This has to be the most versatile reader that anyone has thought of making yet.  Earl, an ereader designed for explorers will hit the market in a couple of months – all being well.

As you will see as you read on, this ereader will have everything built into it that any backpacker, explorer or adventurous soul could possibly wish for in one device.   It is an ereader, a GPS, a walkie talkie, a weather station, waterproof to 3 feet under water, has a touch screen that you can operate while wearing gloves, and a whole host of other functions and abilities that you might well need should you be running around in the Karakorums or the Amazon.  Though at its launch, it will only have maps in it for the Americas, other parts of the world are sure to follow.   So to start with you can happily use this one when wandering in the Rockies, Alaska or the Nevada desert.

Walkie talkie.

Using the latest FRS, GMRS and MURS transceiver you can use this for talking to others up to 20 miles away, no matter where you happen to be.

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Whilst Tablets are winning the competition to become the ebook reading device of choice for most people, there are  still several ways in which the humble dedicated ereader is still the best device there is for reading for the elderly or people with eye problems.

All such ereaders – The Kobos, Sonys, Kindles and so on – are great for reading text with, and for those of us whose eye-sight is not all that it might be, they have several great advantages over their backlit and rather glaring competition, the Tablet.

Currently, the latest ereader from Kobo, the Kobo Aura HD seems to me to be the best ereader so far for all with eye problems.  It offers an amazing range of possibilities in this area, having 10 different font styles, a grand total of 24 font sizes – this means the size of the letters on the screen – and it can also adjust the sharpness of the letters on the page, and how bold (dark) the letters are.  Further it has the highest resolution of all such hand-held reading devices (an amazing 1440 x 1080 pixels with a resolution of 265 dots per inch, which is slightly better than the much vaunted retina display of the current iPad), so reading with this ereader is almost as good as reading an expensively published paper book.. beautifully sharp letters (see photo).

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So, here we have an ereader with an even higher resolution than the iPad Retina display (265 ppi against 264) on a smaller screen.  Having had a good snuffle around this newest ereader on the market, it would seem that what Kobo have produced here is an ereader that in most respects is somewhat better than most other ereaders up till now.

As you will see from the promo video that Kobo have made to accompany the launch of this new ereader, in most respects it is pretty much the same as all the other dedicated ereaders out there, simply slightly better in all respects, and as such it represents the top of the range of the current crop of dedicated ereaders I suppose.

However, it is and remains, simply a dedicated ereader, that in spite of the addition of a “web-browser” (which like all such web-browsers on ereaders is effectively unusable),  needs to be judged in that light.   It is monochrome, mute (no built in speakers or jack socket), no 3G connectivity and is obviously no use for showing videos.

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With the announcement of the launch of the Tolino Shine a couple of days ago, Germany has entered the ereader wars with a vengeance.   It isn’t so much the device itself which is interesting, it is more the fact that a number of Germany’s biggest companies felt it was worth the effort to take on Amazon, Kobo, Sony et. al. in an attempt to gain control of the slowly growing market for ebooks in Germany.

For some reason the whole ereader/ebook phenomena has not really taken off yet in Germany, but what sales there are in that market currently seem to be almost entirely in the hands of Amazon, to the cost of German publishers, and it is this imbalance which the launch of this new ereader is intended to deal with I believe.

So what we have here is a consortium of  Germany’s main publishing and book selling companies (Hugendubel, Thalia, Bertelsmann Club) working with Deutsche Telekom who have produced this ereader and set up a full scale ebook selling system and ereader distribution network in order to achieve this aim.

They have set up a whole network of selling points for both the ereader itself and for German language ebooks as well, so happy Germans will be able to buy this ereader from some 12,500 shops around Germany – which is a pretty amazing number of outlets to start with.  Also there will be no end of German language ebooks available via their own ebook stores, but as this ereader works happily with standard e-Pub and Adobe Editions DRM protection, customers can buy their ebooks from hundreds of other online ebook sellers as well.

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Small is beautiful we are told, well this Trekstor has taken that to heart and have produced the smallest dedicated ereader in the world, the Pyrus Mini, which with its 4.3 inch screen has to be the smallest device for ebook reading there is.

With the proportions of a Smart Phone, this little baby is actually a fully functional ereader in every way except it has no wifi or 3G connectivity, but you cant have everything, and to balance that lack  it is a remarkably cheap gadget as well, costing as little as 49 Euros (depending on where you buy it).

Available in three colours (Black, blue and what they call pink) this ereader has every function one could wish for, 6 different font sizes, easy navigation around your ebook collection, a large enough internal memory for a huge number of ebooks, and of course it supports all the normal ebook formats, including those with Adobe DRM protection.

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BeBook have just launched the latest in their ereader series, the rather splendidly named BeBook Pure, a name which I imagine reflects the fact that this is a straight forward ereader, designed simply to read ebooks with and not as a device for watching videos, sending emails or anything else.

In producing such a device, the BAS Group (who bought up Endless Ideas, the original makers of the BeBook ereaders, when they went bust a while ago) are perhaps flying a bit in the face of the major trend in ereader production these days, which is more and more a matter of an all singing, all dancing device rather than a device for simply reading ebooks with.

But be that as it may, they have produced an ereader that whilst it is a relatively simple and somewhat limited gadget, will be a good basic ereader for people to try out and see if ereading is for them.

What we have here is possibly the thinnest and lightest ereader so far at only 188g, and 8mm thick, which if nothing else will ensure that our hands don’t get tired holding the thing up as we read in bed or other less comfortable positions.

What else?

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