[Nate the great]

As you probably know, Samsung announced a line of ebook readers at CES last week. I already reported on the press conference, and I was planning to write about my impressions of the liseuses themselves. But the Samsung booth was both crowded and noisy (good for them!). I only feel comfortable giving an opinion for the E100 (the 9.7" e-reader).

I was not impressed with the build quality of the E100; it felt like it would be easy to warp it and break the screen. I'm also not impressed with its abilities (the same as the other Samsung models) or its price ($699). The market for large screen readers is crowded, and an ebook reader needs to do something to set itself apart. The E100 looks pretty, and that's about it.

I've attached all the good photos I took (the lighting conditions were not good). The e-reader with a joystick under the screen is the 5" non-slider model with Wacom touch screen but no Wifi. The liseuse with only 2 buttons under the screen is the slider model with Wifi and Wacom. The keyboard model also has a 6" screen with Wacom, Wifi, and (according to the label on the back) 3G.

I would like to spend some more time with the smaller models. They were nice to hold and looked very pretty. If only they were available in some color other than white.

P.S. There is one interesting footnote that I can add. The 3 smaller models all apear to be using the same firmware, and all think they are the SNE-60k. The SNE models are a line of ebook readers Samsung released on the Korean market. It looks to me like these 4 models were developed by the same team that worked on the SNE e-readers. This is good news for the user because it might mean that the new ereaders will have fewer bugs (I hope).