The iRiver Story story

It's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) time of the year again, and no doubt it will bring a raft of eReader product news. Here's one from iRiver...as reported by Engadget.

It seems an iRiver eReader device is to emerge at last! They have been on-off with it for quite a while, occaisionally shoing concepts but not talking much about products....now it seems they have soming for us in 2010.

The industrial design looks very Kindle-like with the included keyboard oif a very similar design to the amazon device.

If the name "Story" is anything to go by, I'd say ludic, fiction reading is their target (like most manufacturers at the moment).

It has fairly standard specs for devices at this time, except maybe a larger than normal embedded memory of 2GByte

• 0.36-inch thick 
• 6-inch e-ink display
• integrated MP3 player
• 2GB of internal memory
• SD expansion slot
• USB 2.0 connectivity
• battery good for 9,000 page turns
• 
  
  with plans to add Wi-Fi later this year
  

It supports viewing of "Office file" formats including PPT, DOC and XLS as well as PDF.

eBook formats supported seems to be only Adobe Digital Editions, although they mention they will add support for other content sources in Q1, hopefully with a firmware upgrade for early buyers.

Interestingly it also offers a "comic viewer" a potentially interesting application for eReaders.

For more details of the iRiver product, see the Hands-On post with included video from Engadget.