Spring Design Says Alex E-Reader With Android Will Ship In April

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Spring Design Says Alex E-Reader With Android Will Ship In April

We’ve been hearing about it for months; now Spring Design is taking orders for the Alex e-reader, the one that’s the basis of its lawsuit against Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS). Spring claims B&N lifted some of the Alex’s elements after meetings between the two. Whether it gets anywhere with the lawsuit, the company will have a hard time getting traction in an increasingly busy e-reader market complicated by the much-hyped iPad and other tablets.

But dual-screen Alex, which lists for $399, has some interesting features that may help with people looking for an e-reader plus: the main 6-inch screen is an E Ink display for reading but the 3.5-inch full-color LCD below is Android-based with multimedia web browsing and downloads over wi-fi. Content can be moved between the two screens. The LCD also works as a navigator for the e-books. There’s an emphasis on Interactive e-books with Spring Design LinkNotes to encourage embedded links in text that go to the web or to content stored on the device. The company says it will ship “no later than mid-April.”

Not too surprisingly, Alex isn’t one of the e-readers using the BN eBookstore. Instead it relies on Google’s public domain books and supports Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) DRM along with Epub, PDF, HTML and text. Spring says the device is also being produced in multi-language versions outside the U.S., including Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Hebrew.

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Staci D. Kramer

@sdkstl Mar 16, 2010 10:20 AM ET

Posted In: Gadgets, Media & Publishing, Books, eReaders, barnes & noble, spring design

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William Volk

This is the situation we are seeing with Javascript/Ajax games on the iPhone in the USA. Rapid development and rapid return on investment.

We recently launched a series of casino games under the Kenny Rogers - The Gambler brand to great success.

I hope this model gets extended to more handsets. In Europe, many of the newer handsets run the same sort of WEBKIT as iPhone does, so that is also a possible market.

William Volk
MyNuMo

Max Buemi

Flash Lite games/entertainment applications are mighty fine: but whom is making a margin from these today? What about tomorrow? Who says operators will not react in one way or another? Will we see an army of bedroom coders flooding the arena with mediocre, trite, rude, or darn right indecent content which operators will want off their phones? Whom regulates the browser access of handsets? Is this to trigger a walled garden second coming?

I see this more as a regulatory and a quality of experience issue as I can well imagine operators either not liking to have content downloaded without fees (fixed or zero rated data/subscription plans being more common) or not liking what is being downloaded as degrading the perceived value of their service. As for folk desperate enough for porn on their mobiles, I guess they will want the real thing and possible be booted into megabyte priced downloads anyway (I suspect flash animation are lighter than video clips, and fall within "fair usage" conditions).

Maybe it will open the gate for mobile phone media specific artists and satirists. Maybe it will be a flash - lite - in the pan. Maybe it will be a revolution. I suspect Adobe making money from selling the player to the manufacturers whom successfully sell the idea to the operators. Otherwise, it means selling the player to existing phone users - an expensive proposition to market.

We'll see ... Personally, I just would like to have better phone platforms on the market, and the phasing out of network service support on the content side for phones over two years old from the date of their launch. That would help industry some.