Spring Design’s Alex

If you want an ebook reader with a good browser and tight integration, this is a great choice.

After the Nook, and before the iPad becomes available in the market, the Alex is the only ebook reader that supports a full web browser, MP3 player and a colour screen. Yes, ebook readers make sense on a black and white E Ink screen, and while we are eagerly waiting to see what the iPad will do to help eye strain, Spring Design’s Alex is all ready to be shipped out from the first week of April. It features a large 3.5 inch colour screen in addition to the black and white E Ink screen, and it can read documents in .epub, .pdf, .html and .txt formats. Running on the Android operating system, Alex gives users a 3.5 inch colour touch screen that allows them to access the web, listen to music in the background, or cross reference text in the book. The screen can also be used to watch videos and make online video or audio references.

What is unique to Alex is its link notes technology, which lets the book publisher or document author insert hyperlinks in the book, which can be read on the colour screen at the bottom. Alex weighs 300 gm and measures 8.9 x 4.7 inches with a thickness of about half an inch. You can hook it up to a broadband connection via Wi-Fi or by linking it to the PC with a USB 2 connector. Its storage can be expanded up to 32 GB; 2 GB is standard and the rest can be had with additional microSD cards. Its E Ink screen is 6 inches in size, similar to the Kindle’s. The overall size of the reader is also like that of the Nook and Kindle, although it is a bit narrower. Since Alex runs on Android, in the future more and more applications will be available to use on this ebook reader. In case you did not want to go in for the iPad, but were missing a good browser and tight integration on the Kindle, Alex is a great choice.

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