Sony Reader Daily Edition reviewed: unworthy of cost premium or love
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.
Permalink | 
Laptop | Email this | Comments
Barnes and Noble CEO describes Nook as ’single best-selling product,’ critical to success
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.
Permalink | Barron’s | Email this | Comments
Acer tables e-reader plans, says market is ‘not that big’
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.
Permalink 
E-Reader-info | Taipei Times | Email this | Comments
Samsung’s E6, E101 and E61 e-readers shown on video
We were fortunate enough to get a quick moment with Samsung’s new assortment of e-readers back at CES, but the cool kids over at Notebook Italia were able to get the E6, E101 and E61 on video. There’s little doubt that these look awfully different than all of the other me-too options on the market, and the touch input seems to be extraordinarily responsive based on the demonstration. Speaking of which… hop on past the break to have a look yourself, cool?
Continue reading Samsung’s E6, E101 and E61 e-readers shown on video
Samsung’s E6, E101 and E61 e-readers shown on video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Entourage Edge suffers month’s delay, minor price bump
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.
Brother’s SV-70 e-book reader is a little bit cheaper, still $1,100
Remember the SV-100B “Document Viewer” from this time last year? It’s okay, we had to look it up too. With its $1,500 MSRP and exclusive release in Japan, it hardly made waves over here. We’re expecting the SV-70 to have a similarly ripple-free reception in the States, since it too probably isn’t coming here, but there’s no telling how Japanese businesspeople will take to it, ditching the Bluetooth module that gave its predecessor a bit of charm, and even the lowly 2GB microSD card that was formerly included on the way to a lower (but still high) $1,100 MSRP. Other specs remain the same, including a relatively expansive 9.7-inch, 1200 x 825 display, 100MB of internal memory, microSD expansion slot, and 83 hours worth of battery life. Why, that’s plenty of time to read even the lengthiest of pseudo-inspirational corporate memos.
Brother’s SV-70 e-book reader is a little bit cheaper, still $1,100 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Openmoko brings improved keypad / scrolling and math equations to WikiReader
It sort of blows our mind that OpenMoko has managed to sell more than a smattering of its $99 WikiReaders (you know, considering just how limited in scope this thing is), but evidently there’s a huge demand out there for improvements. The company has just rolled out its Spring 2010 update, which adds math equations, fluid scrolling, and enhanced navigation. Reportedly, the latter comes in the form of an improved touchscreen keypad, which is said to make “finding Wikipedia entries easier and faster and makes enjoying one of the largest reference archives known to mankind even better.” We won’t bother pointing out the gross exaggerations in that there comment, but at any rate, existing users can download the update today free of charge. Don’t all hurry over at once and crash the servers, okay?
Openmoko brings improved keypad / scrolling and math equations to WikiReader originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.