14 DAY TRIAL // A great number of companies have gathered at CeBIT this year in order to launch or promote their products and technological concepts. Already, we have been able to catch a few glimpses of things to come, even before the start of the show, such as the MSI GT660 gaming laptop, Zotac's ION nettop and ASUS' 890GX motherboards. Of course, ASUS' collection is definitely not restricted to just a couple of products and we have been able to learn that the company will also likely showcase or, at least offer, a preview of its first e-reader.
Given that e-book readers have grown in popularity over the past months, it is unsurprising to find out that a company such as ASUS would aim to carve out a share of this market segment for itself. In fact, the hardware maker has already been revealed to be working on several models that it plans to launch by the end of the year, one supposedly being in color.
Unfortunately, there really is little official information on what kind of product such an e-reader would be and whether it would have any special features that would make it more competitive. It is already known that the marketing performance of such a device is tightly linked to the availability of downloadable content. Unlike Amazon or Barnes and Noble, however, ASUS does not have a sizable amount of such content available, which means that its e-book-reading device will have to be all the more interesting.
One means by which ASUS could achieve such a goal would be an innovative display technology, such as the one that it showcased at last year's expo. At CeBIT 2009, the company exhibited a dual-display laptop concept. The technology, back then, used LCD and was still in its beginning stages. However, if ASUS could replace the LCD with E-Ink or some other type of low-power screens, it could create devices that more closely mirror traditional books.
The company should make an official announcement sometime during the next few days.
Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.