BeBook, who make all manner of ereaders will show off their newest creation at IFA Consumer Electronics fair in Berlin this September, we are told in a longish and rather coy Press Release.

Here is an excerpt from it to give you an idea of what I meant…….

Introducing : The BeBook Club ‘S’
Adding the ‘S’

• ‘S’ for ‘Sports’, due to a new controller, page turning on the BeBook Club ‘S’ is faster and makes it our fastest member of the BeBook family!
• ‘S’ for ‘Screen’, Instead of a regular E-Ink screen, the BeBook Club ‘S’ comes with a high contrast Pearl E-Ink screen.
• ‘S’ for ‘Storage’, we doubled up the internal memory……

 And so it goes on for quite some time.

This newest ereader from BeBook is to all appearances a rather neat little gadget, small enough to be easy to carry around with us, yet equally large enough for pleasant and relaxed reading of our ebooks.

BeBook Club Mark II in fact:

In fact what it will be is a new version of their already existing BeBook Club ereader with a couple of improvements, but in actual use exactly the same.

No touch screens here:

Unusually these days it doesn’t have a touch screen, but instead relies on a range of buttons for all navigation around the device, but these are well placed by and large, both for left- handed or right-handed users all of which you will see from the Promo Video I have placed here of the current BeBook Club ereader, they all work perfectly well, and intuitively enough.

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Showing both how the iRiver HD ereader works and how to use it to download Google Books on it:

This video seems to me to be useful on two fronts, it is a very practical guide on how the iRiver HD ereader actually works, so a sort of “how to use it” video, and also it explains very clearly how to use this ereader with the Google online ebook store – Google Books.

As Google Books is a very new site, and thus  not yet all that familiar to most people, I felt this was a useful video to draw your attention to in a spirit of being helpful.

Google Books has an incedible number of ebooks to offer you, literaly millions of them….   Loads of which are free, others you have to pay for, but still an amazing site,  which I shall be looking at properly in a shortly to appear post.

The iRiver HD is the latest ereader from the iRiver people, and is chiefly notable for the extremely high  resolution of its screen, which is way better than any other current ereader.

I shall place the specifications of this ereader after the video, so you can contemplate all its glories at your leasure after having discovered  with the help of a remarkably svelte Chinese girl – or perhaps Korean – what it actually can do.

So, sit back and watch the video.

Google Books: http://books.google.com/ebooks

Specifications of iRiver HD ereader:

Price: about $ 140

A whole series of useful accessories for all you lucky iPad2 owners:

In fact this is a collection of about 9 different types of cover or reading support  specifically created for the iPad2, and I would think essential “must haves” if you own an iPad2.

As M-Edge CEO Patrick Mish puts it in their press release:

“The introduction of the iPad 2 gave the M-Edge creative team the opportunity to flex their design muscles and come up with extraordinary products.  The new line perfectly complements the iPad 2 with elegance, style, and of course, protection.”

I shan’t give too much info here……

I shall simply tell you about them all, with minimal details, since there are so many of them….   But you will see if they are of interest to you quickly enough from either the short videos or the images of the accessories, and I will give links to their relevant page on their online shop for you to get all the details you could wish for.

The first of these new goodies is the Incline Jacket, which sells for $ 49.99 and I can do no better than show you a video of its glories, so sit back and watch as they show you what it offers you:-

Then we have the  Read full story »

A cheap but good device to read your ebooks on…. and do a load of other things too.

The Skytex Primer Colour eReader is the latest ereader from Skytext, and seems to be  pretty good value for money, as it is capable of a whole range of activities, and is also a damn good basic ereader, and is cheap too….   who could ask for more?

As its name indicates, this is a coloured screen device, a 7 inch TFT screen (not a touch screen though).

I shall pass rapidly over the various media functions this baby has built into it and concentrate on the ereader side of the thing.

As a tablet is can do almost all the things one would expect in a tablet, except, curiously browse the web as it has no WiFi connectivity, which seems to me to be a rather large mistake on their part so it is really rather more a sort of external hard disk rather than a real tablet computer, or perhaps better said, a sort of multimedia player that you can connect to your computer to load up with goodies and then take with you to amuse yourself with as you wander through your day.

As such it can show videos, play music and be used for slide shows.

It supports a most impressive number of video and image formats, as well as just about any audio format you might throw at it, specifically:

MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, AAC, RMVB, VOB, DAT, MP4, FLV, and 3GP.

Seems to pretty well cover it all , doesn’t it?

It comes with a single built in speaker on the back, but for real music listening, it has the standard jack socket for earphones or external speakers.  It has an internal memory of 2GB, as well as a slot for a MicroSD card of up to 16 GB, so you can carry all your videos around with you….   Great when travelling I reckon.

The software to control all these things is also more than adequate, with all the standard audio and video controls needed to enjoy and sort out your various media files and to play them as you wish.

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If the Sun shines, never again run out of power when out and about…….

Suntactics, a Californian company who have been making solar chargers for some time, have just come up with what seems to me to be an ideal solar charger for just about any mobile device you might happen to have, with the possible exception of laptop computers.

Glorying in the name sCharger-5 This baby delivers 5 Volts at 1 Amp when the sun is shining, which is enough to actually run most portable devices, such as ereaders, which is why I am telling you about this one, of course.

Apparently the secret is that this charger uses industrial quality high efficiency mono crystalline solar cells, which are designed for high output, unlike most small Solar Chargers, which are basically trickle chargers working through an internal battery.  The sCharger-5 has no internal battery to wear out, but is a direct source of power.   Obviously this has its down side, in that no sunlight, no power.   But to get around this, they point out you could buy a USB battery or if your device uses AAA or AA batteries, get a USB charger for these batteries, and use this Solar charger to charge those batteries…..

It works via a standard USB connection, so basically any mobile device that can be charge via USB, will work with this one.

Or as they put it in their Press release:

This not an ordinary small solar charger. These use high efficiency mono crystalline solar cells like the ones used in industrial grade solar systems. The sCharger-5 output power is over 5 watts. See if any other small solar charger can match that power in such a small package!

Most other solar chargers use low power solar cells that produce a tiny amount of power. They use the small solar panel to trickle charge an internal battery, which takes forever!  The small solar panel on them is not enough to charge your device directly. They essentially charge your USB device from their internal battery. When the internal battery fails(which it inevitably will, since it’s being baked in the sun constantly), you have to throw the whole thing away.  The sCharger-5 will not only charge your device, it will run it directly from the sun.

Don’t be fooled by the 6 to 7 watt 12 volt solar chargers out there. They are not optimally setup to do USB charging. They require a DC converter to convert 12 volts to 5 volts that USB devices require. This comes out to less power and your smart phone or GPS device will have a hard time charging.

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Will this new BeBook be the ereader of choice?

BeBook have announced the launch shortly of their newest device, the BeBook Live – not in fact as is now normal, an actual dedicated ereader,  but in fact yet another Android based tablet, which can be used as an ereader obviously.

Whilst I have a strong personal preference for custom made, dedicated devices to use as an ereader, I understand very well the attractions of the new wave of tablets that are hitting the market just now and can see the advantages of having a small, easy to transport device with one that is able to be used as an ereader as well as having all manner of other possible functions.

Obviously a tablet is no more an ereader in itself than any other computer (a tablet is after all simply a highly portable computer in fact).  As with any other computer, one has to install software (known these days as Apps) to enable it to carry out specific desired functions.   So in the case of this device, one will have to install Apps from the various sellers of ebooks, such as Kindle, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and so on in order to be able to use it as an ereader.   But as all these Apps are free, this isn’t really any sort of a problem.

So, how will it be as an ereader?

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