale, for reading and for marking up with a stylus. On the right, a 10.1 inch color LCD running Android for the browser and everything else. enTourage Systems called the format a dualbook, a word nobody else has ever needed. It went on sale in early 2010 at 490 dollars.

I did not see one. It sold in the United States and never turned up in a shop here, so my version of the problem stayed exactly where it had been: a PDF open on a laptop with a mouse pointer standing in for a pen. That is worse than paper in every way except the cost of the paper.

~ the record ~

~ the hinge ~

Apple announced the iPad on 27 january 2010, three weeks after enTourage showed the eDGe at CES, and shipped it on 3 april at 499 dollars. Nine dollars more. One sheet of glass against two panels and a spine, and the argument was settled before most people had heard the word dualbook said out loud.

The eDGe had its own problems that had nothing to do with Apple. It launched on Android 1.6 and stayed there while the platform moved on without it, so the tablet half aged out of the app ecosystem it depended on for its own value. enTourage tried again on 12 november 2010 with the Pocket eDGe, the same idea shrunk to a 6 inch e-ink side and a 7 inch LCD at 399.99 dollars. Making the object smaller did not answer the objection to the object.

~ what it became ~

The content store closed on 21 may 2011 with a final week to pull down anything you had already bought, and by the 23rd the devices were confirmed dead. enTourage told owners to buy books from Google eBooks and apps from Amazon's new appstore instead, which is a polite way of saying the store had been the last standing part of the company and now it was not either. Fourteen months on sale, from first shipment to last download.

The design outlived the firm by a little. Pleiades Publishing picked it up and produced a version 2.5 in november 2011, mass produced by Foxconn, running Android 2.2 on a 1 GHz Marvell chip. Almost nobody saw it. entourageedge.com still resolves, and what answers now is a permanent redirect to an Indonesian slot gambling site, which is the standard afterlife for a domain nobody renewed on purpose.

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