Spring Design announces two-screen e-reader

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 20 October 2009 00:01

Your IT - Mobility

Hot on the heels of last week's rumors about a new dual-screen e-reader from Barnes & Noble, Spring Design has announced Alex, a device that pairs a black-and-white e-ink screen with a full-color LCD screen. The device offers Internet access as well as support for e-books. 

Bookstore giant Barnes & Noble is hosting an event tomorrow in New York, at which the company is expected to announce a new e-book reader.

The rumors and leaked photographs described a device with a 6-inch black-and-white e-ink screen paired with a color LCD touchscreen.

Now Spring Design, an e-book developer founded in 2006, has announced Alex, a device fitting exactly that description. It features a 6-inch E-Ink display plus a 3.5-inch color LCD, as well as a headphone jack and speakers.

Running on Android, Alex can connect to the Internet via WiFi or mobile phone networks -- 3G, GSM, and EVDO/CDMA. The idea is that readers can call on the Web to "complement, clarify, or enhance what they are reading," according to the announcement.

Web content can be captured and displayed on the E-Ink screen, which would save battery life. Alex also features a slot for a removable SD card for added storage.

So far, the device supports Adobe's EPUB XML-based standard format (PDF description) for e-books.



Spring envisions Alex opening entirely new secondary publishing markets. "This is the start of a whole new experience of reading content on e-books, potentially igniting a whole new industry in multimedia e-book publishing for secondary authors to create supplementary content that is hyperlinked to the text," said Spring CEO Priscilla Lu in the announcement.

For more on Alex, see Page 2.