At Computex Acer presented its first major e-reader that was hidden underneath a large pane of glass for the most part of the tradeshow. We got a chance on the last day to see it out of the glass, as they were packing up shop, and we were very impressed with the new Acer LumiRead L600! It is very reminiscent of the Kindle E-Reader with its full QWERTY keyboard (37 Keys and D-PAD) and it has a great feature no other e-reader has, an ISBN barcode scanner. With this little dandy, it allows you to scan a barcode, and be able to instantly search and find the book online. Speaking of online, the device comes with a web browser, courtesy of Opera to surf the internet with.
The Acer LumiRead L600 is powered by a Freescale processor i.MX357 with a processor speed of 532 MHz and an integrated unit that provides hardware acceleration for OpenVG 1.1. It also has 128 MB of ram. It has a 6 inch screen with a resolution of 800×600 and is powered by a TFT screen, which uses electrophoresis without backlight, similar to the new ASUS Eee Tablet.
The e-reader has 2 GB of flash storage onboard memory via a MicroSD slot, and allows you to upgrade to a maximum of 32 GB. Although a 3G version is due later on in the year, it does come with a wireless network card with 802.11b / g speeds. Compared to allot of other electronic readers this one is not that heavy, it weighs around 250 Grams, and word has it the 3G version will only weigh 285 Grams.
Now let’s talk E-Reader formats! Having a versatile array of compatible e-books is a large factor in deciding what e-reader is right for you! The Acer L600 reads PDF, ePub, TXT, HTML, MOBI, RTF, and Doc files. Which means you can not only use converted Kindle Books on this device, but you can read any online format, as well as the industry standard ePub.
Acer’s first offering with the Lumiread L600 E-Reader is very exciting! It looks like to us, like a poor man’s kindle. No word on pricing or release date yet. This article concludes our on the ground coverage of Computex 2010 in Taipei, or as we called it Tabletfest 2010! We wish to thank everyone for checking our articles on all of the new Slate, E-Reader and Tablet PC’s!
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.