Personally I’ve been thinking about E-ink quite a bit as I’m preparing to start training regularly. With the amount of charts and plates you could need on hand when flying, a small cockpit is not the place you want to unfold giant maps or sift through stacks of paper. E-ink readers, while still fairly young in tech, are at what I consider to be THE future of printed media. I don’t own one myself, but more and more I’m seeing trends that I like.
Looks like someone else likes the trend too.
If the Sony Readers and Amazon Kindles of the world start doing their thing in color (they are all still B&W), I envision a whole generation of pilots whipping out a book shaped gizmo, flicking it on, and having access to thousands of maps, airport diagrams, approach plates, checklists, and more. But wait, Fujitsu is saying they’ll release a color E-ink reader in the fall…
There would be no need to unfold anything, and with the multi-touch gesture technology found on devices like the iPhone, you could have a dizzying array of scalable mapping, plotting, highlighting, and tracking systems at your fingertips.
I wonder if Garmin will get on the E-ink bandwagon with some sort of GPS enabled ebook…
Tags: charts, e-ink, kindle, navigation, reader
Stumbled across your blog post while looking for thoughts on paper charts vs. all of the new technological findings. Being the owner of an iPhone, I am all about the latest gadgets, but I can tend to be a smidge old fashioned when it comes to charts… for an alternative to having to unfold a giant sectional, I would definitely say you should check out http://www.skysectionals.com/. Basically they have taken the same information you would get from the FAA/NACO sectionals and turned them into easily accessible sectionals that fit perfectly on your kneeboard. The website is a cinch to navigate, and I was able to look at a sample before making up my mind to try them out. I have really enjoyed using them, and it’s great because once I downloaded the sectional I could print off as many as I needed, and I could print just the ones that I needed for my trip.
Thanks Lindsey! Good stuff!