Oh goodie, the big day is finally approaching. Karl McGoldrick, CEO of Polymer Vision,
has announced the upcoming release of the
Readius device, which has been setting our geeky hearts aflutter for some time now.
Quote:
Our exclusive rollable display technology is the core around which we build our plans, and in the Autumn of this year we will launch Readius, the first pocket eReader. Readius offers the advantages of eReaders as known today - but now all neatly wrapped into a pocket sized device.
Readius is very much a data centered mobile product, designed around eBooks, eNews, RSS feeds, and receiving email messages. It is optimised for mobility by allowing instant access to hundreds of books from your pocket, while the integrated 3.5G data connection ensures high speed downloads of pre-ordered content and instant news updates on the go.
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The first countries to get the Readius are
England,
Italy and
Germany, according to the
NYTimes. US Americans will have to wait until early 2009 before they can lay their hands on it. But don't expect the Readius to be a bargain (emphasis mine):
Quote:
Thomas van der Zijden, vice president for marketing and sales, said the Readius would be more expensive than the Kindle, which now is selling for $359.
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Specification:
- Dimensions (closed): 115 x 57 x 21 mm
- Dimensions (open): 115 x 160 x 21 mm
- Weight: 115g
- Display: 5-inch, 320 x 240, 16 grey levels, rollable organic thin film transistor backplane with electrophoretic front plane
- Interface: 5 touch (capacitive) buttons with optical feedback, tactile buttons for options, back and power
- CPU: ARM11 - 400MHz
- Memory: 128MB Ram, 256MB internal storage, High Capacity Micro SD external
- OS: MS Win CE
- Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band, UMTS/HSDPA Dual band, USB, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, DVB-H (optional)
- Power consumption: up to 30 hours active reading
So we got no information about supported e-book formats. But I found something about
Content World, which seems to be a platform where users can fetch pre-formatted content for their Readius device:
Quote:
Content chosen via Content World can either be free (for example RSS feeds, free e-books) or paid content (newspapers, e-books). After selection, the content can be transferred to Readius in 2 ways:
- download to the PC and subsequent USB side loading from PC to ReadiusŪ.
- over-the-air transfer of the content directly to Readius at defined future moments (for example once per day, or every hour). No PC connection is required for these regular over-the-air updates
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So who is going to be the first to send us some juicy unboxing photos of the Readius ?
PS: To celebrate the upcoming launch, we've now opened our dedicated
Readius forum!