Hyread has announced that they have developed a new colour e-reader that will be released in March 2024. The device is called the Hyread Gaze Mini C, a 6-inch e-reader using the previous generation colour e-paper, Kaleido Plus. It is being crowdfunded in Taiwan and is available as a pre-order for $239 from the Good e-Reader Store.
The Gaze Mini C specs aren’t known, since the crowdfunded page only has basic information. I have a feeling that it is the exact same as the Hyread Mini, since the design, button placement and everything else on the Mini C, mirrors the older model.
If the specs are the same as the Mini, the Mini C would have a 6-inch E INK Carta HD black and white display with 300 PPI for text and an E INK Kaleido Plus colour filter array with 100 PPI and can display 4096 colours. It has a sleek white body and physical buttons. The Gaze Mini C incorporates a concave screen design, a double row of physical buttons, and a built-in gyroscope and touchscreen. This enables convenient page-turning regardless of the user’s preferred hand. The physical buttons facilitate essential page-turning functions and offer shortcuts for returning to the main menu, taking screenshots, refreshing the screen, and activating the front reading light.
Gaze Mini C is thought to have a a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor, 3GB RAM, and 32GB storage capacity. If this does not suit your needs, an SD card slot can have an additional 1TB. It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi. The device includes built-in speakers, a microphone, and Type-C support for OTG. It is powered by a 2200mAh battery, which should be suitable for a few weeks. Android 11 is included; users can install their apps or alternative app stores.
The Gaze Mini C is perfectly suitable for reading books and manga. The device officially supports EPUB, PDF, MOBI, DOC, TXT, FB2, RTF, HTML/HTM, DJVU/DJV and CBZ. These formats are great if you have your collection, but the average user needs to; they do business with specific ecosystems such as Amazon, Kobo, Nook, Scribd, and Audible or get books from the public library. This is where apps come in; you can install Kindle Lite or Overdrive Libby. It also has full support for English and Chinese.
Note, since the specs aren’t finalized, place a pre-order, only if you are OK with this. Hyread is a solid company, who has released over a dozen different e-readers and is one of our distribution partners. I will update this post, when I have finalized specs, but I believe these are the true specs, and I am seldom incorrect with this sort of thing.
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.
