Hasta La Gadget!

Sure, we’d love to be hanging out with this device in person, but we suppose this is second best. ASUS UK has some shots of the upcoming DR-950 e-reader, sporting 9-inches of grayscale SiPix e-paper. It admittedly looks pretty great under these idealized lighting conditions, and the homescreen interface looks simple and oh-so-touchable. Hopefully we get to put the device through its text-to-speech, 3G and ePub paces soon enough.

ASUS DR-950 touchscreen e-reader spotted in the ‘wilds’ of ASUS UK’s office originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s decision to open the Kindle up to developers is a good, if late, idea. Clearly another response to the upcoming Apple tablet, the Kindle SDK could turn the mostly single-use device into a multifaceted source of entertainment.

Or not.

One of the reasons I love the Kindle is that it doesn’t try to do too much. I rarely use any of the experimental features Amazon built for it because, frankly, they stink. Web browsing on the Kindle is a painful experience. The browser can barely handle simple HTML and the screen refresh simply isn’t designed to handle the interactivity found on Web sites.

So what will developers do with the Kindle SDK? Already a couple, such as Handmark and Zagat, are building apps and games for the Kindle. Electronics Art’s mobile division is promising big things, too. Still, it’s a limited platform. It has a slow-to-update black-and-white E Ink screen, a zippy 3G Whispernet, speakers, a keyboard, and firm control buttons. Is there any hardware inside that Amazon hasn’t turned on? I hope so.

In any event, I asked my Twitter followers what apps they’d like to see developed for the Kindle. Perhaps because the Kindle hardware is so limited, I got just a few suggestions. I’ve added some ideas I heard around the office, as well as a few of my own.

Here’s the skinny from The Wall Street Journal: major publishing company HarperCollins is in talks with Apple about bringing e-books to the oft-rumored, still-unconfirmed tablet that’s expected to be the focus of its January 27th event. The article also states that other publishing companies have been in talks with Cupertino HQ. That jibes with what we’ve heard through the grapevine, specifically with Time Inc. property Sports Illustrated, and fits comfortably well with the New York Times conjecture from earlier today. E-book readers are all the rage these days, but like we said just after CES, we’d wager the future of the medium integrated into slates to provide rich, color multimedia presentations. Seems someone might be sharing in our perspective, but of course, this is just one of many, many, many Apple rumors we expect to see in the buildup to next week.

WSJ: Apple and HarperCollins negotiating e-book deal for tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ready for it? We’ve got more (and possibly less) on the color ASUS DR-570 e-book reader that stormed through our site over the weekend riding a wave of OLED anticipation. We now know that in addition to WiFi, 3G, and 122-hour real world battery life, we can expect lightning quick 0.03 second page turns (that’s about 23 times faster than the Kindle and its peers as you’d expect from a non E Ink display), 124 x 170 x 8.8-mm / 200-g footprint, 4GB of onboard storage with SDHC expansion, 512MB of SDRAM, and 1,530mAh battery. It also brings a built-in RSS reader, audio/video/Flash player, text to speech engine (presumably the Svox like the DR-950), and built-in web browser when it hits before the end of the year. There’s also a hint of online video streaming support via Amazon video on demand, 3D gaming and navigation (picture Blio page turning emulation), “One stop shopping for books, video, music,” and explicit support for ePub, PDF, txt, MP3, MP4, and AVI content formats.

The one thing we can’t confirm is the 6-inch OLED display originally reported; our data simply calls it the “world’s first 5.7-inch colorful eBook Reader” and we’ve heard rumors that Sipix (the panel of choice for the DR-950) is expected to ship a color electronic ink display in 2010. Doubt they’ll achieve 0.03 second refreshes with that though. Stay tuned as we dig deeper.

ASUS DR-570 color e-book reader gets detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, isn’t this a doozy. ASUS was a bit of a no-show in the e-reader arena at CES, but has dropped some knowledge on the Times Online’s InGear: it’s building a 6-inch color OLED e-reader, which flies in the face of previous rumors about an ASUS e-reader entry. The device, currently dubbed the DR-570 and pictured to the left, will play back Flash video, includes WiFi and 3G, and supposedly can last for 122 hours on one charge under “real world conditions.” It’s supposed to be released by the end of the year, and while from anybody else we’d assume this would cost an arm and a leg, the ASUS brand gives us some hope that we might actually be able to afford one when it hits.

[Thanks, Ian S.]

ASUS DR-570 e-reader to sport 6-inch OLED color screen, 122 hours of battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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