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Written by Daniel
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 11:39 |
The Readius e-reader, with a flexible screen that weighs little more than a cell phone, will launch in the middle of this year
By Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
January 22, 2008
InfoWorld
Polymer Vision plans to launch Readius, an e-reader with a flexible screen weighing little more than a cell phone, in the middle of this year, it said Tuesday.
The long-awaited gadget will be a boon to those who now get their daily news fix by scanning the headlines on an e-reader -- but who miss the way they could roll up their old newspaper and tuck it in a pocket when they had finished reading.
The key feature of the Readius is its flexible screen, 5 inches across the diagonal, with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels (QVGA) in 16 shades of gray.
It has mutated a little since Polymer Vision showed early prototypes of the wrap-around flexible screen a year ago: "The concept is the same, but we have added mobile phone functionality," said Thomas van der Zijden, vice president of sales and marketing.
The latest device, now ready for production, functions as a triband phone with a high-speed mobile wireless connection. Unlike Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader, which can only connect to U.S. wireless networks, the Readius will operate almost worldwide, as it works with the HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) 3G (third-generation) service favored by European, Asian and some U.S. operators.
Although the device will function as a phone, dialing unfamiliar numbers will be awkward, as it has only eight buttons. That's not a problem, according to Van der Zijden, as mobile phone users make most calls to numbers already in their address book -- and the Readius can be synchronized with a PC through its USB 2.0 connection or Bluetooth 2.0 wireless interface.
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