BERLIN—Smart for its simplicity, the Boogie Board Rip eWriter, on display here at IFA, uses a no-power LCD with a stylus to let you jot down notes, illustrations, or anything you can scrawl, and transfer them to your computer where you can archive or share them as PDFs.
The term “tablet” is is a bit misleading since the prototype model I saw here at IFA felt a lot more like a toy than, say, an iPad. The Rip (which stands for Record Image. Preserve.) is constructed of lightweight black plastic, with a 9.5-inch diagonal writing surface and a gray plastic stylus that slides into a slot at the top. Above the writing surface, there’s a Save button to commit your notes to the tablet’s internal memory and an Erase Lock button so you don’t accidentally delete what you’ve created. A MicroUSB port lets you connect the Rip to your PC so you can offload the PDFs.
So how does this thing work, you ask? Well, the writing surface on the Rip is a reflective, pressure-sensitive, plastic LCD and you create images by pressing on the LCD with with the stylus. The harder you press, the wider the lines you create. To clear the screen, you might feel the urge to shake it, like an Etch A Sketch, but you have to hit the Erase button with removes the image by applying an electric field to the display.
Since the Boogie Board Rip uses a no-power LCD, the tablet requires no power to generate or retain images and only a small amount of power to erase an image or upload a file to a computer, the company claims the rechargeable batteries last for more than week at a time. Combine this with all the paper you’ll save, and you can’t deny the green appeal of the Boogie Board Rip. Paperless office, anyone?
Priced around $100, the Boogie Board Rip will be available in November.
For more of the products we've seen at IFA, hit the slideshow below.