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$130 ereader to hit market – Paradigm Shift EER-051D
April 22, 2010 | 9:43 am
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By Paul Biba
BestTabletReview.com is reporting on this new ereader to be sold for $129.95. It includes a 5-inch color LCD screen, FM radio, MP3 audio and MP4 video playback and a photo viewer.
It will display EPub, PDF, DOC, FB2, PDB, HTML, ANSI and TXT and will have 2GB of internal flash storage and an SD card slot. Seemingly the company will not be selling directly, but is looking for distributors.
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Comments:
They just keep creeping cheaper, don’t they?
At this rate, it’ll only be a few months before someone breaks the magic $100 barrier.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see $99 readers for the holiday shopping season this year.
This particular reader has been available via Walgreens for a while. Early reviews at Mobileread seem to like the hardware/loathe the software which renders all supported formats as plain text.
It *is* however available to AARP members for US$95.
http://aarp.walgreens.com/store/catalog/Electronics/OpenBook-E-Book-Reader/ID=prod6016669&navCount=0&navAction=push-product
So it looks like a likely candidate for “first to $99 list price”.
With a 5″ LCD display rather than a 6″ e-Ink, and no DRM capability, even $95 seems a rather high price.
Here’s the link to the Delstar info on MobileRead that Felix was talking about: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Delstar_OpenBook — that one doesn’t claim to have FM radio reception.
Bear in mind that the hardware is actually a family of products. At least three that I’ve heard of at Mobileread. They all look exacty the same from the outside and their markettng is actually worse than their early software.
The Delstar Openbook has no DRM or FM, the newer version announced in the subject press release is supposed to. It is even rumored to support DiVX video files. (It certainy has the screen for it.)
With audi, video, 7 hrs batery life, paperback sizing, and a 5″ WVGA screen there is a lot to like here. And one enormous dislike: the software.
At $99-$129 DRM is optional for now; text formatting isn’t. Now, if it supported pdf properly (Yeah, I still despise pdf pretend-paper for books) one might be tempted to risk it as a short term reader for a kid or as a “disposable” fill-in while one waits for the mainstreaming of the blister-pack color LCD reader. (Say another year).
The thing bears watching if nothing else.