The Asus DR-950 has been announced and should launch at the end of March or early April
It has a 1024×768 resolution screen and uses SiPix technology, not E Ink. It is only 9mm thick and incudes a virtual keyboard, handwriting recognition, 2GB or 4GB of memory and an SDHC slot, along with a web browser and RSS feed reader. It will have a built-in dictionary and text-to-speech. WiFi will be included and there will also be an options 3.5G HSDPA,WiMax module.
Formats include PDF, unprotected epub, html, text and various audio and picture formats. Price is £250, about US$450, and more details and pictures are here.
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e-readers, eReader, ereaders, Paul Biba, Asus
I just found that Kindle DX (Global ver.) is USD 489. I remembered the price was used to be over $500 or did they drop the price recently?
Its always been US$489; no price drop yet.
It doesn’t do any flavour of mobi? It doesn’t read Kindle books or Sony protected books? and he authors of link claim it “puts the Kindle DX to shame”?!? I admire ASUS and love some of their products but this seems just weird to me.
Why would we care about non standard formats like the Sony or Kindle? It does ePub.
Is SiPix a reflective display technology? I’m not married to E-Ink per se, but a backlit display for a dedicated e-reading device is the non-starter for me. I already have a laptop, an iPod touch and a Palm Pre.
I’d love to see a summary of the non-e-ink reflective display technologies being developed. Everything has a clever name, these days, including new versions of old tech. It’s going to get hard to keep them straight, I fear.
SiPix is an alternative e-paper technology to E Ink. At MobileRead, DaleDe reported on a prototype SiPix device:
“The contrast seems as good. The background color is slightly different. I would classify Vizplex as slightly tannish while the SiPix is grayish but the difference isn’t all that great. Black seems just as dark.”
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=742228&postcount=9