Is This a Kindle Killer?
By John DeNardo |
Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at
12:22 am
Just weeks after the announcement of Amazon’s Kindle 2, Fujitsu today announced the release of the world’s first color e-Paper “mobile terminal”, now for sale in Japan.
It’s called FLEPia (Nice name. Not.) and its features include:
- 8-inch display screen capable of showing up to 260,000 colors in high-definition (768 x 1024 resolution).
- Equipped with Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN.
- 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged..
- Supports up to 4GB SD card (the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper-based books).
- Books downloaded directly to device.
- Embedded stereo speakers for audio playback of e-books.
- Input: touch screen, digital stylus, scroll key, function buttons.
- Two e-book viewers included as standard feature (BunkoViewer [XMDF], T-Time [.book]).
- Loaded with Windows CE5.0, enabling use of an Internet browser, e-mail, and various software.
So is this a Kindle killer? Here’s a clue: the FLEPia costs 99,750 Japanese Yen, or roughly $1,015 U.S. dollars.
Sweet Jeebus! I’m guessing, no, this is not a Kindle killer.
[via ZDNet]
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Filed under: Books • Science and Technology
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I wonder if you can load other book readers on it…as I’m not recalling running across any eBooks with either of those two readers mentioned!
As for the price, TeleRead has an interesting thought: Maybe this price point for color would drive down the prices of the B&W units.
Too bad it’s not an a E-Ink display but an XGA display. The inclusion of Bluetooth and WLAN is great though.
Off topic a little, but Sony and Google have reached an agreement for the Sony Reader to get 500,000 books for their reader.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090319/ap_on_hi_te/tec_google_sony_reader
Sony and Google have reached an agreement, but it isn’t an exclusive. Also, all of the content is in the public domain, and thus has been available for years via Project Gutenberg and Manybooks and other sites…for the Newton, the Palm, the Handspring, the iPhone, the iTouch, Cybook…so this is less of a big deal than it is being touted in the headlines.
I think I would be interested if authors and publishers eventually embrace the technology, creating content that is additional and exclusive to the e-book. I’m thinking of clickables that explore the author’s research, play music identified in the writing (or that inspired the author), illustrations, and any other things that can transform the experience. I want an e-book to be something different, something more, something unique. I want a new entertainment.
Perhaps, Neal Stephenson had it figured out with “the young lady’s illustrated primer.” Give me that.
Also, by making the content unique, companies will then have the incentive to make the “hardware” as cheap as possible. Make the money on the content. You could have people that already own two print copies of The Diamond Age dishing out for the enhanced, interactive, e-book version.