World's Thinnest E-book

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Comments Posted on Oct 20, 2009 Posted by Yellow Tiger

Recently we’ve seen a few sites reporting the arrival (or rather imminent arrival) of a new e-book from Shenzhen Boeye Technology Co. - a high-tech enterprise located in Shenzhen High-Tech Park. Very thin at only 7.7mm, the Boeye E510 supports 16 levels of grayscale, has a Samsung 400Mhz processor, and storage capacities ranging from 2GB to 16GB. While no pricing had been reported, a little digging turned up some more info…

Shenzhen Boeye’s website can be found in English here. From the English side, you don’t seem to be able to navigate to the E510 product page, although it can be found on the Chinese side.

Boeye1

There you can see a few more specs including the 800x600 display resolution, a mini USB port, wireless capability, a battery of 1000mAh with a standby time up to 15 days, supported media formats of txt, html, doc, pdf, fb2, epub, pdb, chm, rtf, djvu, dvi, and ps for books, MP3, WMA, WAV for audio, and JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIF for images.

Interestingly, if you have a look on Alibaba you can find the Shenzhen Boeye pages complete with full contact details and listed products. While the E510 doesn’t make an appearance, the E500 (and other close variants) is there.

Boeye5

As you can see from the screenshot above, the price for the E500 (which has very similar specs – a little thicker at 10mm, perhaps to accommodate the slightly larger battery, no support for .doc files) is between USD150-200 FOB Shenzhen.

Western Opportunity Analysis:

Without a hands-on review it’s difficult to tell just how good this device is, but based on the specs and images alone it looks very promising. For those hoping that this was going to be a much cheaper alternative to the Amazon Kindle, don’t hold your breath. Once shipping and distributor and retailer margins are tacked onto the FOB price above, we’re unlikely to see a consumer price significantly less than what’s available now.