Astak Mentor

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 will be refined in San Jose, California.

Preliminary Information

Astak has more information on their new Mentor line:

Mentor Lite

The Mentor Lite uses a cursor to make selections which is very natural and easy to learn. It has "REFLOW" on it for .PDF documents which will resize a document to fit the screen. It has four small buttons on the left side that are "one-touch". You press one and no matter where you are now it takes you to the Main Menu... a real great feature. You press another button and it displays horizontally. Press another button and it opens up the Sudoku game. These are small and unobtrusive buttons so they will NOT be hit by accident. Yet, I think all of these buttons are a real PLUS. And... Sudoku can be a great game. It is a 6 inch device. It comes with a leather pouch.

• Mentor Lite 5: 5 inch, Linux 2.6 OS, E-ink, 8 grey scale, supports: txt, pdf, html, fb2, epub, prc, jpg, bmp. Weighs under 6 ounces.

• Mentor Lite 6: 6 inch, Linux 2.6 OS, E-ink, 8 grey scale, same formats as above. Weighs under 7 ounces.

Mentor Intrique

• Mentor Intrique: 6 inch, Linux 2.6 OS, 8 grey scale, same formats as above. Weighs under 7 ounces. Power saving to 16,000 pages on a single charge. Touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Epson controller.

• Mentor Intrique Plus: 6 inch, Windows CE/Linux 2.6, 8 gray scale, same formats. Weighs under 7 ounces. Touchscreen, Wi-Fi, 3G, hand-written note taking, Bluetooth. 16,000 pages to a single charge.

Mentor True

• Mentor Electra: 9.7 inch, Windows CE/ Linux 2.6, 16 gray scale, or 256 Color, same formats as above. Touchscreen, hand-written note taking, Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, 16,000 pages to a single charge.

Check the Netronix web site for more details on each of these products.

The older preliminary data is below:

It has a gloss black front bezel with orange sides and back. 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. All will have SD card slots expanding the memory up to 4GB. On the smaller devices, resolution is 800 x 600 pixels and WiFi (802.11g) and Touchscreen will be options on the 6". One charge lasts for about 8,000 pages. See EB-500, EB-600, and EB-610 for more details.

The early projected sales prices for these devices will likely be revised prior to release. The 9.7 inch version will allow an 8.5" by 11" page to read at nearly full size once the margins are cropped. It 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. See EB-900 for more details.

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.

The operating system will be Linux or WinCE (depending on the model) with splash screen on boot; and it will support English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese (Big 5), and Japanese. The Mentor will include eReader and perhaps Adobe Digital Editions in firmware. Hopefully they will also support TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML/CHM.

For more information

http://www.astak.com/product.asp?serial=EB-EB600BLK Mentor basic

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22658 - forum discussion

http://www.netronixinc.com/product_e-book.htm - Netronix page on the new products