Archive | ebook

SiS enters e-book market with SiS9700 E-Reader SoC

Posted on 31 May 2010 by

SiS9700 E-Reader SoC — Offers New Paperless Reading Experience
May 31st, Taipei– Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS) today unveiled the first generation of E-Reader SoC, SiS9700 mainly integrating PDF/ePUB accelerator, the electrophoretic display controller, and the loading dependent frequency/voltage scalar to ultimately sustain up to15000 page flip/1500 mAh battery life. The SiS9700 can also be used in conjunction with the SiS9730 EM touch processor to equip friendly human interface for supporting versatile handwriting experience. SiS is committed to continue developing new innovative technologies to provide customers with even more competitive products while expanding its e-reader market and enhancing consumer reading experience.
The integrated PDF/ePUB accelerator in SiS9700 mainly comprises the AES/RC4/SHA1/MD5 security engine, the OpenVG scalable vector graphic, and the JPEG decoder, in an attempt to boost performance for deciphering, decoding and rendering the PDF and ePUB documents with minimum CPU processing time, and thereby to extremely reduce the power consumption. The Integrated eletrophoretic display controller utilizes the locality/parallelism refresh scheme to save power, and supports up to 16 levels grayscale waveform for up to 2048×1536@50Hz panel. The loading dependent frequency/voltage scalar actively gauges the system loading and dynamically adjusts the operating frequency and operating voltage of the processor and various H/W accelerators on the fly. Thus, when the user is reading a document, listening to music and downloading content at the same time, the SiS9700 will boost to the performance mode to deliver seamless user experience. When the user is just reading a document, the SiS9700 will automatically switch to energy-saving mode by reducing the operating frequency and voltage to extend the battery life and reduce the number of recharges.
Key differentiated functions integrated into the SiS9700 include the display timing controller for supporting variously dimensional panels, and audio codec with stereo speaker or headphone outputs for playing the music or text to speech, or with microphone input for voice recording. The associated front-end audio processing engine supports MP3 / WAV / WMA / AAC decoding, and audio effect synthesizing such as Volume, Balance, Mute, & EQ, … , etc. A variety of peripherals such as LPDDR controller, USB2.0 host/device controllers, SD/SDHC/MMC/SDIO/SPI/UART/I2C interface, NAND flash controller, and RTC, etc are also provided for WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G communications modules and other peripheral devices to enable mobile network connectivity for the user. The SiS9700 uses 15mm x 15mm LFBGA package technology.
“SiS will continue to invest in the research and development of innovative e-book technologies to provide our customers and users with better e-book products and a better user experience. Our target is the massive e-book market.” said Michael Chen, President at SiS. “Our R&D capability and innovative technologies will enable customers to master the mysteries of e- reader design and inject new life into the market.”

SiS9700 is slated to enter volume production in the third quarter of this year. Sample products will be demonstrated at COMPUTEX 2010 during June 1st to June 5th. You are cordially invited to visit the SiS booth at C621/C623 in the Taipei Computex Exhibition Hall 1 and to learn more about the trends in the e-book reader market.

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Should you buy an Apple iPad now or wait ?

Posted on 03 April 2010 by

You probably heard a lot about iPad. Basically it is a tablet touch screen device in roughly the size of a magazine. There are three models that connect to the Internet strictly over Wi-Fi (16GB for $499, 32GB for $599, 64GB for $699) and three that use a combination of Wi-Fi and AT&T’s 3G wireless (16GB for $629, 32GB for $729, and 64GB for $829–pay-as-you go for the data subscription). It also uses a smaller SIM card that is incompatible with existing SIM slots and vice versa.

Basically, it can be used just like the way you use a iPhone or iPod Touch. There are the apps web surfing, email, maps, music, youtube etc and there is a App Store which you can download apps via iTunes and buy music on the itunes store. Although it functions like the iPhone, you won’t be able to make phone calls (unless voip) or SMS on it. In fact, you can imagine it is more of a enlarged version of the iPod Touch for viewing documents.

As a e-book reader, the iPad provides colour illustrations compared to black and white on the most popular Amazon Kindle reader. Free public domain books are also available within the iBooks store, and any EPUB book format (including titles from Project Gutenberg and Google Books) can also be transferred to iPad via iTunes. Competing e-book software, such as the Amazon Kindle app, is also available on the iPad. In terms of battery life, the backlit colour iPad would only last you 10 hours of continuous use while the Kindle DX can last for 4 days.

