Icarus has developed a new 8 inch e-reader and they are hoping that it will find commercial success. In order to make this device more accessible to people living in North America they have just listed the latest device via Amazon for a very respectable $199.
The Illumina XL e-reader features an 8 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024 x 768. Icarus decided to employ E-Ink Pearl technology because the higher resolution e-Ink Carta screens aren’t compatible with 8 inch devices.
Underneath the hood is a 1 GHZ processor and 512 MB of RAM. There is 8 GB of internal storage to house your e-book collection, but if this is not enough for your needs there is an SD card that is expandable up to 32 GB.
Icarus is really hyping up the slim design and claims its up to 20% lighter than competing devices. (145 x 200 x 9mm, 275gr.) They managed to pull this off because they decided to forgo manual page turn buttons and instead relies exclusively on the touchscreen display. There are only two buttons on the device: on/off and the home button.
One of the most compelling features of this e-reader is the fact it is shipping with Android 4.2. Users will be able to install mainstream e-reader apps like Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Skoobe , Bliyoo and hundreds of others.
The vast majority of e-readers on the market are six inches and many people want the extra screen real estate in order to get novels or PDF files. Icarus is well known for larger screen devices and has been developing 9.7 Android e-readers for a number of years.
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.
