Samsung’s e-reader hits the shelves

WITH ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon's latest Kindle apparently coming out this weekend, sort of, Samsung has joined the book-burning party and whipped out its own 6-inch e-reader.

Samsung has partnered with high street retailer WHSmith to bring the E60 slide device to UK punters, and the firm is taking online orders now. Pavement steppers will have to wait until later in the week though, as the device will not hit the high street stores until 26 August.

The E60 apes many of the other e-readers' features, with its WiFi and such, however, the addition of stylus input lifts it slightly above the competition as it stops the screen from getting all grubby with fingerprints and turns it into a drawing and handwriting tablet. It also has a slide-out navigation keypad at the bottom, which we saw back in June.

"Samsung's arrival in to the eBook Reader market is significant as we are bringing unique functionality to this emerging market. The addition of Wi-Fi and accurate handwriting functionality to eBook Readers will take the user-experience to a new level and ensure eBook Readers continue to grow in popularity," said Graham Long, VP of Samsung's IT Business Division. "We're confident that we've produced a market-leading device that'll be loved by customers of WHSmith up and down the country."

With its E-paper display for clarity, text to speech reading service and MP3 player for audiobooks, the Samsung looks like an unhealthy alternative to nannies, Ipods and real books themselves.

The e-reader can store up to 1,200 books on its internal 2GB of memory, according to Samsung, but of course it also has an SD card slot, meaning that this capacity can be increased further. And the partnership with WHSmiths and inclusion of Wifi mean that users can download more books from an e-store pretty much at whim, so long as there is a net connection close by.

Talking of the e-store, WHSmith is bundling £80 worth of books free with the Samsung e-reader, which it has already sliced in price from £299 to £199.

The other Samsung e-reader we saw in June, the E61, is still without a release date, and a company spokesman declined to comment on when it will become available. µ