Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 28 January 2008 18:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
In some ways, the Readius sounds a bit like Amazon’s Kindle, although as it is built with 3.5G HSDPA technology it could be rolled out to countries across the world today, while the Kindle is primarily restricted to the US for now.
Readius looks like a great competitor to all eBook readers, not just the Kindle, especially with its mobile phone capabilities letting you make and receive calls. No specific mention is made of being able to buy books online, as with the Kindle, but its clear that one of the services that could easily be offered is an online book store you can access any time.
Equipped with only 8 ‘smart touch’ buttons, the user interface is meant to be ultra simple to use, allowing quick access to any of the main areas and the content within.
The technology looks very cool, with the screen rolling up into the device, which then folds up into a handheld unit similar in size to the average mobile phone (its dimensions are 115 x 57 x 21mm), making it as portable as any cellphone while having a larger screen than virtually any other pocketable device.
There is the catch of the screen only being 16 greyscales compared with screens on phones than can display hundreds of thousands and even millions of colours, although there are benefits, too. As the screen uses E-Ink to display text, battery life for reading alone is rated at 30 hours of continuous use between charges.
As a device primarily aimed at reading information, that’s a week or more of casual use between charges.
Clearly heavier use will drain the battery faster, as would any phone calls made or received on the Readius, although there doesn’t appear to be any actual indication of talk time users could expect at the Polymer Vision site as yet.
The Readius interface can be seen in the ‘World of Readius’ section of the
Polymer Vision website. As the site uses Flash, I can only link to the front page of the site, but once there, click on the ‘Applications’ button in the ‘World of Readius’ section.
Please read onto page 3...
