The latest review details are behind a paywall, but a reader on the Amazon discussion forums says these are the final scores as printed in the December 2010 issue of the magazine. (Higher is better.)

Kindle 3G/Wi-Fi 72
Kindle Wi-Fi 68
Kindle DX 67
nook 56
Alex 49
Kobo 40

CR also has some good general advice for ereader shoppers. The magazine says that “Wi-Fi should suffice for everyone except bookworms who want the unlimited [3G] access,” and that you should “think twice about readers… that lack any wireless connectivity. Such models require a USB connection or use of a memory card to load new content, which is a significant inconvenience.”

Via Chris Walters’ Booksprung blog

The Carl Brandon Society announces a prize drawing to support the The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund.

The Carl Brandon Society, an organization dedicated to racial and ethnic diversity in speculative fiction, will hold a prize drawing of five eReaders to benefit the Butler Scholarship, a fund that sends two emerging writers of color to the Clarion writers workshops annually.

In keeping with the Society’s support of literature from and about people of color, the prizes include five eReaders: two Barnes & Noble Nooks, two Kobo Readers, and one Alex eReader from Spring Design. Each eReader will come pre-loaded with books, short stories and essays by writers of color from the speculative fiction field. Writers include: N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Terence Taylor, Ted Chiang, Shweta Narayan, Chesya Burke, Moondancer Drake, Saladin Ahmed, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and more.

“Octavia wanted everyone to enjoy the powerful stories writers of color can produce when we write speculative fiction, so this drawing would have made her very happy. It’s a wonderful win-win-win event, raising money for a scholarship that helps writers of color while sharing their creations with the world,” said Carl Brandon Society co-founder Nisi Shawl, winner of the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

“It’s so appropriate that booksellers are supporting the development of the next generation of writers, with the next generation of reading devices. This fundraiser will help ensure that great and thought-provoking literature will be coming out of our community for a long time,” added Claire Light, CBS Vice President.

“We’re thankful for the generosity shown by Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Spring Design in donating the devices for this drawing,” said K. Tempest Bradford, Special Events volunteer. “Thanks to them we can offer some of the best eReading devices available.”

The drawing’s tickets will cost one dollar US ($1) and can be purchased at http://carlbrandon.org/drawing.html. Entrants may purchase an unlimited number of tickets, which will be available from November 5, 2010 through November 22nd, 2010. Sales will close at 11:59PM EDT on November 22nd. Winners will be drawn randomly from a digital “hat” and announced online.

To purchase tickets, read details about the eReaders, or to learn more about the Carl Brandon Society, please visit carlbrandon.org/drawing.html.

About the Carl Brandon Society

Carl Brandon Society’s mission is to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction. We envision a world in which speculative fiction, about complex and diverse cultures from writers of all backgrounds, is used to understand the present and model possible futures; and where people of color are full citizens in the community of imagination and progress.

About the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship

Established in 2006 after the author’s passing, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship provides funds to writers of color accepted to the Clarion and Clarion West writers workshops. The scholarship has been awarded every year since 2007 to a total of seven students. The fund allows the Carl Brandon Society to further the author’s legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan (now located in San Diego, California), giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.

Carl Brandon Society Website: http://carlbrandon.org

Drawing website: http://carlbrandon.org/drawing.html

From a Computerworld Report by Daniel Grotta and Sally Wiener Grotta

Before we begin, the introduction is worthy of a special mention since it offers a very useful overview of the e-book reader scene.

From the Comparison Section of the Intro:

Including privately branded devices and Asian knockoffs, there are probably more than a score of e-readers currently on the American market. For this roundup, we focused on currently shipping, readily available models, most by mainstream vendors. These include the Alex, jetBook Lite, iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Libre eBook Reader Pro, Nook and Pandigital Novel.

Sony has recently introduced new versions of its three e-readers: the Reader Pocket Edition, Reader Touch Edition and Reader Daily Edition. While the upcoming models weren’t available in time for this article, Computerworld did get a first look at the devices — check out the article: Sony introduces three light, bright touch-screen e-readers

Because of deadline pressures, we could not include a number of e-readers scheduled or rumored for imminent third- or fourth-quarter release, including devices from Velocity Micro, Asus, Acer, Sharp, Sony and Copia.

Each Review Contains the Following Sections:

+ What’s Interesting:

+ What’s Good

+ What’s Not

+ Bottom Line

+ At a Glance (Basic Specs)

Access the Complete Report

Source: Computerworld

Via Resource Shelf

Grammata,a Spanish company specializing in the design, content and sale of eReaders and Spring Design announced that Grammata will open an online ebookstore and sell the Alex eReader in Spain online and in retail stores starting July 2010 starting with 1000 titles. Grammata is currently consolidating digital books from various Spanish publishers and expects to offer 15,000 to 45,000 Spanish language eBooks for sale and selected copyright-free classics at no cost through its online store at www.grammata.es. …

Grammata will offer the Alex worldwide and hopes to address all Spanish speaking customers interested in getting Spanish titles with Alex as their Reader.

I didn’t know who the backers of Spring Design were, but according to a Business Week article they are pretty high class. The article says they include co-founder Jack Yuan, who had co-founded SanDisk and Albert Teng, who was a general manager at Intel. The article also lists Google and Adobe as partners, but gives no details.

