“Handsets carrying the Walkman name and equipped with built-in digital music players helped raise Sony Ericsson’s second-quarter phone sales by 33%, to 15.7 million units,” BusinessWeek reports.
Could Sony add e-books to the mix on the phone? At 176×220 res on the Sony screen, e-books would be far from impossible. But the specs don’t show them listed among the entertainment options. Perhaps Sony is thinking we all want to read e-books on the Sony Reader–in, of course, the dreadful BBeB format if possible. Sony so far has been stubbornly deaf to pleas for a more a more open approach, including, of course, use of a truly nonproprietary format for e-books, one that large publishers could live with.
Meanwhile, in marked contrast to Sony, iRex is open to a bunch of e-book formats and has reached out to the user community in other ways. People are responding by not just ordering the iLiad E Ink machine but also by coming up with useful hacks for it. Roland Rohde reports that users have even coaxed the iLiad into doing Web browsing.
Related: Microsoft’s Zune to Challenge Apple iPod, in ExtremeTech. I wonder how e-book-worthy the Zune’s display will be.
