Asus officially unveils 9-inch e-reader, the DR-900

[Jos]

We knew Asus was jumping into the e-book reader market, and even saw alleged specs for a couple of devices, but today at CeBIT the company has finally gone and made it official by announcing the DR-900. Featuring a 9-inch, 1024x768 resolution touch screen display made by SiPix, the new device hopes to give Amazon's Kindle DX a run for its money with good connectivity and great battery life.

According to what Asus has shared so in terms of specs, the DR-900 will come with 2GB to 4GB of storage space built-in (expandable through SD cards), Wi-Fi and optional 3G connectivity. The device works in landscape mode, has a virtual keyboard, supports handwriting recognition, and can handle PDF, TXT and ePUB files. It will also have a headphone jack for improved text-to-speech and MP3 listening. The picture above also suggests some sort of integrated bookstore, but the company made no mention of a partnership or anything proprietary.

Asus has gone with a minimal design that's "no thicker than a pencil" and features just a few buttons on the sides. They tout this as a slim e-ink device so the screen is probably only grayscale -- that and the fact that battery life is unusually long as the device can last for 10,000 page turns with wireless off. Unfortunately there's no news regarding pricing or release dates yet, but hopefully the company will share more in the coming weeks.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/38069-asus-officially-unveils-9-inch-e-reader-the-dr-900.html

 

[TomSEA]

I'm an avid reader but have stayed away from the reader devices as they just didn't have all the options I wanted. Plus there's the pricing issue - let's see, drop $300 on an electrical device that I could lose, pour coffee on or break and has limited battery life, or pick up a used paperback for $2.00 that anything can happen to and I won't care. Decisions, decisions...

BUT...this ASUS seems to have enough options to rethink that. Will have to wait and see who they package their book offerings with as well as pricing.

 

[Guest]

talking about specs: have you seen this? http://www.skiff.com/skiff-reader_tech-specs.html

I'm also waiting for a solid reader with native PDF support and made point of wating until Skiff and iPad are on the market... then I'll choose

 

[JudaZ]

for a good price, i would defenitly buy one ...

far better then an iPad ...but still dont think it can beat the kindle.

its an eReader after all. If the screen still acts lika your standard computer monitor, you cant read text on it for to long, this is where kindle shines..... and iPad for instance is yet again an epic fail.

..

 

[Tekkaraiden]

If it has decent pdf support I'd buy it to use with service manuals.

 

[helobuff]

Hmm, I like that brining on all this competition is bringing down the price of the kindles at least. Not necessarily going for the asus ereader.. I too think the kindle shines when it comes to reading.