BeBook Neo e-Book Reader with WACOM Ability Launches

Posted 01/22/2010 at 2:20pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Competition is a lovely thing. As a new market opens up and manufacturers rush to fill it with the newest, the shiniest, and the coolest, there’s a good chance one or two of them will actually produce something useful. In the world of eReaders perhaps BeBook’s newly announced Neo will be one of these.

The Neo is pretty much what we’ve come to expect in eReaders: a 6-inch monochrome Vizplex display with 800 x 600 resolution, 512 MB of internal memory, an SD-card slot (up to 16 GB), a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and USB 2.0 connectivity. But also under the hood are some nifty features that distinguish the Neo: a 532 MHz Freescale CPU, a WACOM touchscreen interface, and WiFi.

BeBook says the Neo is the “fastest eReader currently on the market”, with browsing and operating speeds 2.5 times faster than competitors. The 1600 mAh Li-ION battery, when fully charged, will allow users 7,000 page turns--making diehard fans of Russian novels happy indeed. The open architecture of the Neo, furthermore, allows for future expansion.

The Neo supports a wide range of file formats, including ePUB, PDF, HTML, JPG, and PNG. Users can download new material from BeBook’s own collection of over 20,000 “free classic titles”, or from any of the other eBook providers sprouting up on the Internet, such as Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library, or Mobipocket.

BeBook says the Neo will be available February 25, and will cost $299. Pre-orders are now being accepted.

Image Credit: BeBook