Sony announced a slimmed-down version of its “Digital Paper System” tablet today (May 21), called the DPT-CP1. It’s an e-ink “electronic notepad,” as Sony calls it, meant to replace all the notebooks and printed books in your life, for a cool $600.
The 10.3-inch, 8.5-ounce tablet uses a similar type of display technology found in e-book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle products, which effectively replicate the experience of reading physical paper on a digital screen. But unlike a Kindle, the CP1 is also meant to be drawn on, and comes with a stylus designed to replicate the feeling of writing on paper with a pen and a pencil. The new model also lets users fill out interactive PDF forms, and Sony has built a new app (for iOS and Android) that lets users port over documents to read, notate, or sign on the CP1. (If those users had a Samsung Note 8, however, they’d be able to do all that without this tablet.)
The tablet boasts a battery with a three-week lifespan, but it’s unclear whether replicating the look and feel of paper and pen is enough to attract users away from other tablets (or e-readers) that do far more for less, or just taking notes the old-fashioned way. (Reviews of the older 13.3-inch model were mixed at best.)
You could buy 5,000 sheets of paper from Staples and absolutely splurge on a classic Mont Blanc “Meisterstück” ballpoint pen, and you’d still come in about $130 below the cost of this tablet. Of course you wouldn’t be able to carry all that paper around in your messenger bag.
Perhaps if you’re attending Harvard Law School, as the person notating the tablet in Sony’s preview images appears to be, then amortizing the cost of the single-use tablet over the course of whatever you’ll make with that lucrative law degree after you graduate isn’t such an outlay. But for everyone else: The new iPad, which starts at about $465 (with a stylus), is probably a better bet. You could even throw in a $80 Kindle if you had your heart set on reading on an e-ink display, and still come in under the cost of Sony’s tablet.