Hanvon N510, a Chinese 5-inch Electrophoretic E-Book Reader

Since fewer and fewer people actually do have the time to read a paperback book, there's an increased level of interest in eBook readers, those ultra-portable devices that allow you to read not one, but thousands of books, wherever you might happen to be at the moment. For this reason, everyone's trying to get a head start on this market segment (that will most likely boom in the next few years), including here Chinese firm Hanvon, which has just introduced what it touts to be the world's first 5-inch eBook reader that employs electrophoretic technology – the Hanvon N510.

The device from Hanvon uses E Ink Vizplex Display technology, which employs electromagnetic pen input and a high-end electronic paper. The 5-inch screen provides a pixel density of 167 PPI, a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, 180 degrees viewing angles and it is only 11mm thick.

Moreover, the e-paper display is sunlight-readable and, besides having quite a paper-like appearance, it doesn't feature an EMI generating backlight/inverter, meaning that, most likely, you won't have any problems using it for very long periods of time.

The portable e-book reader from Hanvon also offers a very high level of versatility from the point of view of compatible files, since it will work very well with TXT, HTML, PNG, JPG, PDF, XEB, CEB, MP3, MTXT formats. Unfortunately, the device doesn't have any internal memory in order to store these files, but instead it relies on SD cards for this function (1 GB SD card included in the sales package). However, for transferring the files from the computer to the SD card directly, the device has also been equipped with a miniUSB port.

The Hanvon N510 eBook reader sells for around 300 US dollars, which is a rather OK price point, compared to all of the other similar products to be found on the market.


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