There is a brand new e-reader that has been developed by Shenzhen YiBen Electronic Co.,Ltd. It is only available for sale on Facebook and a random Danish website and is retailing for around 895.00 DKK, which is $130 USD. is called the Y-Ben p47L and it has a few major selling points. It is considered a mini e-reader, with a pocket friendly 4.7 inch screen and has manual page turn buttons on the side, and a very paltry weight, 100 grams.
The Yiben p47L features a 4.7 inch E INK Carta display with a resolution of 960×540 and are claiming it is 300 PPI. It does not have a touchscreen display, but does have two manual page turn buttons on either side of the screen and a series of buttons on the bottom, which assist in navigation and accessing various menus and functionality. There is no front-lit display, so you will have to make sure there is a lamp nearby.
Underneath the hood is a RK2818 – ARM + DSP 600MHz single core processor, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. It does not have WIFI, Bluetooth, but does have a Micro-USB port for transferring data. It is powered by a 350 mAh battery. Basically, you will have to sideload your own books on this device, luckily it has support for PDF, EPUB, TXT, DJVU, HTML, RTF, FB2, DOC, MOBI, CHM and PRC. The dimensions are 126.6 x 67.5 x 5.98 mm.
This seems like it has potential, but it certainly does not come close to the Xiaomi InkPalm Mini, which is its closest competition. I think the Xiaomi, even with a pure Chinese UI is a more polished device and has a touchscreen, WIFI, Bluetooth and is running Android, so you can install your own apps. I have not heard of the Y-Ben OS, but is called Ucos. Does anyone know anything about it? Who is this device aimed at? I suppose people with privacy concerns, its very barebones. This might be suitable for like various military branches, since there is no connectivity and books can just be preloaded on it. It is comparable to the Nerd e-reader that came out 2014.
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.