This year at Computex it was all about tablets, we literary could not walk fifty feet without bumping into something interesting. It was not until our last day did we bump into an old friend that we have not seen in quite some time, the Asus DR-900 e-reader. This fabled e-reader was rebranded to the Asus TZ-900, but had a English firmware build on it, making it quite attractive as a 9 inch touchscreen e-reader.
The Asus DR-900 is a 9 inch touchscreen eink e-reader with a resolution of 1024×786 pixels. It had 2 GB of internal memory but you could increase the size via Micro SD. The unit itself was very light weight and slim and was probably the most solid e-reader I have had the pleasure to put my hands on this year.
It was brimming with features such as stereo speakers and a headphone jack. I tried listening to audio books and music files and it worked like a charm. It also had plenty of cool features such as a web browser and RSS feeds to take advantage of the WIFI internet access.
Reading books on it was a great experience and the e-ink really popped out at you and displayed very well on the large screen. I tried out ePub and PDF books and most e-readers can’t really handle PDF that well, but it really shined on this unit. Books with pictures and text were an easy read and in the settings menu provided tons of options to change fonts and margins.
In all, this is one of the best e-readers available, it’s just a shame that no one has picked it up to distribute it and Asus does not seem too keen on marketing it effectively.
[cincopa AUNArnaoljuN]
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.
