Whether or not Barnes and Noble liked it enough to copy it, Spring Design’s Alex prototype dual-display ebook reader is certainly nifty enough to capture our interest. MaximumPC had a chance to go hands-on with the Alex, which has a 6-inch e-ink screen up top and a 3.5-inch color capacitive touchscreen underneath for control and navigation, as part of a Marvell demonstration for the company’s new ARMADA 166E SoC.
We’re used to copyright and industrial espionage claims being more like cases of trademark squatting these days, so to find something ostensibly as straightforward as Barnes and Noble’s alleged “copying” of Spring Design’s Alex concept is almost refreshing. The startup claims B&N led them to believe that they were interested in producing the Alex dual-display Android ebook reader, before breaking off contact and then, shortly after, announcing the nook. Now Spring Design has shared their NDA agreements and details of the lawsuit with Engadget.
Back in the run-up to Barnes and Noble’s launch of their nook ebook reader, hitherto-unheard of Spring Design grabbed some headlines with their Alex dual-display ebook design. At the time there was some speculation that the two devices were one and the same, though that turned out not to be the case; according to Spring Design and a lawsuit against B&N, however, the two do in fact share some design DNA. Spring Design allege that B&N knowingly “misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties’ non-disclosure agreement” in designing the nook.
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Creative got us all excited when it unveiled its Android-powered Zii Egg last month. Creative has now announced the coming of the next device in the Zii family called the Zii MediaBook. The MediaBook is the company's first entry into the eBook market. The device will compete alongside the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Amazon Kindle.
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eBook readers are quickly becoming the new gadget to have with lots of high profile offerings on the market like the new(ish) Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook coming soon. The common thing about many of these eBook readers is that the price is right at $250. If you are holding out for eReaders to come down another $100 before you buy, the time is here.
Put nook and QUE together and you’ve got the ideal setup for a filthy pun, but you’ve also got Barnes and Noble’s upcoming ebook device lineup. Plastic Logic and the publisher have announced that the QUE will go on sale both in B&N retail stores and online, when it hits the market in 2010, right next to the Barnes and Noble nook announced earlier this month.
Weeks are flying by and it’s time for another week in review. Monday we learned that a new hack was available from the iPhone Dev Team that adds MMS to first generation iPhones and tethering to 3.1.2 OS for the later iPhone models. We also found out that Microsoft is set to issue a new update for the Xbox 360 that will break unauthorized storage devices. That means that some gamers will be unable to access the saved game data after applying the new update.
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Barnes and Noble's nook fact sheet [pdf link] has revealed upcoming Android and Windows Mobile versions of their ebook reader software, though the software is not yet available to download either from the publisher's download page or the Android Market. The document suggests that the apps will support B&N's last-page-read sync, and be available for free.
Amazon have rejigged their Kindle range, seemingly discontinuing the previous US-only Kindle 2 and reducing the price of the international version to $259. Presumably acting in response to the recently announced Barnes and Noble nook, which is also priced at $259, Amazon have been informing international Kindle buyers that they’ll get a $20 refund
Spring Design’s Alex dual-display ebook reader was a surprise announcement earlier this week, seemingly diving into the public eye to make some headlines before Barnes and Noble’s nook grabbed all the attention. The company have followed up their render with a jerky video of the device in action, demonstrating its smaller Android display and how you can shoot content from the web-browser up to the larger e-ink panel for easier reading.
Video demo after the cut
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