March 19, 2009

FLEPia color eBook reader on sale soon in Japan

Fujitsu have announced that they plan to start selling the FLEPia color eBook reader to consumers in Japan, after the trials they been doing for some time.

Previous coverage of mine on the FLEPia can be found here:-
Description and Specs (taken from the Fujitsu press release) include:-
  • Color!  260,000 colors to be exact
  • lightweight and thin
  • 8-inch screen with a resolution of 768x1024
  • Screen refresh times could be an issue as speculated on in previous reviews of this product, with times such as 1.8 seconds (1 Scan), 5 seconds (2 Scans), 8 seconds (3 Scans) depending on the quality desired and the number of scans needed to achieve it. But if the trials found this acceptable enough to launch the product....?
  • Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
  • High-speed wireless LAN - IEEE802.11b/g (11/54Mbps)
  • USB mini-B connector supporting USB2.0 (480Mbps)
  • Sound: Stereo speakers (embedded), 1 standard headphone connector
  • Power-efficient, with up to 40 hours (bi-stable display does not require power for display of a screen image)
  • SD Card slot. With a 4GB SD card, the color e-paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper-based books when each book is 300 pages long at 600KB per book
  • Touchscreen and stylus input (we assume that the stylus works like a finger on a resistive touch screen until we hear more)
  • For now the reading software and formats supported seem to be very specific to Japan
For now the price is 99,750 JPY, which at the time of writing was 776 Euros or $1015 USD.
If you are in Japan you can order on-line from the Frontech on-line store

You can also read what Wired thought of it.