Sometimes living in Europe has its advantages! Last month the Dell Mini 5 or Dell Streak is on sale via O2 and dell.uk in England! This month, we saw the new Samsung SNE60 E-Reader hit the streets in France.
Although this E-Reader has been in the pre-order stage in England, none have yet shipped, and there is no word on a US release date. It has been made available in Korea (of course) in February of this year.
It is available currently in France at 288 of Carrefour retail locations, you are looking at paying around 329 Euros, or $411 US.
The most striking aspect of the SNE-60 e-book reader is its sliding control with the front screen sliding up to reveal a set of keys for ease of use. As for the screen, it measures 6 inches and boasts of 8 levels of grayscale with a display resolution of 600 x 800 pixels. The E-ink technology used renders complete paper like display that is ideally suited for the most stress free reading experience.
Another unique aspect of the SNE-60 is the electromagnetic resonance or EMR stylus pen that comes with the e-book reader. This unique EMR stylus provides its users with the ability to make annotations or to pen down thoughts and ideas along the margins while reading, something that anyone would perhaps do while reading a real book.
Apart from these, the SNE-60 has all that you would expect out of any e-book reader. Like it has a built-in dictionary and an MP3 player that enables you to either listen to music or have a book read aloud by way of its text-to-speech feature, which according to Samsung, the SNE-60 can do without any mispronunciations. The e-reader comes equipped with a 0.3w speakers.
Then the device has an impressive onboard storage capacity which at 2GB is enough to store close to 1,200 e-books. And if that’s not enough, there are SD card slots that you can make good use of. The SNE-60 is WiFi enabled, which means it can download contents via 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on its own without requiring it to be connected to an intervening PC. Samsung also claims this to be the first time to feature in an e-reader.
The e-reader is extremely compact and measures a mere 17.1×12×1.6mm and is compliant with ePub, PDF and TXT formats.
Dispite some of the impressive stats, and the recent e-reader price slash from all of the major companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble and today Sony, have all reduced prices deep into the 100.00 dollar range. Affordable E-Readers that are QUALITY features will hopefully propel them into the mainstream. There is a great untapped market who would purchase an E-Reader as a way to save money on books, but the abysmal prices thus far, have prevented it from being an affordable “must have” item.
The Samsung SNE-60 is one of the most quality E-Readers we have seen to be developed this year. They have also partnered with Barnes and Noble to share the same E-Book Database, so there is no lack of direct content. With the price on this item, in the mid $400.00 dollar range, it may be a fringe e-reader.
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.