more on ereaders

[toastykitten]

Jeff Bezos apologized for the Kindle controversy in which Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from people's Kindles and refunded their money.



It doesn't make me want the Kindle any more. But I recently discovered that txtr is coming out in October in Germany. It looks great, and I've told Mark he needs to ask his co-workers about it when it comes out. Here's the specs I'm concerned about:

Main Features

• eInk Vizplex 6" display at 600x800 pixels
• 146mm x 128.2mm x 8mm, 260g
• Freescale ARM11 CPU 532MHz
• capacitive slider interface
• next generation Epson display controller
• Linux kernel
• integrated 3D accelerometer for automatic orientation detection
• full integration with txtr online community platform

Communication

• internal 3G/GPRS modem
• USB 2.0 cable connection
• Bluetooth 2.1 for audio, external keyboard and future enhancements
• WiFi
• low power 2.4GHz near range communication

The communication specs means that it can compete with the Kindle better than the Sony Reader or other ereaders. I like that you can read PDFs on it, and they have their own store, similar to the Amazon store, except you don't have to go through the hassle of converting your documents. That they use Linux is a plus and it makes me think that they won't pull the Amazon crap where they tell you there's a limited amount of times you can download a work but they can't tell you how many because it varies with each publisher. And it looks to be ideal for reading comics and manuals. I just wish I knew how much they are going to sell it for.

Comments

[loic.livejournal.com]

The Kindle is Linux too, of course...

The big Kindle win is that they have a store with a shit-ton of books. As we saw with the iPod, that's a prerequisite to competition. And it's hard to get. Google needs to cut a deal with publishers to be able to sell all of their scanned material.