With e-ink up top and color on the bottom, the Spring Design Alex is trying to be an e-book and Web tablet all in one. Are we buying it?
In advance of the expected announcement of a similar product by Barnes and Noble booksellers, a company named Spring Design today unveiled a new dual-screen e-book reader. The device will use e-ink technology up top for a high-contrast e-book screen, and the bottom will bear a color LCD screen for multimedia playback and enhanced Web browsing. The new e-book reader, dubbed the Spring Design Alex, will run Google's Android OS and will feature a range of possible wireless networking options, including Wi-Fi and built-in support for 3G networks from just about every U.S. cellular carrier. The Spring Design Alex will feature an SD card slot for expandable memory to hold e-books and other content.
The Spring Design Alex uses a 6-inch e-ink EPD (electronic paper display) screen in addition to a 3.5-inch color LCD screen. You can browse the Web using the Android browser on the lower screen, then transfer your Web content to the upper EPD screen to save power. Electronic paper displays use less power overall than LCD displays, so reading long pages on EPD could be more efficient. According to Spring Design, their build of Android has been optimized for the dual screen layout, and we're curious to see just how they pull it off.
In addition to the browsing and multimedia features, Spring Design also imagines authors will use the lower screen to create enhanced content for their e-books. Using "Web grabs" and Spring Design's own "Link Notes," authors can add multimedia content to their e-books. Certainly, if major publishing houses latch onto this value added proposition, it could catch on, but we'll have to see it in either a wide range of products or one incredibly popular device.
In fact, we're skeptical about a few bits of information here. For one thing, Spring Design mentions patent work on the dual screen design dating back 2 years, but the Spring Design Alex is the only product to be found on their site, and it's listed as "Coming Soon." For another thing, some of the verbiage and terminology used in their official release was unusual. We'll reserve judgment until we've seen a finished product launched, but it's interesting that this announcement come so close to the expected B&N announcement tomorrow, where Barnes and Noble is expected to launch a remarkably similar device.
In any case, Spring Design doesn't mention specific pricing and availability details, but they do say that they are currently in discussion with content partners and plan to release the Spring Design Alex by the end of the year.
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