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.