14 DAY TRIAL // E-book readers are the things that, in the not-so-distant future, might bring about the demise of paperbacks and hardcovers, but unfortunately, they're quite far from turning mainstream, at least for the time being. However, the future of this family of devices is most likely a very bright one and this is why the Taiwanese company Netronix Inc. has just announced the development of a very interesting addition to this concept, namely a reader fitted with a 6-inch touchscreen.
Pretty much as you might have expected, the most important selling point the EB-100 is the 6-inch E-Link display, which offers a total viewing surface of 122 x 99 mm. Furthermore, the screen can attain a maximum resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, 170 dpi and 4 grayscale levels.
The reader is supposed to work with a fairly large number of e-book formats, including here TXT, PDF, RTF and HTML/CHM, but it can also be used for displaying photos in JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG formats. Moreover, the device can also double as a media player (at least to some extent), since it's capable of playing MP3 and AAC files and offers support for several languages, including here English, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and French.
According to the spec list provided by Netronix, the reader is built around a Samsung S3C2440 AM9 processor running at 400 MHz, accompanied by 128 MB of SDRAM and an equally large amount of NAND flash memory, for storage purposes. However, this rather limited space can always be boosted up via the SD extension slot, which supports storage capacities of up to 4 GB.
It's also important to note that the necessary power is provided by the built-in 1000 mAh Li-Ion rechargeable battery (4-6 hours recharge time), which will allow users to view up to 8000 pages. Additionally, users can also go online via the optional 802.11g module, which could make it a pretty serious contender for Amazon's Kindle.
Unfortunately, the company has provided no information regarding the pricing or availability of their e-book reader, but by the look of things, this is yet another of those cool products that will never actually make it out of Asia.
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