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Originally Posted by Snappy!
That is so hilarious ... they did not even bother to take a new pic?? ... or perhaps they are the OEM for Sony Reader?  |
I'm beginning to think it's more like disrespect.
Here's a
press release from them where they claim to have "beaten" Sony, whom they apparently consider the industry leader:
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A world lightest and thinnest ebook reader was firstly launched in the Cheng Du today. It is learned that this kind of the ebook reader has successfully beaten the leader of this industry – SONY, and be the most advanced technology in the world now.
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As near as I can tell, they mean that they're the "most advanced" because their reader is the "thinnest and lightest" -- the article suffers from indifferent xlation, and it doesn't really say much. Certainly they haven't beaten the Sony Reader on price or sales (they're a hundred bucks more, and they just launched).
A friend who played with their software (which apparently gave his anti-virus software conniptions, BTW) sent me some screen caps which I've attached. I haven't played with the software myself, nor am I likely to after his experience, but all I'd want to see is these screen caps show anyway, so....
From the caps, the book he looked at looks like a scan & OCR job.
They did include the copyright info, which is a bit ironic, given my increasing suspicion that their content may be 'free' because they didn't pay for it in the first place.
As you can see, there's also an ad-space at the front, so they're clearly expecting some revenue from that.
Beyond that, apparently a lot of the english covers they show sport the Amazon "look inside" logos on them, so it would seem that ... borrowing the Sony marketing pix isn't an isolated thing.
It seems to me that if this is a good product, then it'll stand on its own well enough. While I am a bit put off by what seems to be their attitude toward other folks' property rights, the
hardware (what little we actually know about it) looks reasonably nice. The light, thin (apparently plastic) case makes me want to hold it in my hand before I decide whether how durable it might be. I'm also concerned about the apparent disinterest in any formats other than their proprietary one. That seems like a bit of a step backwards to me.
They have a bunch of other releases (four just yesterday)
here, but they seem to be more of the same: vaunting, low on actual info, and indifferently xlated.
