Fujitsu Launches Color e-Book Reader in Japan

Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu has stepped into the e-book fray with the a color e-paper mobile device aimed at consumers. Thin and lightweight like its competition the Kindle, Fujitsu Frontech’s awkwardly named FLEPia, is now on sale in Japan and will start shipping on April 20 for around $1,000. Customers will have the option of purchasing e-books through the FLEPia-ya Web site via Japan’s largest e-book online retailer Papyless while connecting the device to the Internet via wi-fi.

Weighing less than a pound, the e-reader uses the latest no- glare e-ink technology to render text as clearly as a printed page. Flepia displays 260,000 colors, good enough to display magazine like graphics. With up to 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged, like other e-readers on the market it does not require power for continuous display of a screen image, consuming power only during re-draw. When used with a 4GB SD card, the color e- paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper based, 300-pages-long books.

Fujitsu plans to ship 50,000 units by the end of 2010 and is working on reducing the price of each player and introducing the e-reader outside of Japan in the fall, including in the U.S. "I think it opens new ways of dynamically combining different types of content on that horribly small, user-unfriendly and obscenely portable device. We'll have no choice but to learn to coexist with these things," says publisher Julian Vinuales of GlobalRhythm Press, sl.