Hasta La Gadget!

What’s this we hear? Is it the distant thunder of sanity emanating from Acer’s Taiwanese headquarters? The Taipei Times is reporting this morning Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang’s announcement that his company will not be releasing an ebook reader “for now.” It was only a month ago that Jeng-tang and his crew were telling the world about the aggressive inroads they were going to make into the Amazon-dominated e-reader market, but it appears some second-guessing has been taking place in those Taipei boardrooms, which has led to the scrapping of the earlier plans. Considering the absolute glut of interchangeable E Ink devices out there, we have to agree with Acer’s perspective; you either have to come up with something unique — like the Nook, the Edge, or the Adam — or just focus your energies elsewhere. Good job on remembering that we’re more interested in seeing that mysterious ultrathin laptop than just another run of the mill 6-inch e-reader.

Acer tables e-reader plans, says market is ‘not that big’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ll be forgiven for just glazing over during CES and ignoring all those ebook readers that were raining down, but Liquavista‘s attempt at marrying the endurance of e-paper with the desirability of color is well worth another look. The company has now furnished its LiquavistaColor dev kit with a QWERTY keyboard and also recruited Texas Instruments into the fold, whose OMAP system-on-a-chip is doing the grunt work under the hood. The video after the break indicates that touchscreen interaction is also planned, but the most impressive thing has to be the total lack of any redrawing pauses, which may be the considered the biggest drawback to the many E Ink devices out there. For the more conventional monochromatic crowd, we’ve also grabbed video of the LiquavistaBright, which replicates the rapid refresh skills, but omits the keyboard and OMAP in favor of a more compact form factor and Freescale iMX5x hardware. Slide past the break to see it all.

Continue reading Liquavista demos its color e-paper display with a new QWERTY-equipped dev kit (video)

Liquavista demos its color e-paper display with a new QWERTY-equipped dev kit (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was kind of inevitable with all these e-readers competing for attention at CES that some of the manufacturers would overestimate their capabilities and make promises they could not fulfill. One early candidate for the newly inaugurated promise breakers’ club is the dual-screen Entourage Edge, whose February delivery date and $490 price have both been elevated, albeit slightly, to their new values of March and $499. The delay is clearly the most significant change, though we should note the careful wording, which states that “new orders will ship March 2010” and thereby leaves a glimmer of hope for early pre-orderers. The rest of us shouldn’t be too downhearted either, it’s a moderate time to wait, and we can just fantasize that the company’s busy filing away at that splendiferous bezel.

Update: Entourage have gotten in touch to let us know the extra $9 on the price is for the new (as of February 1) inclusion of the Documents To Go software, and pre-orders placed before January 12 will be shipped this month. Candidacy for promise breakers’ club is denied. Better luck next time.

Entourage Edge suffers month’s delay, minor price bump originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading iREX DR 800SG e-reader now shipping via BestBuy.com

iREX DR 800SG e-reader now shipping via BestBuy.com originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re still patiently waiting for Sipix’s color e-paper to hit the commercial realm, but ’til then, we suppose we’ll pretend to be content with the monochrome variety. Bookeen, which obviously has a hard row to hoe in the slam-packed e-reader market, recently announced what appeared to be a relatively ho hum reader in the Orizon. Today, however, we’ve learned that it’ll ship with a multitouch 6-inch Sipix display (800 x 600 resolution), and it’ll be available for purchase this May in the United States and UK. For those who’ve forgotten, it will arrive with WiFi, 2GB of internal memory, Bluetooth, an accelerometer and support for PDF / ePUB formats. Still, if the rumored $250 price point sticks, we sort of doubt those to-be Kindle customers will turn their back on an always-on connection, but hey — if the hackers step it up, this whole multitouch thing could really be enticing.

Bookeen Orizon to ship this May with multitouch Sipix display originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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