It was just in April that ViewSonic had revealed their plans of making their presence felt in the e-reader segment with the VEB620 and VEB625 e-reader devices. A month down the line and as per the latest e-reader news, ViewSonic is in the limelight again with their Jin Yong e-reader which they unveiled at the ongoing Computex show. Named after the famous Chinese martial arts novelist and author of 36 books on the ancient art of fighting, the VEB362 e-reader may look like just another e-reader with a 6 inch screen. But before you put this off, hold on for the Jin Yong e-reader does pack in a few surprises.
To begin with, the Jin Yong comes pre loaded with all of the author’s books that can be read on the RFID touchscreen that depicts an easy touch form of capacitive touchscreen including motion and multitouch commands. With a 6-inch 600 x 800 resolution display, this E-Ink eReader has a limit to the amount of times the screen can be refreshed when going through books which is rather unusual. Unmistakably, the software engineers have fixed the problem of the exasperating E-Ink flash which has been restricted by letting it play just once every ten screens. This ensures that the users are able to flip through pages at a faster speed with the least amount of interruptions. This makes it one of the fastest E-Ink eReader made available to us. An amalgamated market has also been established for several online e-book promotion sites.
With the Jin Yong VEB362 e-reader, Viewsonic claims what it has is the “the slimmest multi-touch eReader ever” on the back of tight dimensions of 5.28 x 8.39 x 0.35 inches. Matching the compact dimensions is its weight which stands at a comfortable 270 grams or just 0.55 pounds. Internal storage is quite generous at 2GB that’s good enough to lap up 1,500 e-books, though if you still feel cramped, you can make use of a microSD card that will expand your storage options further to up to 16GB. This coupled with the customizable categories truly makes the Jin Yong a personal mobile library. The Jin Yong VEB362 also comes integrated with 802.11b/g WiFi which means the e-reader is capable of downloading e-books independently from a range of supported online stores. The e-reader supports PDF, ePub, HTML as well as TXT layouts.
It was also announced at the Computex that the Marvell® ARMADA™ 166E application processor would be powering the JinYong VEB362 e-reader. Battery life stands at a commendable 2 weeks though with the WiFi switched off. Other features that makes this e-reader stand out of the crowd of 6 inch e-reading devices include digital text annotation and book-marking features while also incorporating a built-in Chinese-to-Chinese and English-to-Chinese dictionary for convenient translations on-the-fly. Then there’s also a micro USB port along with the option to choose from four different font sizes.
So all in all, the JinYong e-reader is one among the several e-readers that ViewSonic brought forth to tap in the vast market of Chinese e-books. Its an e-reader that has been specially designed for a convenient and easy novel reading experience with a long battery life and easy touch gestures. Its likely to be priced around $450 when it is launched in July.
Further developments on this will surely find place here, so keep watching.
Also, the July issue of the Good E-Reader Magazine has gone on sale. So pick your copy today. It costs just $3.99!
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With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
