Fujitsu moves colour e-reader to pre-order stage
Books, documents and presentations in colour
Move over Amazon, Fujitsu has begun taking pre-orders for what’s thought to be the world’s first e-book reader with a colour screen.
Fujitsu's Flepia: for e-reading in colour
Called Flepia, the device's screen has a 768 x 1024 resolution and is 2in larger than the 6in display found on Amazon’s recently launched Kindle 2. Flepia’s screen has a 1.8s refresh rate, so it’s not designed for movies, and can be operated by a “digital pen” and “touchscreen buttons”.
It’s worth noting that the screen doesn’t use a backlight, which should help conserve battery life. Fujitsu insists it's well-readable outdoors, from which we assume means it's a trans-flective panel.
Speaking of battery life, Fujitsu said Flepia’s power pack should hold out for 40 hours after a full charge. The gadget’s 12.5mm thick – at its slimmest part - and weighs in at around 385g.
Wireless, Bluetooth, SD storage and a slim design
Wireless communication is catered for, with 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 included. An SD card slot that supports cards of up to 4GB is built in, and data can also be moved off of or on to the device through its USB 2.0 port.
Running Windows CE 5.0, Flepia will display several eBook formats and a whole host of alternative file formats, including PDF, TXT and Word documents. It also has built-in stereo speakers, should you want to jazz up your reading experience.
Fujitsu’s Flepia is currently available to order in Japan ahead of its April ship date. It's priced at ¥99,750 (£728/$1011/€775). Fujitsi hasn't said when or if it'll bring Flepia to Europe. ®
COMMENTS
The battery life is what makes it (and other eInk) products
worth the money. Compare it with netbooks/laptops all you like, it won't make one whit of a difference: all it will do is make you look like a silly ass. Try a 40-hour-battery-life device sometime and then take up your netbook - I guarantee that you will be chucking latter boat anchor against the wall 2 hours later when its battery dies. PH 'cause even she could figure this out.
It's how much
At £750 You would be much better off buying a cheap laptop cant see them selling very many.FAIL..........
Great first attempt at color for a reader
I'm looking forward to seeing this in the stores. Owning a Sony Reader and an IPhone using Kindle as I do makes me a target customer of this kind of a device but at over $1000 though it just won't cut it to get color, even with those features. The cheaper alternative now for color is a Eee or Acer Aspire one netbook. Get that for about $300 and you can read 1/2million old books via google and newer ones via various book outlets on the net. The game will change when those guys make a similar device, that can also run Windows or OSX (hint hint Apple) at the price point that they can make the net books.
How does it make the colour?
I can see how the mono displays work - they flip the half black, half white micro beads.
does this mean that there are three (or four) beads in a 'cell'? red, yellow, blue (black or green?)
Very clever, tgho'
What type of screen?
So is this digital paper still or is it more of a standard LCD affair?