InformationWeek

Covered devices include the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Plastic Logic Que, Skiff Reader, Sony Reader, Spring Design Alex, and Apple iPad. The article goes into a fair amount of detail about each device’s strengths and weaknesses.

It’s a great resource for people just considering getting into e-book devices.

Meanwhile, Engadget has an in-depth look at the Spring Design Alex. On the whole, they found it enjoyable to use (with just a few minor caveats), but note that commercial e-books and an app store will not be available until the summer, and the $399 price is rather high compared to the Kindle (which seems to have become the gold standard against which people, even me, judge other e-book prices).

I must admit, I am becoming intrigued now by how much people seem to like the Alex. Perhaps it is not so bad for being a chimera after all.

All in all the review finds the machine a good experience, but questions whether its high price is worth it. The Alex has a $150 premium over the Kindle and the Nook, but, as the reviewer says, that premium buys you a true multitasking device that does both the basics and the extras well.

With all the “me too” readers out there now it’s refreshing to see someone thinking in larger terms. It does mean, though, that I’ll hold off buying one until I see if a branded, subsidized version will come out. I wonder if Kobo is thinking about this?

Since the JooJoo has been delayed,

Another delayed e-book device, the Spring Design Alex, began taking pre-orders yesterday for $399, according to CrunchGear. The Alex somewhat resembles the Nook in form factor, save that the LCD screen is a full 3.5” touchscreen display rather than the Nook’s small rectangle.

To the Alex’s credit, the Android-based device will allow a lot more interactivity over the web than most other e-book readers, including websurfing, watching videos, and online communication. It even has a micro SD card slot and USB 2.0, and supports Adobe ADEPT DRM.

But on the other hand, you’re only going to be reading from one display at once—so at any given time, either 1/3 or 2/3 of the device’s screen real estate is going to be useless to you. That extra screen real estate makes the Alex a bit unwieldy—like a Kindle DX with less readable screen area. And honestly, it seems a little expensive for what you get—just $100 more will get you an iPad.

Samsung has announced it is going to come out with an Atom-based slate PC platform in the second half of the year. Samsung execs stated that the device would be more powerful than the iPad, being a full-fledged PC with a slate form factor rather than just a media and web tablet.

Meanwhile, Samsung is also releasing four e-ink based e-book devices in Australia, ranging in screen size from 5” to 9.7”. Device features will include wifi, access to Google Books, and a QWERTY thumb board on one model. Versions of the devices released in the USA will have access to Barnes & Noble’s e-book store along with the Nook; there is no word on when or which of these devices will come to American shores, however.

Gizmodo also reports on an apparent new iPhone app strategy from publishing conglomerate Hearst—they are releasing a series of $1.99 apps built on a template, which act as content aggregators, drawing together photos and news stories from around the web on a given subject (such as Green Day or Angelina Jolie). Gizmodo compares this to the strategy used by banned appmaker Perfect Acumen, which also “charge[d] people for other people’s content.”

It does seem odd that they are doing this in the wake of Apple’s plan to crack down on templated apps—not to mention a bit ironic given how another megapublisher, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, is complaining about Google profiteering on other peoples’ content.

Apple has hired Richard DeVaul, a “wearable computing” expert, as its new senior prototype scientist, says Ars Technica. DeVaul’s dissertation involved a form of augmented-reality glasses, which could use GPS and accelerometer data to assist in providing information. Since then, the company he co-founded, AWare Technologies, has created an iPhone fitness tracking application.

DeVaul’s employment provides some tantalizing glimpses at the direction that Apple’s next mobile device developments might take. Might we eventually plug a pair of “iGlasses” into our iPhone and view augmented reality that way, rather than through the device itself? Might we be able to read an e-book on our glasses rather than a handheld screen? This opens up some very interesting possibilities.

For that matter, we might eventually be projecting e-books on our wall. Apple recently filed a patent covering projector systems, possibly with an eye toward integrating picoprojectors into future versions of existing devices—laptops, AirPort hubs, maybe even iPhones. Nice to know Apple plans to continue innovating.

Laptop is reporting that you can pre-order the WiFi version today, but that the 3G version will not be available till the end of July, as the company is still working with carriers. According to Laptop the Alex will be localized with Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Hebrew languages. They also have a video (which can’t be embedded so take a look here).

UPDATE:  The Alex is now available for pre-order in the Spring Design shop for $399 in black or white.  Delivery will be “by April 14″.  You can find the shop here.

Here we have yet another ebook reader and yet another rumored launch date. This time the rumor is in regards to the Alex ebook reader from Spring Design and suggests that it will soon be available. Well maybe soon is an understatement here, according to the rumor it will be available as of March 16 which is just a few days away now. Of course, rumor aside the official Spring Design website is still referring to a “first week of March” time frame. And as we can tell from the calendar, that has already passed.

# The features are very well thought out. The number of options is a bit overwhelming. There are literally dozens of different settings.
# There are Notification icons in the LCD status bar including – new email, battery indicators, uploading/downloading data, and more. Plus you can scroll through notifications and open them.
# ‘Touch and Project’ feature that lets you project the text content of a website from the LCD screen to the eInk screen.
# There’s an Alex Market to download applications. You can also download applications from your browser.
# Alex’s browser has 5 text sizes, javascript, and a pop-up blocker. You can also clear the browser cache, history, and stored cookies.
# Email App supports up to 5 POP3 or IMAP accounts. The Email App is very impressive.