14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the e-reader market is proving to be a very harsh place now that a certain family of e-book readers has more or less reached the point of no return, as suggested by what happened to the content store.
Considering the special conditions that have to be met by a company in order for an e-reader to have any success, it was clear from the start that some models weren't going to make it.
Granted, this more or less holds true for any product type, from the IT industry and beyond.
Either way, it appears that Entourage has decided to shut down the content store for its Edge series of e-readers, hinting at the death of the device itself.
The main reason the original Edge did not take off was the price of $500, but the second (Pocket Edge) also failed to sell, because of several factors, even though it has been going for as low as $150.
For one, the e-book reader never made it past the Android 1.6 operating system, contrasting with the B&N Nook Color, for instance, which has Android 2.2.
The second cause was the lack of application availability which turned out to be more important that one would have perhaps expected for a device type designed for book reading before everything else.
Either way, the app store is now closed and May 27 is the last day when users who own one of the above devices can download software. The company directed users towards Amazon.
“As for Apps, we really like what Amazon has done with an Android App store. Go to the Amazon page and download the Android Store App and you will now have access to a lot of Android Apps that Google would never give us access to,” says the website.
According to Good E-Reader, Entourage is now designing a different electronic that will probably be a tablet, or something close enough to it.