If you intend to use it as a replacement of your netbook, the iPad also comes with iWork. It has 3 apps priced at USD 9.99 they include : Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Keynote (presentations). iWork apps are capable of opening and editing common Office documents and saving in native or exporting them as PDF files.

While most devices like netbook comes with USB ports to transfer files in/out, the iPad does not have that. You can’t burn a CD as well. The only way to transfer files in and out of the device is via email, i-work account or save it to a shared folder. You would then require conenction by iTune from your PC/MAC to transfer the files out from your device. I am sure there would be some work around on this in the future.

So much about the functionalities of the iPad. Non US readers who have mail order the purchase through a US forwarding address should receive their iPads real soon. If you bought the WiFi only version, that would work without any problems whenever there is WiFi coverage. Those who bought the 3G version would have to wait for the local telcos to provide a compatible SIM as the 3G SIM card is different from the conventional SIM card you use on your iPhone or any 3G phones.

So will you buy it or wait for a newer version just like people skipped the original iPhone for 3GS. Discuss

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2 more ebook readers sighted at IT Show 2010 – iRiver and Eco Reader

Posted on 14 March 2010 by

2 more ebook readers sighted at IT Show 2010 – iRiver and Eco Reader.

The Eco e-Reader features a 15 cm e-ink screen with 4 levels of grayscale. It can read up to 7000 pages from full charge and supports a wide range of file formats : PDF, PRC, TXT, RTF, EPub, UT, PPT, WOL, DOC etc. It retails at S$533.

The iRiver Story looks much sleeker and comes with a full qwerty keyboard. It retails at S$699

Specs include
LCD size: 6-inch e-ink display
Capacity: Built-in 2GB memory (expandable up to 32GB via memory slot)
Color: White only
E-book file formats: EPUB, PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS (without any convert)
MP3 file formats: MP3, WMA, OGG
Image file formats: JPEG, BMP, GIF
Battery: 1,800mAh lithium-polymer, up to 7,000 pages/20 hours of MP3 playback
Others: Voice recording
Size: 127 x 203.5 x 9.4mm
Weight: 284g

This is how they look like :

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IT SHOW 2010 – first encounter with OAXIS ebook GB-W960

Posted on 12 March 2010 by

Here is a video introduction of the ebook reader that will make its appearance at IT SHOW 2010 2 days ago. OAXIS Digital Ebook Reader GB-W960 at $399 at IT SHOW 2010

This 6? E ink panel has a resolution of 600×800 with a PVI display and 4 level gray scale controller. It is powered by a Rockchip RK2706B ARM7EJC (260MHZ)+ processor. It comes with 256MB of RAM on board and has a 2GB internal storage. The unit supports SD card of up to 32GB. It uses a Built in polymer battery.It has a dimension of 160×116×10 ad weighs 152g.

Audio support includes mp3, wma, flac, aac with 3.5mm stereo audio jack for earphone. Picture format support is JPEG and BMP. Text format supported includes ascii, unicode txt doc, pdb, ePub, HTML, PDF, FB2.

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OAXIS Digital Ebook Reader GB-W960 at $399 at IT SHOW 2010

Posted on 10 March 2010 by

OAXIS Digital Ebook Reader GB-W960 at $399 at IT SHOW 2010

This 6″ E ink panel has a resolution of 600×800 with a PVI display and 4 level gray scale controller. It is powered by a Rockchip RK2706B ARM7EJC (260MHZ)+ processor. It comes with 256MB of RAM on board and has a 2GB internal storage. The unit supports SD card of up to 32GB. It uses a Built in polymer battery.It has a dimension of 160x116x10 ad weighs 152g.

Audio support includes mp3, wma, flac, aac with 3.5mm stereo audio jack for earphone. Picture format support is JPEG and BMP. Text format supported includes ascii, unicode txt doc, pdb, ePub, HTML, PDF, FB2.

This product will make its appearance at IT SHOW 2010 at an introductory price of S$399 with FREE 4GB SD card and a leather pouch.

IT SHow 2010 pricing are listed here

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