Infibeam Pi: An affordable eBook reader

Hitesh Raj Bhagat 

BANGALORE, INDIA: Infibeam has announced a truly affordable eBook reader called the Pi. At quite an affordable price compared to its most popular competitor, the Amazon Kindle, the Pi stands a chance to capture a whole new class of consumer. The Pi will work in conjunction with the Infibeam online eBook store which claims to have over 1 lakh titles available for sale. It also supports Word, PDF and TXT files.

We had a chance to take a closer look at the device before it officially goes on sale. It features a 6-inch, 800 x 600 pixel e-ink display, just like the Kindle, but is a lot more compact because it does away with a QWERTY keypad. The device is also very slim (10mm) and light (180 grams). The e-ink display is, as expected, great to read books on. It can display images too, but in grayscale. Below the display is a 5-way navigation pad and you get controls along the side for 'Home', 'Menu' and font size.

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The Pi has an internal memory of 512MB which can be expanded by upto 4GB using a standard full size SD card. Not only does it support the popular EPUB files, but also Microsoft Word (DOC), text files (TXT), PDF and HTML. It can also display images in JPG, BMP and PNG formats.

At first glance, the device itself did look a little familiar. Any clues to the country of manufacture and OEM were blanked out on the device we saw. But sure enough, a quick search revealed several other eBook readers which are the same basic device (with just a few cosmetic changes). Some examples are Foxit Software's eSlick, iRiver's Libre, Bookeen's Cybook Gen3 and Astak's Mentor, to name a few. It's a new breed of low-cost eBook readers, and a lot of manufacturers have jumped at the idea. Obviously then, the device is not made in India, but by a Chinese OEM manufacturer (probably Huaxin Electronic Facilities in Shenzhen or C-Double Tek from Guangdong).Check out these devices here.

To transfer files or to charge the device, you need only conect it to a PC using the mini USB port. We could not find any way to transfer files from the SD card to the internal memory. The built-in lithium-ion battery has a claimed life of 4 to 7 days, which we feel could have been better. A higher capacity battery wouldn't have increased the price or weight by much, but it would have increased the usability by a lot. And while the device does support playback of MP3 files, it strangely has only a 2.5mm audio output. Since all aftermarket earphones are 3.5mm, you'll either have to use a 2.5 to 3.5mm adapter or be content with the supplied earphones.

We tried reading a rather large PDF file on it by transferring it to the SD card. It took a few seconds to load the page, but interestingly, the Pi applied some sort of default formatting to display all the text in a more readble manner (while the images were displayed separately at the beginning). However, while it may increase readability, this sort of formatting may not always be desirable; the very purpose of having a PDF was defeated because we could not see the PDF page as it originally appeared.

You can currently pre-order the Pi on the Infibeam website (www.infibeam.com) for a non-refundable deposit of Rs 999. The balance amount of Rs 9,000 (which includes all taxes, shipping and handling charges) will be payable at the time of delivery. The device starts shipping on the 22nd of Feb 2010

(Source:Living Digital India)