Brother rolls out A4-sized e-document reader

Serkan Toto

Dr. Serkan Toto is an independent consultant and advisor focusing on Japan’s web, mobile and social gaming industries. Based in Tokyo, he works together with financial institutions and startups worldwide. Serkan has been the Japan contributor for TechCrunch.com since 2008. He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. → Learn More

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

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Amazon’s Kindle isn’t available in Japan and nobody over here bought the Sony Reader (Sony stopped sales over here already). Japanese people love reading (and even writing) stuff on their mobile phones too much. But now Brother is trying to at least get business people interested in a document reader, their SV-100B the company introduced today [JP].

The monochrome SV-100B comes with a rather large 9.7-inch LCD screen (A4 size) with 1,200×825 resolution and 150 dpi density (the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch screen with 600×800 resolution and 167 dpi). It’s weight is 600g (including battery) and it’s 15.5mm at the thinnest part.

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One 2GB microSD card that can hold the content of up to 10,000 pages in A4 will be delivered with the device. Apart from microSD cards, users can transfer documents through USB or Bluetooth after having installed a piece of proprietary software. The SV-100B’s lithium-ion battery has to be recharged after 83 hours (based on one page-turn a minute).

The device will hit Japanese stores June 1 and cost $1,450. Brother hasn’t said anything yet about exporting the SV-100B to other countries.

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