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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kamla bhatt

Thanks Nitin for this post. I was wondering what was up with TIL and associated sites since I was unable to access content ivia Google search. Has this been going on for a week or so? That is the feeling I get.What was even more puzzling is that they have published an article of mine and I am unable to find it through Google Search.

Kamla Bhatt

Mohit Hira

Apologies for mixing up the site names - truly! You know where to find me…anytime. Cheers again!

Nikhil Pahwa

Oh, and this isn't Alootechie.

Nikhil Pahwa

Mohit - been trying to contact you for a confirmation regarding this. called the indiatimes office, but they weren't able to connect me to corpcomm. Couldn't contact you either. Found a corp-comm number on the net, and that person appears to have left Indiatimes.

Mohit Hira

Hi…wish someone had checked with us before posting this story but what's done is done :-)

The fact is that we are in the midst of a routine upgrade and maintenance check that required us to temporarily block all crawlers until today. These crawlers will be reinstated in phases today - as was the plan. It would be stupid for TIL to block news aggregators such as Google or anyone else, for that matter. And, contrary to what some Alootechie readers may think, we ain't stupid! Cheers!