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By David Rothman

image A color e-book reader from Fujitsu is said to be the first one to go on sale, at least in Japan. The price will be just a bit higher than $1K. Specs:

–Eight-inch screen displaying 260,000 colors.

–Bluetooth and WiFi (b and g).

–Touch screen and stylus.

–Battery life of 40 hours of continuous use, or 2400 page turns.

A Wired blog says: "Books are stored on an SD card can can be bought from the online bookstore Papyless." Proprietary mischief at work here? Or some flexibility? In fact, Fujitsu talks about "A vast number of e-book sites" being "currently available on the Internet." Hope! Other details from the blog:

Curiously, the Flepia seems to be a kind of tablet/e-book hybrid. Along with the book reading software, the device comes loaded with Windows CE 5, meaning support for e-mail, spreadsheets, web browsing and the like. If you view this as a low powered, long life computer instead of a color e-book reader, it starts to look less expensive…

A Fujitsu press release says:

imageCompared to the FLEPia commercial samples which were used in field marketing, the latest FLEPia offers 1.5 times higher brightness and greater contrast, enabled through optimization of the color e-paper’s optical properties. Re-draw speed was also enhanced by 1.7 times…

imageTwo popular e-book viewers widely used on PCs or mobile phones in Japan – “BunkoViewer” (XMDF format; “bunko” refers to “library” in Japanese) and “T-Time” (.book format) are included as standard features. These e-book viewers enable downloaded e-books to be easily read with FLEPia. The e-book viewers offer an enriched reading experience compared to conventional paper-based reading, enabling readers to jump from the table of contents to desired sections and freely enlarge or shrink text or images. A vast number of e-book sites are currently available on the Internet, and a wide range of approximately 20,000 Japanese e-books in either XMDF or .book format can be downloaded with FLEPia (see “Content Storage Capacity” under Specifications).

So will there by a U.S. version soon, and what formats will it work with? Also, is it possible that even at $1000+, the new color gizmo could encourage makers of monochrome e-paper machines to lower prices a tad?

Related: Engadget and MobileRead and Techmeme and Google News.

 
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