The Tolino Shine is a new ebook reader that is going to be available in Germany starting March 7th.
The Tolino Shine was born through a partnership with Bertelsmann and Deutsche Telekom and Germany’s leading bookstore chains—Thalia, Weltbild, and Hugendubel.
The device will sell for €99 (about $129 USD) from 1500 partner retail stores and online. It will be competing with Germany’s other ebook reader brands, most notably the Amazon Kindle and Kobo.
The Tolino Shine has a 6″ E Ink high-res screen with 1024 x 758 pixels. It also has an integrated frontlight and an infrared touchscreen. The device comes with 4GB of internal storage, 25GB cloud storage, and a microSD card slot.
The Shine has Wi-Fi for downloading ebooks through an integrated ebookstore that contains 300,000 German-language titles, and it can also download ebooks from the individual booksellers’ websites. The Tolino Shine supports EPUB, PDF and TXT ebooks, so choice of content selection is going to be wide open.
Other specs include an 800 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 7 week battery life, and access to 11,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots via Telekom in Germany.
One of the most interesting details about this new ereader according to the specs is it has an Android operating system. That could potentially lead to some interesting software modifications and the ability to install Android apps. The Nook Touch and Sony PRS-T1 and T2 all run Android and they can be hacked to install other ereading apps and do all kinds of crazy things. It’ll be interesting to see how the Android twist develops on the Tolino Shine. It sure makes me wish I could get my hands on one of these…
Tolino Shine – Hands On (german/deutsch)
Via: Gigaom
Nathan, what I see as being interesting about this e-reader is the cloud infrastructure that comes with it (25GB of storage and 11,000 free hotspots). That’s a lot of storage for e-books and could be a game changer for an open e-reader platform.
The open platform is PR-speak, the reader has Adobe DRM and can read PDF with and EPub with DRM. It may be rooted without problem, but only then I would call it open: being able to install and use Android Apps, like Amazon Kindle for Android.
You can use a lot of stores, meaning except for Barnes & Noble and Amazon, but I do not call that open.
A real difference would have been to force the publishers to use NoDRM or at least Watermarks as soft DRM, that would have been open.
Of course for those of us who regularly strip DRM and use Calibre, that is not important.
And Cloud-Storage means, without encryption the Telekom knows what I read and probably how I read – it is a little different to most other shops, who only know what they sold me, except for may be Amazon. There are few benefits, if you use more than one device to read or you have more ebooks than fit on the reader. But you can add a memory card, adding up to 32 GB to the available memory of 2 GB. Depending on the software of the reader, this may not be manageable, but at least it is possible without using Cloud-Storage.
Conclusion for me: I will certainly take a look at the reader, maybe wait for the first user-experiences or wait for it to be rooted.
The free Hotspots sound ok, but I know of only 2, I could use, at places where I shop, and I had this option all along, as the Telekom is my German Internet-Provider and my monthly price includes usage of the Hotspots – but I have so far never used one, so I cannot say how many will profit from that, and depending on the service. For example surfing could be restricted to a certain amount of data.
So T-Mobile is part of Telekom…hmmm
Looks like a nice device, I only wish we had a better look at the screen and the video was in English 🙂
Only tell me if it can be rooted, and which android version “es gibt” 😉
Does it read Cyrillic?
It reads Cyrilic, cannot rotate. I am very excited of device, very very light, good plastic like velvet in your hand. I cannot replace even with a better tablet. Very useful. Can give 5 stars from 5…