Gadget of the Week - e-ink readers

This week’s gadgets are the e-ink based readers from iRex and Sony respectively. These devices promise to be the prototypes for a whole series of electronic books that, their developers hope, will do to books what the iPod did to music.

Both gadgets are based on the same underlying technology from a start-up called E-ink, both are currently pricy (€650 for the iRex iLiad, $350 for the Sony reader) and neither seems perfect. However they do seem to be available (or if not on sale soon in the Sony case) and they do promise significantly longer battery life than LCD based readers - a key advantage.

Given the price difference it would seem logical to buy the Sony reader rather than the iLiad, but Sony seem enamoured with their proprietary reader format, and, although they also support PDF and both rich and plain text formats, for some reason they omit HTML and open eBook formats. Likewise the iLiad supports a wider range of connectivity options including both WiFi and Ethernet whereas the reader only supports USB and flash memory options.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 1:12 am and is filed under New ICT Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.