PocketBook’s German division has announced the upcoming release of the PocketBook Era Color with a 7-inch color E Ink Kaleido 3 screen.
The new model shares the same design as the original PocketBook Era, but it adds some upgrades, including a faster quad-core CPU and more storage space (32GB), and of course it has a color screen.
The new PocketBook Era Color is expected to get released in mid-April, and the list price is €259. It’ll probably be sold in the US from PocketBook’s Amazon store too, but there’s no word on the US price yet (it’ll probably be in the $279 range).
This is PocketBook’s second color model to use a Kaleido 3 screen. They released the PocketBook InkPad Color 3 last year with a 7.8-inch screen. Both have 300 ppi for black and white content and 150 ppi for color content.
The PocketBook Era Color has page buttons, it supports audio and text-to-speech (there’s a speaker and Bluetooth), it’s waterproof (IPX8-rated), it has an auto-rotate sensor, there’s a frontlight with adjustable color temperature, it has a USB-C port, a quad-core 1.8GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and it has a 2500 mAh battery.
Like most PocketBook’s, the software is based on Linux so it doesn’t support installing Android apps like some devices, but it does support a wide range of formats, including comic formats like CBR and CBZ.
In the video below, the PocketBook Era Color appears to have a flush front screen. Hopefully they fixed the cloudy front layer on the original PocketBook Era. They used an indented screen on the InkPad Color 3 so it doesn’t suffer from that problem, but it makes you wonder if the Era’s screen is going to look worse with the added layer.
This is the second new 7-inch color ereader to come out this year, the Bigme B751C being the other one. Kobo is probably going to release a 7-inch Kobo Libra Color soon too.
Video: PocketBook Era Color
via: MobileRead
It looks like E-Ink has designed this to be an off the shelf display module that anyone can quickly implement in a product. If so, it’s reassuring that it’s not experimental and doesn’t require huge amounts of developer work to get it optimised.
I really hope Kobo makes quality colour content EASY to find in their store to make this worthwhile. If they keep working on their apps, it will be a more compelling ecosystem for people to buy content from and use across devices.
How not to do it is Kindle’s write-on-scribe books. How do you even find them? I looked for and found a sudoku book, but didn’t want to part with the high asking price to test out the functionality.