The iRiver Story HD brings much needed innovation to the dedicated ebook reader industry with its 6″ XGA 1024 x 768 resolution display.
Not only is it the first ereader with a high resolution display (most 6″ ereaders are 800 x 600), it uses new screen technology developed by LG that actually has a good shot at taking on E Ink, a company that pretty much holds a monopoly on the epaper industry.
E Ink’s only major competitor is SiPix, and SiPix’s epaper screens are noticeably inferior. E Ink needs more competition to press innovation because their technology has improved very little over the past 5 years. Vizplex to Pearl is hardly noticeable to the average person and E Ink’s color displays have yet to reach the market.
Hopefully iRiver can succeed in adding more depth to the dedicated ereader market with the Story HD, due to arrive in May.
Aside from the screen, the Story HD sports some other interesting features. It comes with the new faster Freescale chipset, which will supposedly make it the fastest ereader. It can download ebooks over WiFi, and supports the Easy WiFi Network for accessing any open or subscribed WiFi network automatically. Battery life is rated at 3 weeks. And the Story HD supports Adobe DRM for PDF and EPUB ebooks encumbered with DRM. For memory it has an SD card slot and comes with 2GB internal.
No official word on pricing.
iRiver Story HD Video
Via: Engadget
nice,- seems to be a better contrast than pearl-e-ink,- but the former iRiver devices got always a higher price than the other competitors,- i expect the same for the new HD-variant,- at least in europe.
nontheless competition of display-technology is always important,- especially for the sleepy PVI-Company.
bytheway the interesting color e-paper-mirasol-Display-Tech
will hopefully strengthen the rat race in 2011
Mirasol is looking good, but I think the sleeper might just be Pixel Qi.
well, in terms of colored e-paper, the upcoming PVI Pearl-based colored e-ink Display just reached the level of colored newspaper. The colors are to dull to touch the colored magazin paper-level. The overlayed Color Pattern dilluteted the contrast of the underlayed greyscale Pearl-e-ink layer. Seems not very innovative compared to the other technologies. PVI pushes to come the first e-paper-device because they fear the competitors. The CEO of Amazon is not convinced of PVI-Color-e-ink and not want it to build into the next colored Kindle-Generation.
As far i can see the competitor-Techs are Mirasol, Philips-colored oil-e-paper Tech, Fuji-still works to improve they technology and perhaps more or less Pixel Qi. Some of them build facttories for mass production, others are still in the labatory.
..and Bridgestone not to forgot to mention as a possible competitor with there micro-powder-pased colored e-paper-technology.
The iRiver Story HD will be my first E-reader when it is released, whatever the price. I would have bought the Kindle 3G months ago, but the fact that Amazon tries to hold your books hostage, as they do not natively support epub, has put me off.
I also want to be able to buy and read dutch and german ebooks too and they are almost exclusively published as epub. And the same is true for library books. Amazon is going to loose this battle in the long run with these ridiculous antics.
It is a pity, because the Kindle is a wonderful product I really would have liked to own. But for non-american booklovers it is not smart to buy the Kindle.