Spring Design Inc recently launched its e-book reader called “Alex”. The final version is expected to be shipped not before the month of April. Will the “Alex” gain a significant foothold in the e-book reader market? Will it give Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other notable e-book manufacturers a run for their money? This review aims to judge the fate of Mr Alex! Will it compete or will it perish? Let’s find out!

Spring Design’s Alex e-book reader, unlike other readers, has two display screens – the 6 inch EPD (Electronic Paper Display) which gives the pages a realistic view and the second one is a smaller 3.5 inch LCD display meant primarily for controls and navigation. Both of them are capacitive Multi-Touch screens capable of displaying high resolution images with good quality. But the feature that makes Alex an off-the-shelf e-book reader is that it runs on the Android Operating System (developed by the Open Handset Alliance). As a result, the menus and icons bear much resemblance with the cell phone, PDA, Pocket PC versions of Google Android. The overall interface is captivating and the navigations are of a standard level. A 6oo MHz MARVELL processor powers the machine.

Spring Design’s Alex e-Reader

The Alex weighs slightly less than 11.2 ounces and is approximately 0.5 inch thick. It can handle and operate quite comfortably even when on the fly. As expected, the e-book reader supports virtually every common image, text, document and video formats like PDF, TXT, GIF, JPEG, ePUB, etc.

Another interesting feature is that Alex creates an offline library which lets users store customised links. Also, the e-book reader provides access to an ocean of books from the Google books collection. Spring Design is mulling over other potential reading content partners such as ‘borders’ in order to integrate the reader with an online bookstore.

Apparently, the only two major demerits are the Android operating system and its cost. Priced at $399 it costs approximately $150 more than the ‘Nook’ by Barnes and Noble and Amazon’s Kindle. The analysis shows that these two limitations would overshadow all its other exciting features and would probably shatter Spring Design’s dreams to dominate the e-book market.

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