Although Elonex is not a very well known company in North America, it has a devote following in Europe and Australia. They had a number of past e-readers to break into the market with the Elonex 610EB and Elonex 511EB Electronic Readers. With their new offering the 710 EB they just might get their break into the North American market to entrench themselves as viable e-reader contenders to Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.
The Elonex 710EB has a full color 7 inchTFT touch screen which makes it one of the first color e-readers using TFT. It is backlite and very easy on the eyes. It will also come with WI-FI built into it, and will feature an ARM processor.
This little device will also allow you to play back audio books, MP3 music and display photos and videos. It will allow you to read ebooks in the ePub, TXT, RTF and PDF formats. You also can surf the internet, send and receive emails and more! Battery life is claimed to be 8 hours of use.
Although the final details in terms of specs are unknown at this time, from the pictures it appears to be using a Google Android based operating system. Our best guess that it will be using Android 1.6, which would mean that it would not be a multi-touchscreen device. It is also unknown if it will have access to the android market place.
The final price on this unit will be $250.00 and will be available July 31 2010. You can pre-order it today on Amazon.com
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.