Astak Mentor

From MobileRead

The Astak Mentor is a joint project between PVI (screens), Netronix (assembly and design and Touch expertise), and Astak (end design and sales). It was developed in-house in Taiwan and is now being refined in San Jose, California.

[edit] Preliminary Information

Astak will be introducing three new eBook devices at the IDPG show in New York on May 14, 2008. The eBook devices are known by the name "Mentor". It has an awesome gloss black front bezel with orange sides and back... very attractive. Mentor will come in three sizes: 5 inch, 6 inch, and 9.7 inch. They all use E-ink technology and have stereo headphone/earbud jacks. You can do slide shows on them. On the smaller devices, resolution is 800 x 600 pixels and WiFi (802.11g) and Touchscreen will be options. One charge lasts for about 8,000 pages. The 5 inch is projected to sell at about $159, and the 6 inch about $200. All will have SD card slots expanding the memory up to 4GB.

The advance projected sales price for the 9.7 inch version is about $299-$349. It will allow an 8.5" by 11" page to read true, will come with WiFi/Bluetooth and Touch integrated, 512MB embedded memory, 3.5 stereo headphone jack, SD card expansion slot, 1200 x 825 pixels, four programmable functional buttons, and a lot of other bells and whistles and lights. The release date for this unit is projected for August. The Li-ion battery will last ten years but is likely not user-changeable.

The Astak Mentor will have the following features: Turn Page, Jump to Page, Progress Bar, Font Increasing, Bookmark, Zoom In, Zoom out, Slideshow, Delete File. We have preliminary samples made and have already made changes to "Americanize it" (it is being released throughout the world). WE only know that at IDPF on May 14 we have to have working production samples.

The operating system will be Win CE with splash screen on boot; and it will support English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese (Big 5), and Japanese. It will include eReader in firmware, and may include MOBI if Amazon drops its requirement for exclusivity. It will also support TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML/CHM.