Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung still hasn’t committed to a formal launch date for the e-reader line it launched at CES, but the company narrowed down the launch date from “early 2010” to “this spring” this morning — which makes sense, seeing as spring has nearly, uh, sprung. We’re only hearing about the six-inch E6 at the moment, along with a new Barnes and Noble partnership — we’re not sure anyone will pick the Samsung over the popular Nook, especially at the $399 price point we heard at CES, but at least there’s a built-in content ecosystem. Interestingly, we’re not hearing anything about the 10-inch E10 or QWERTY-equipped E61, both of which would fill large gaps in the B&N lineup, but we’re looking out for more info — we’ll let you know. In the meantime, you can watch a video of all three devices right here.

Update: Samsung says the E6 will be $299 at launch, which is a nice little drop. As for the E10 and E61, all we’re hearing is that they “may be coming soon,” so who knows what’s going on.

Samsung E6 e-reader coming to Barnes and Noble this spring for $299 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For all the fuss made at its launch back in August, Sony’s Reader Daily Edition has all but dropped off the map in terms of interest. Remember, Sony’s response to the Kindle gave us a 7-inch touchscreen device with free AT&T 3G data for a street price of $399. Now we’ve got a proper in-depth review of the thing. On the plus side, the interface is simple and easy to understand right out of the box with nice, oversized icons suitable for your meat digit manipulation. Unfortunately, the Daily Reader was also sluggish. According to Laptop, it was common to suffer a delay of a few seconds after tapping an icon or other interface item. Worse yet, about a third of the time the Daily Reader’s touchscreen display wouldn’t respond to taps or swipes at all. Conversely, page turns responded with a relatively snappy (for E-Ink) one second delay — faster than both the Nook or the Kindle. The EPD display was also a bit “dull” compared to non-touchscreen e-readers like the Kindle and Nook thanks to the additional screen layer that enables touch — a common issue that affects all touch-enabled e-readers, we might add. This resulted in some eye strain in medium to low light. Connectivity also proved a sore spot. AT&T’s network would inexplicably drop out during testing. It was plenty fast, however, when available, capable of delivering new books to the device in just seconds. Performance still lagged both the Kindle and Nook during comparison testing though. Laptop‘s verdict isn’t surprising then, finding the $140 premium you’ll pay for the Daily Reader difficult to justify compared to the EPUB supporting Nook or Kindle 2 with its better design and superior content selection.

It’s worth noting that Laptop did not test the Daily Reader’s library finder services that lets you check out e-books from the local branch for free for a period of up to a month. A shame; as library nerds we think that’s one of the killer features compared to the competition.

Sony Reader Daily Edition reviewed: unworthy of cost premium or love originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve spent all our time hearing about a DR-950, but today at CeBIT ASUS has trotted out a DR-900 as its first 9-inch ebook reader. It doesn’t appear manifestly different from what we’ve heard and seen already, with WiFi connectivity augmented with a 3G option, and a battery life rated to last a pretty radical 10,000 pages on a single charge. The interface on show clearly invites touch interaction, and we can fill in a few gaps with what we know of the DR-950, namely a 1024 x 768 resolution on a Sipix panel, 4GB of integrated storage, 3.5mm headphone jack, and support for PDF, TXT, MP3 and ePUB files. We’ll be tracking down an official price and release date shortly, as well as smudging a few fingerprints on these before the day is through.

ASUS makes DR-900 e-reader official originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s nothing, nothing, we love more than talkative CEOs. And though this may not be a case of some brash smack-talking, we still appreciate Mary Lou Jepsen giving us a fresh update on the development of those delectable Pixel Qi displays. As you already know, CES provided us with our first opportunity to see one in person (in the shape of the Notion Ink Adam) and we were left highly impressed with the versatility and responsiveness of the hybrid display. Since then, Mary Lou and company have recruited a few more partners and, while production of the 10-inch units is ramping up as expected, new form factors are also being contemplated. She still won’t tell us any names, but we’re excited by the possibility of (relatively) pocketable Pixel Qi devices — how does a Dell Mini 5 with a 40-hour battery life sound?

Pixel Qi has ‘several more’ partners since CES, is working on new form factors originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a conference call with investors yesterday, Steve Riggio described the Nook as a great success and the company’s best selling product. The former is predictable, but the latter is kinda weird. You typically wait to have more than one own-brand product in order to describe anything as “best-selling,” but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s comparing the Nook against books published under the B&N name. It’s still disappointing that, much like Amazon, Barnes and Noble refuses to issue actual sales figures. The closest we get to that is Steve’s boast that the Nook’s release has fueled a 67 percent increase in online ebook sales — an effect that would have been even greater if the company had more stock of the device to sell. In the long term, he sees the Nook as a stimulant of traffic and sales, both in its retail and online stores, and a central component of his company’s strategy. As to the iPad? Steve skirted that question by noting that B&N ebooks are also available on PC, Mac, iPhone and BlackBerry devices. Which is good to know.

Barnes and Noble CEO describes Nook as ‘single best-selling product,’ critical to success originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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