November 11, 2008

On your doorstep

Original Post from March 4th 2008.

I guess sometimes you don't see what you have close at hand....last night thanks to a magazine article on tech ("Kindle, the iPod of books") in a womans magazine (my wife passed to me, honest!) I came across an eBook provided by a Spanish company from Granada (if you didn't know, I'm based in Barcelona, Spain).

It's called Papyre 6.1 (web). It's not clear to me if it's just imported and distributed by the small Spanish company FacThor Inovacion, or they have been involved in design. The User manual is really basic, and probably represents the extent of their work (to translate into Spanish, I mean).

Either way, it doesn't seem a bad device and is along the lines of the CyBook, Janke and others in this kind of "vanilla eBook" trend, probably caused by a few Chinese/Taiwanese ODMs...

All the web's in Spanish, so I only translate here the main specs:-

  • Samsung Arm9 200MHz
  • Rechargeable battery with up to 10,000 page turns (that even beats Sony and is the "record" at the moment I think)
  • E-Ink Vizplex display, 6" diagonal, 600x800 pixels, 4 grey levels per pixel
  • Weighs 200g
  • Measures 184mm x 120.5mm x 9.9mm
  • 32MBytes SDRAM (first time I've seen that spec'ed!)
  • 2MBytes NOR FLASH built-in
  • 3.5mm headphone jack, stereo
  • USB 1.1 (not 2.0 :-( )
  • SD slot (up to 4GBytes)

Formats:
- PDF, TXT, DOC, HTML, MP3, CHM, ZIP, FB2, image formats

Shipped with the base product is:-

  • security leash
  • earphones
  • 1GB SD card ("400 books")
  • USB cable and power adapter
  • SD reader for your PC (nice touch!)
  • 950mAh Li-ION battery
  • cover

and all for 350Euros....if Sony would sell the PRS 505 outside of the US then we might have some competition.....

If you can read Spanish, here is one Spanish tech-blog review of it, that is pretty well done and balanced and leaves quite a good impression of it.

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