Mar 22 2010
Alex eReader to ship mid April
Spring Design Opens Alex eReader Store
The Alex eReader, which made its world debut at Lunch at Piero’s during CES 2010, is closer to entering the market. Spring Design has opened the web shop for pre-orders of the Alex, priced at $399. The Alex is Android-based and runs a number of Android apps right out of the box. You can annotate, highlight, even make voice notes to augment what you are reading. You can browse, enjoy multimedia, use Gmail on the LCD screen. Two surprisingly loud speakers deliver great sound or you can listen on the headset provided with the Alex.
EPD and LCD screens can work together through the Duet Navigator extending the LCD display up into the larger EPD screen that lets you read anything, even in bright sunlight. The handy LCD screen also lets you look up things easily as you read a book on the EPD screen. But here’s the real magic: Imagine if books came with built-in hyperlinks? Spring Design suggests that publishing is going through a major change and has designed LinkNotes into the Alex that lets users or publishers embed links into text. Textbooks will never be the same again, nor as bulky. The Alex is 4.7 x 8.9″ weighs only 11 ounces and is less than a half inch thick. And imagine if you could not only read about that chemistry experiment but actually watch it on the LCD screen either playing off the Web or stored on the microSD card for up to 32GB of extra storage.
A slight delay in opening its store was attributed to web site glitches, but now everything appears to be running fine. By the time the Alex ships in mid April, there will be resellers and partners around the world. Spring Design has already developed the Alex in several foreign languages.
Spring Design plans to expand its developer community and provide plenty of content to read from various partners that will be announced later.
