Sony's smaller, cheaper Digital Paper tablet reaches the US
The 10-inch E Ink slate is available for pre-order now.
Was your heart aflutter when you heard that Sony was releasing a smaller version of its Digital Paper E Ink tablet? If you live in the US, you can satisfy your heart's desire... well, almost. Sony has started pre-orders for the 10.3-inch model (the DPT-CP1) through retailers for $600. That's far from a trivial purchase, but the $200 price advantage over the 13.3-inch variant might be just enough to sway you if you don't need the size of the larger model. You're still getting a long-lasting, lightweight tool for annotating documents and filling out your calendar, just in a notebook size that stands a better chance of fitting in your bag.
The company hasn't committed to an official release date, although Amazon lists the CP1 as arriving on June 21st (we'd take that with a grain of salt until Sony says otherwise).
As it is, both Digital Paper variants will receive some welcome upgrades on May 30th. There's a new mobile app for Android and iOS to help shuttle documents to the device. You'll get screen capture and video output modes for sharing your work with a larger crowd, support for smart forms (including interactive PDFs), a page jump feature, view panning, automatic page rotation and a thumbnail viewing mode to survey files at a glance. If you want to use Sony's slate as a part of your professional workflow, it should be a little easier going forward.
