Tolino has just announced a brand new e-reader called the Epos 3. This features an 8 inch screen with a brand new E INK Carta 1200 display panel. This new technology will increase page turn speed by 25% and overall performance by 30%. The Epos 3 is the most expensive unit they carry and is now available to purchase at the Tolino Alliances distribution partners such as Thalia, Weltbild and Hugendubel for 279,00 €.
The Tolino Epos 3 features an 8-inch E INK Carta 1200 display with a resolution of 1920×1404 with 300 PPI. The e-paper is flush with the screen and protected by a layer of glass. You can easily turn pages via the physical page turn buttons The one and only smartLight ensures perfect lighting at all times on your Tolino Epos 3. The clever color adjustment can be augmented with the integrated reading light adapts automatically and changes in accordance to the time of day – switching from cool white light in the morning to warm white light in the evening. It’s perfect for your natural rhythm, especially if you like to read before going to sleep. Of course, you can individually adjust smartLight to your preferences, whether you want cool or warm light. If you are reading in bright daylight, you can also turn the lighting off completely and extend your e-readers battery life even further. Read like the printed page without any annoying reflections from the sun. You can also adjus the orientation of the Epos with the gyroscope, that will automatically display content in landscape and portrait mode, this is good for lefthanded people.
Enjoy a relaxing reading time out with new, your favorite book – whether in the bathtub, in the swimming pool or at the lake. Thanks to it’s water protection, the device is completely protected from water damage and can handle a brief dip without any trouble. So if your tolino epos 3 should accidentally slip out of your hand, just stay calm: your device will not be harmed. This water immunity is attributed to the IPX8 coating, which should be good for up to 60 minutes in fresh water.
Underneath the hood is a AllWinner B300 1.8 GHZ quad-core processor and has 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. You should easily be able to house more than 24,000 ebooks on the device. All purchases from the various online bookstores are stored in the Tolino Cloud and can be accessed on other Tolino e-readers, reading apps or the online web reader. It has Bluetooth 5.1 and WIFI, although Bluetooth doesn’t really do anything yet, since the members of the Tolino Alliance have not embraced audiobooks yet. The Epos 3 is powered by a 1,200 mAh battery and the dimensions are 181.4×160.5×7.6 and weighs 232g.
This e-reader is relevant in a couple of markets. It supports English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch. There are over 3 million books available from the various Tolino Stores and are available in multiple languages. However, you are not obligated to buy anything and can elect to sideload in your own library and the supported book formats are EPUB, PDF and TXT. One of the cool features on this model is library link, which allows users to merge libraries from multiple Tolino bookstores.
The Epos 3 is based on the Kobo Sage, but doesn’t have any note taking functionality and does not support a stylus. Kobo provides Tolino with the hardware and has a hand in designing the software. The main difference with the Tolino brand is that they use Android as their OS, whereas Kobo has always used Linux. This is why the Tolino software experience is very different from Kobo. When you buy a Kobo e-reader, you tend to just buy books from Kobo, whereas with Tolino, there are around 4-5 different bookstores you can do business with, in addition to having support to downloading books from the public library in Germany. The Epos 3 makes a lot of sense if you speak German, but you can use this e-reader anywhere in the world.
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.