I told you that I would keep detailing the Asus products at their booth, and so I am, with feedback from CeBIT. Next up is the Asus DR-900 eBook reader that my colleague got his hands off, and that's no typo, sadly. The reader was sealed in a box, and couldn't be taken out, so I guess we'll have to leave the hands-on preview for later, or until Alex breaks the box and takes it by brute force.

Nevertheless, judging by what he could see through the plexi glass, he mentioned the DR-900 had a decent image quality, but that could as well be very influenced by the box the company kept it locked in. At least, we get the technical specifications for this, that point out a 9-inch diagonal SiPix electronic paper display, which should be more than comfortable to the eyes, especially with the impressive 1,024 x 768 pixel resolution. I almost forgot to mention two more important characteristics of the display, namely the 150ppi and the gray scale with 16 levels that should suit most customers.

The overall size of the DR-900 is 222 x 161 mm, with a thickness of less than 1cm, making it almost twice as slim as the Amazon Kindle. Storage for the DR-900 is mentioned as either 2GB or 4GB internal hard disk, but I would so doubt it Asus bothered to cram an actual hard disc in there. Or maybe they got a good deal on antique 4GB IDE hard drives - who am I to question that?

Connectivity seems better than for some dedicated mobile internet devices, featuring 802.11g Wi-Fi, 3.5G HSPA and optional WiMAX, and that's just for wireless, whereas plugged, the DR-900 packs one micro USB 2.0 for connecting virtually any PC or Mac, as well as for connecting it to the power adapter. Audio goes out either through the built-in stereo speakers or through your own earphones, via the 3.5mm stereo audio jack. File formats supported are PDF, TXT, Audible, MP3, unprotected ePub, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP.




Live report by Alex Vochin from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.


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