Computers

enTourage presents the Pocket eDGe dualbook

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The Pocket eDGe has a 6-inch e-Ink reader to the left and a resistive touch LCD tablet to the right
Getting to grips with the Pocket eDGe at CES: the tablet display
Getting to grips with the Pocket eDGe at CES: the e-Reader display
The e-Reader display is Wacom Penabled and the tablet side has a resistive touchscreen
USB and mini-USB ports to the bottom of the Pocket eDGe
The top edge, showing headphone jack, power button and card slot
The hinge keeps it all together and allows for interaction between the two display areas
A colorful pocket library
Getting to grips with the colorful Pocket eDGe at CES
Getting to grips with the Pocket eDGe at CES
The Pocket eDGE next to its bigger brother at CES
The enTourage eDGe on display at CES
The enTourage eDGe on display at CES
The Pocket eDGe on display at CES
The Pocket eDGe has a 6-inch e-Ink reader to the left and a resistive touch LCD tablet to the right
The tablet benefits from portrait or landscape orientation
The e-Reader display is Wacom Penabled and the tablet side has a resistive touchscreen
The Pocket eDGe has a 6-inch e-Ink reader to the left and a resistive touch LCD tablet to the right
The pocket-book-sized Pocket eDGe
View gallery - 39 images

For those users who simply couldn't make up their minds whether to buy an e-reader or a tablet computer, the enTourage eDGe dualbook offered a bit of both to ease the stress. Now the enTourage has a baby brother called the Pocket eDGe. Like its larger sibling, it has an e-Reader screen and a Tablet screen in the one device, is Wi-Fi enabled and includes a video camera, stereo speakers and microphone. We got up close and personal at this year's CES.

The Pocket eDGe from enTourage Systems consists of a couple of hinged screens with a 6-inch e-Reader display to the left and a 7-inch WXGA tablet to the right. The left side features a Wacom Penabled e-Ink screen at 800 x 600 resolution and benefiting from 16 shades of gray. As well as hand-written annotation and highlighting, users can also write notes on or sign a document and email it as a PDF.

The e-Reader display is Wacom Penabled and the tablet side has a resistive touchscreen

The company may have a good reason for making the 800 x 480 resolution LCD tablet side a resistive touchscreen, but we still can't help feeling that capacitive would have been a better choice. The interaction between the two sides of the Pocket eDGe gives users the ability to attach links to documents or websites or to search Google or Wikipedia for words or phrases on the tablet side while viewing the e-Reader side.

The 1.35 pound (0.6 kg) Pocket eDGe runs on a Linux operating system with Google Android (version 1.6 on release, but it's not known if a newer version is now in residence) taking care of the Tablet side of the device. There's 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and although 3G is not available via the device itself, it is compatible with some 3G USB adapters. Users can choose to listen to audio via a 3.5mm headphone jack, through the stereo speakers or compatible Bluetooth headphones.

The displays can be folded over so that each is screen is back to back with the other or held like a book with both screens on show, and the LCD tablet has portrait or landscape viewing orientations. A video-capable 2 megapixel camera also features, the battery is said to be good for 6 hours of dual usage or 11 hours of e-Reader only and there's 4GB of internal memory, with 3GB being available for the user. Physical connectivity and expansion is courtesy of a microSD card slot and both standard and mini USB ports.

Getting to grips with the Pocket eDGe at CES

There's support for both ePub and PDF e-Reader formats, together with numerous audio and video formats including MP3, OGG, MP4, AVI and Flash. Users can head to the enTourage Systems' web store to select from over 250,000 commercial e-books or over a million public domain e-books, thousands of periodicals, millions of music tracks and numerous Android apps.

The Pocket eDGe is available now for US$399.

An overview of the Pocket eDGe's main functionality is shown in the video below:

View gallery - 39 images
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3 comments
Richie Suraci
Looks like another great product I most likely will buy.
Facebook User
I don\'t see the point. There\'s reader apps for Android for just about every e-book format. I just want an Android tablet that\'s about the same size as a Palm LifeDrive, but with a larger, higher resolution screen. There\'s lots of wasted space around the LifeDrive\'s 320x480 screen. What this Android tablet should have is a 5-way button on the front.
Akemai Olivia
The video is so misleading. This device does not do OCR for photos (and calendar or newspaper) and NFC for videos. If you want to save battery life with an e-ink display, go for OLPC XO-1 display as it can do both.