Lately there has been a ton of entry level tablet computers being billed as e-readers. The Augen e-Reader is no different and hopefully is an upgrade to the tremendously disappointing Augen Gentouch78 tablet.
Hardware
The new Augen e-Reader has a 7 inch TFT LCD color touchscreen with resolution of 800×480 pixels. It features a Ingenic 4755, Arm9 400 MHZ processor and the operating system is on a Linux platform.
For memory you are looking at only 2 GB, although you can further enhance it up to 32 GB via an SD card. One of the features they are billing on this is the text to speech functionality.
This is more a multimedia tablet than e-reader and supports a ton of different formats for audio and video. One of the more solid functions is that it has support for high quality audio such as MP3, WMA, FLAC, and AAC. If you feel like watching videos you can import in WMV and MP4 formats. There are built in speakers and a audio jack so you can listen right from the device or via headphones. You can connect up to the internet via the built in WIFI and battery life is around six hours.
Content Distribution
The Augen e-reader comes with 150 classic eBooks so you can get reading right away. This is not a Android tablet so there is no way to load in your favorite app like with the Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Kobo, or others.
This is the type of e-reader where if you want to read books you are going to have to load in your own. One of the things this has going for it, is that it does read many ebook formats. You can easily load in TXT, HTML, ePub, PDF, CHM, RTF, FB2, and MOBI/PRC. It also reads books you might have purchased from other stores. The device is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions and the formats it reads are PDF and ePub.
Our thoughts
It looks like a solid e-reader so far, but I think its more for people who want a cheap multimedia tablet and want to load in their own books.
In a few days we will have one of these in our own hands and we will write a proper review. Since it just came out, I wanted to give you guys the heads up on the specs and our initial impressions of it.
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.
