Lenovo Tianji EB-605 e-book reader in the works

Lenovo plans to launch its own e-book reader, called the Lenovo Tianji EB-605, a Chinese website zol.com.cn has reported.

Photo: Lenovo Tianji EB-605 e-book reader

The news is unconfirmed but the buzz is that Lenovo’s upcoming e-book reader will come with support for 3G connectivity.

The Lenovo Tianji EB-605 e-book reader features a 6-inch display and measures 178 × 128.4 × 9.9 mm.

It is powered by a 400MHz Samsung ARM processor and supports all major file formats including DF, CHM, EPUB, TXT, HTM, HTML, RTF, PDF, DJVU, MOBI and PRC formats.

It has a SIM card icon display on the top of its screen, which is assumed to be an indication of 3G support.

The price of the device and its availability in the market are yet to be announced, though it is pegged to be over $300.

Recently, the market has been flooded with e-book readers. The latest e-book reader to be launched is Endless Ideas’ BeBook Neo Wifi e-book reader.

The BeBook Neo has a 6-inch display and weighs around 220g including battery. Its stand-out features include WiFI and WACOM touchpanel technology that allows users to sketch, mark annotations and mark up texts using the touchscreen.

The BeBook Neo connects to the internet through WiFi and allows users to access Google and Wikipedia, and also shop for books online.

The company had launched two e-book readers earlier in the market, the BeBook One and the BeBook Mini.

It was actually Sony who had introduced e-book readers to the world. The company launched its first e-book reader in Japan and later in the US. It failed to gather steam and Amazon came in to this nascent field with its Kindle electronic reader.

Amazon with its vast collection of books found it easy to launch and market its e-book reader.

Kindle set the stage for future e-book readers by offering 3G wireless connectivity, which made the early Sony ebook readers obsolete. Sony had to later follow Amazon and the company launched its Reader Daily Edition, Touch Edition and Reader Pocket Edition e-book reader, in August 2009.

The Sony’s ebook reader is priced at around $399 in the US.

Many technology companies and publishers followed including Barnes & Noble with its $259 priced -ebook reader called the Barnes& Noble Nook. This devices compares well with Amazon Kindle as well.

It has a colour touchscreen and runs on an open source platform Android, which is powered by Google. This could offset Amazon’s advantage of having millions of books on their virtual shelves.