Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Kindle Vs Asus is suddenly an intriguing prospect - Asus unveiled a 5.7″ color OLED eReader that will take on the Kindle at the end of 2010.

Asus have also revealed the Asus 950 which has a 9″ black and white screen, is just 9mm thin, and seems set to take on the Kindle DX.

Times Online broke news of the OLED eReader and Electric Pig in the UK has additional Asus DR 570 details and also the scoop on the Asus DR 950.

Kindle Vs Asus 570 – 6″ eInk Vs 5.7″ OLED

The main features of the Asus DR 570 are -

1. 5.7″ color OLED display with 768 by 1024 resolution. 
2. 412 MB RAM.
3. An impressive 0.03 second refresh rate.
4. Low weight at 200 grams.
5. 4 GB of flash storage with a SD/SDHC card slot.
6. A 1530m Ah battery claimed to have 122 hours of battery life. That’s over 5 days.
7. Support for ePub, PDF, txt, mp3, mp4, AVI, and Flash Video.
8. WiFi and 3G support for wireless downloads.

The Asus 570 is expected to be out by end of the year.

Kindle Vs Asus 570 comes down to -

1. Price – How close to $259 can Asus come?
2. Range of Content – Asus says it’s working with content providers.
3. Color Asus screen Vs whatever screen the Kindle has by end of the year.
4. OLED technology vs Kindle’s ePaper technology at the end of the year (don’t see Amazon ditching ePaper anytime soon).
5. WiFi Support on Asus 570.
6. ePub support and the memory card slot.
7. The ability to watch video etc. for 122 hours. That’s just unreal battery life.

We’ll have to see what the screen looks like and how it reads before figuring out how good it is for reading books.

Given the 570′s features there’s a high chance that Kindle Vs Asus 570 ends up being a side-show to Apple iSlate Vs Asus 570.

Kindle DX Vs Asus 950 – Battle of the Big Screen eReaders

The Asus 950 looks like a big threat to the Kindle DX. The 950′s main features -

1. 9″ Touchscreen with 1024 by 758 resolution.  
2. Black and White Screen.  
3. On-board virtual keyboard.
4. Browser and Landscape Mode.
5. It’ll weight just 370 grams.
6. Translation and Text to Speech will be supported.
7. 2 or 4 GB memory and a memory card slot.
8. WiFi and HSDPA or WiMax.
9. Screenshots show that it will target newspapers and have apps and a RSS reader.
10. There also seems to be handwriting recognition and support for Chinese or Japanese. 
11. Formats supported will include ePub, PDF, txt, Audible, MP3, html, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP.

There’s no word on release date and no mention of battery life. Kindle DX Vs Asus 950 will revolve around -

1. Price. It shouldn’t be too tough to beat the Kindle DX’s $489 price.
2. Type of wireless connection and whether it’s free.  
3. Screen quality, readability and battery life.
4. Range of Content.

It’ll be interesting to see what type of screen the Asus 950 has.

Kindle Vs Asus – How big of a threat is Asus?

There’s no way Amazon can take a competitor like Asus lightly -

1. Asus came up with the netbook concept and are currently #2 in netbooks.
2. They’re also the fifth biggest laptop vendor in the world after Acer, HP, Dell, etc. with 5% market share.
3. They’re good both at cutting prices and at extending battery life (they have several laptops with 12.5 hours battery life).

Asus’ eReaders are a big threat to the Kindle.

Asus had originally said that they would come out with dual screen eReaders with LCD screens. They have told Reg Hardware that the dual screen is actually a dual-touchscreen Tablet PC with added eBook functionality.

This means Asus will have 3 devices capable of reading ebooks -

1. The Color OLED screen Asus 570 which targets the Apple iSlate and to some extent the Kindle. 
2. The Black and White screen Asus 950 which directly targets the Kindle DX. 
3. The Dual-TouchScreen Eee Reader whose details are still under wraps.

The Asus 570 is more of a direct competitor to the Apple iSlate than to the Kindle but it might still steal some readers.

The Asus 950 on the other hand is a direct rival to the Kindle DX.

Kindle suddenly has a lot of competition and Kindle Vs Asus is one intriguing sub-plot.

Filed under: kindle Tagged: | kindle vs asus, kindle vs asus ereader