New BeBook eReader no comments
BeBook has announced a new ereader it is calling the Club. While we don’t have official pricing yet, it appears that the Club will be a budget-priced ereader that will, like the BeBook 
Neo, will be based on Onyx BOOX hardware — this time the BOOX X60.
BeBook says that the Club will be “brilliantly affordable,” no doubt in order to better compete with the Kindle 3, which is much lower priced than the current flagship BeBook ereader, the Neo ($249), and is more feature rich, albeit without the touchscreen.
The Club will have a 6-inch e-ink screen with a resolution of 600 x 800 pixels and eight gray levels, but it will be the older Vizplex display rather than the newer and more contrasty Pearl display that is utilized by the latest generation Kindles (both 6-inch and DX) and the new Sony ereaders.
A wide range of file formats will be supported by the Club, as well as MP3s and the usual picture file formats. The bad news is that there is no wireless – you will need to use the USB cable to transfer content.
There is an SD card slot, which will let you expand on the internal memory of the Club. There is only 512MB of internal memory. BeBook’s (or perhaps Onyx’s) approach seems to to be to include less internal memory than other ebook readers (the Neo as well as the BeBook One and Mini all have 512MB) and rely on card slots to provide more memory for those readers who need it.
The relative dearth of internal memory means the added expense of purchasing the SD card, which you will probably need for installing updates, but it does give more flexibility to readers who have a lot of ebooks or documents. Amazon takes a different approach and eschews card slots — the Kindle 3 has around 3GB internal memory available to the user (holds approximately 3,500 ebooks), but has no card slot for expansion.
The battery life of the Club is said to be good for up to 12,000 page turns, which is quite good. Size wise, the club measures 196 x 121 x 10.6mm (7.72 x 4.73 x .42 inches) and weighs 289g (10.19 ounces). So the Club is a little taller, thicker and heavier than the Kindle 3.
The Boox hardware that the BeBook Club is based on is said to use a 532MHZ Freescale processor — same as the BeBook Neo ereader. The Neo is pretty fast, but to me the Kindle 3 seems slightly faster.
My take is that this could work for BeBook if they were to price the Club at a significantly lower price than the Kindle 3. If the Club is more expensive or even only a little lower than the Kindle 3 it just does not make sense. You are getting an older screen technology, no wireless and no Kindle Store.
We should not have to wait long for the Club as BeBook says that it will be available from their online store and other retailers within a couple of weeks.
Update: Charbax from ARMdevices has caught the Boox X60 on video at IFA 2010. It appears that Onyx has made the X60 drop proof to some extent. Hopefully this will make for a few less cracked screens.
£149.00
£109
