Vertu is a luxury brand out of Hong Kong and sold in English. They are well known for selling diamond encrusted phones or phones with an alligator skin or calfskin built right into it for 30k. Their phone cases are also designed well and normally retail for $700. The company has just launched their first digital note taking device and it is called the Vertu Vbook, William Shakespeare edition. You can order it today from the Good e-Reader Store for $1399.99, it is after all, a luxury product.
The Vertu E-Note features a 10.1 inch E INK Carta HD display with a resolution of 1200×1600 with a proclaimed 360 PPI. It has a front-lit display for reading at night. The color scheme is piano black on the front and back and the display is flush with the bezel and protected by a layer of glass. On the front of it is the Vertu logo embossed in gunmetal aluminum. Inside the box you receive the device, a black folio case made of leather, which has an embossed Vertu logo on it and a typical plastic WACOM stylus. The standby screen also has a picture of Shakespeare on it, which is a nice touch.
Underneath the hood is an The HiSilicon Kirin 820e, which is an ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It has 4GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage. It has WIFI, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C and is powered by a 4500 mAh battery.Â
The Vertu Vbook is running an unknown version of Android, likely 9 or 10. It comes preloaded with a number of apps, such as Kindle and WPS Office, so likely you can sideload in your own apps too, in addition to alternative app stores. This device fully supports English, in addition to Chinese.
This is an e-note so be able to freehand draw, take notes, edit PDF files and ebooks. It supports PDF, EPUB, TXT, RTF, FB2, MOBI and more. You can sideload in your pictures and audio files to listen to audiobooks. There is support for PNG, JPEG, BMP, WAV and MP3. The note taking experience is good, since it has support for 4096 layers of pressure sensitivity and has a number of pens, pencils available, in addition to layers. There is voice translation available with the microphone. It has support for 10 dialects and 9 foreign languages, including English.
In the e-reader and e-note industry, design has been homogenized. All Kindles look the same, and most other brands do not pay attention to industrial design. The Ventu is designed well and all of the accessories look amazing. We haven’t really seen a luxury brand attempt to design an e-note before, and it is a welcome change.
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.