WATBlog earlier brought you the news about Pi an e-reader being launched by Infibeam.
Now it seems the E-commerce portal has started accepting advance orders for the rumored reading device on its site. The device is named ‘Pi’ (as expected) and will ship for Rs.10k (including taxes shipping costs) in Indian markets. The reading device is slated to start shipment from 22nd of February this year.
The hardware specs for device includes a 6″ display screen (Black White 8 gray scale) and carries 10 mm thickness. The screen supports 600*800 resolution and as such has no support for night reading. The device comes with 512 MB of internal memory with a SD card slot to ramp up the memory to 4 GB.
The device has support for Indian languages like Hindi Sanskrit (other supporting languages not mentioned on site). The device can read formats like PDF, EPUB, HTML, TXT, MOBI, DOC and even supports music(mp3) playback. The device could have scored brownie points if wireless transfer support was to be included.
One of our reader pointed out the uncanny resemblance of the reading device to eSlick,a reading device from foxit. The device is similar in specs & design and in our viewpoint could be a OEM version with several modifications like support for regional languages.
Will It become a rage in Indian Market?
The USP of this device is its support for regional languages and lower pricing adopted as compared to kindle. The biggest drawback however is the absence of any wireless transfer for books. The option of memory card transfer although looks quite convenient for Indian markets but in no way can replace textbooks and newspapers in Indian market at least not in current form.
Infibeam despite soaring expectations from us seems to be targeting the upper pyramid audiences for its device. In the beginning it basically wants to implement blue-ocean strategy for E-book market in India so that it could revolutionize the E-book reading concept. The E-book prices are still high compared to Indian standards and needs to come down further to pave way for such digital reading device to become a hit in Indian markets.
Man – how quickly will they get sued with that logo. It screams copyright infringement w/ Amazon!