First seen at this year's CES in Las Vegas, Samsung's entry into the e-Reader market has now been made official. The device offers much of what we've all come to expect from an electronic reader such as e-Ink display and WiFi but, thanks to a deal with Barnes & Noble, users will have access to over a million book titles, magazines and newspapers.
With a growing number of similar products now available, Samsung needed some extra zing to help get its eReader noticed. That comes in the form of a deal with Barnes & Noble which will give users access to a huge online bookstore for title purchase. Users of Samsung's eReader will enjoy the same benefits as Nook owners, such as the facility to lend purchased titles to friends for up to two weeks free of extra charge.
Apart from a cool mobile-phone-like sliding operation to reveal some navigation keys, Samsung's device has much the same features as other e-Readers such as a six inch e-Ink display with an eight gray scale adjustment, support for e-pub, PDF/a, TXT, bitmap and JPEG, text to speech functionality, built-in MP3 player and internal speakers. Title downloading is undertaken via 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 also features.
The eReader has 2Gb internal memory with microSD expansion and offers users the facility to write notes in the memo application, make journal or scheduler entries, scribble margin annotations or highlight important text courtesy of an electromagnetic resonance stylus pen. Synchronization with PC-based Outlook is also available.
The eReader is set for a Spring release at about US$300 but it's worth mentioning that Samsung also showed off a larger device at CES so this release could well be followed up with another. We'll keep you informed.
