ALDI is releasing a new color e-reader today called the Bauhn by Effortless Technologies. It will retail for $69.99 and is a very low cost device that us much akin to the Book by Augen.
The new Bauhn e-reader features a seven inch TFT display with a resolution of 800×480 pixels. It has 4 GB of internal memory and a Micro SD port to further boost it up. It has a built in mono speaker to play audio and video but you will want to use the 3.5mm headphone jack ideally.
This is more a multimedia tablet than e-reader and supports a myriad audio codecs such as MP3, WMA, FLAC, and AAC. If you feel like watching videos you can import in WMV and MP4 formats. Videos on the device do not look too bad, they play both in landscape and portrait mode. Pictures also don’t look too shabby, but are only really viewable in landscape mode. It does JPEG rather well. There is a built-in mono speaker and an audio jack so you can listen right from the device or via headphones. There is a menu option for audiobooks and music, and you can actually listen to music outside of the music application. This means you can surf the web and listen to tunes at the same time, or vice versa with an audiobook. You can connect up to the internet via the built in WIFI and battery life is around six hours. If you are going to buy this to read books it supports TXT, HTML, ePub, PDF, CHM, RTF, FB2, and MOBI/PRC.
Should you buy this item? Honestly it really looks like a re-branded Augen e-Reader and they went out of business last year. It runs on a Linux operating system and does not give you any flexibility to really do much with it. It only costs $69.99 but I think you would be better served buying a budget Android tablet for the same price. You will be able to load in your own apps and have more freedom.
Verdict – Avoid at all COSTS!!
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.
