Portable Ebook Reader

Plastic Logic recently demoed their portable ebook Reader at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference near San Diego. They surprised a lot of attendees by giving everyone a *free* Plastic Logic Reader. This device won’t be available to the general public until Jan 2010, but apparently Plastic is determined to build the hype early.

Here’s a video showing a demo of the Reader at the conference:

And here’s a list of some of the features that we were able to gather from different sources:

• A screen that’s larger than 10″ - wow!
• Extremely light-weight and thin
• Touchscreen (like the Sony Reader PRS-700)
• 3G wireless capability (like the Amazon Kindle 2 and Kindle DX)
• The devices will be able to “beam” documents back and forth between each other (we’re guessing via BlueTooth or maybe IR)
• WiFi support
• Ability to scribble and add annotations
• Very long battery life
• Native support for many Microsoft Documents and PDF files

The price is currently unknown but many sources are saying it will likely be more expensive than the Amazon Kindle DX - that means greater than $500!

The target market is reportedly “mobile business professionals” according to Plastic Logic’s Director of Marketing, Maureen Mellon. Their CEO went on to say, “Everything is designed for the business user, and business users require a lot of different types of content. It’s really not about books at all.

Hmmm…sounds like it’s designed more to be a business document, magazine, and newspaper reader, rather than for novels or ebooks.

One apparent flaw that the media is jumping all over, is that it takes 4 seconds to turn pages, although in the video above you can clearly see that it takes less than that. Plus, the public release isn’t for 8 months so I’m not sure why everyone would make such a big deal out of a work-of-progress.

For more info on the Plastic Logic Reader:

• A detailed article - TG Daily
• Many, many pictures - LaptopMag

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