You’ve heard of Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad; both devices are supposed to change the way we read electronic books (ebooks). Both of them also share their roots in the U.S., or more precisely, China (but then which device doesn’t).
Well if you were expecting something from India, you got it right here.
Enter Pi, the first native ebook reader from Infibeam. The Pi gives you access to over 1 lakh titles on the Infibeam ebook store, which you can download and start reading in seconds. The Pi is 10mm thin and weighs 180 gms, which is about the weight of a magazine.
The device is equipped with a 6-inch E-Ink display capable of displaying 8-levels of grey colours. The E-ink technology provides a paper-like reading experience — with no screen glare, the Pi will also be readable in direct sunlight. Unlike other Ebook readers, the Pi supports Hindi, Sanskrit and most other native languages of India! It has got a internal storage space of about 512 MB which stores 500 Ebooks and the memory is expandable upto 4GB (via a SD card) which can store upto 3,000 books. It supports most the ebook formats – PDF, EPUB, HTML, TXT, MOBI, DOC and image formats – JPG, BMP, PNG.
The Pi also has a music library and can play songs. Moreover, this device supports games such as Sudoku. The Pi is priced at Rs. 9,999 and will be available for shipping on February 22nd 2010. It is currently available for pre-order here.
Here are the complete specifications of the Infibeam Pi
Processor -S3C2440
RAM Memory -64 MB
Internal Memory -512 MB
SD Card Slotupto – 4GB
Height -188 mm
Width- 118 mm
Thickness- 9.5 mm
Weight- 180 gm
6″ E-Ink Vizplex
600×800 pixels
Black & White 8 grayscale
No backlight. Daylight readable
Battery Life -7 days
Books format supported -PDF, EPUB, HTML, TXT, MOBI, DOC
Images- JPG, BMP, PNG
Audio- MP3
3 mm Audio Earphone Connector
SD Card Slot (up to 4GB card supported)
Mini USB Slot
Button for 4-Way Navigation & Selection
Buttons back, home, plus / minus for size changes etc.