Japanese Carrier Gets Super High-Res LCD E-book Reader

For our non-American friends who love the Kindle's inclusive wireless over the air download of e-books for no additional charge through Amazon's partnership with Sprint for Kindle's Whispernet service, Japanese carrier KDDI is getting a cool e-book reader of its own. Toshiba is making the Biblio for KDDI, an e-reader with an LCD screen instead of the digital ink display used by traditional e-readers. The advantage here is that the Biblio can render crisp color images rather than grayscale, but the e-ink display is more battery friendly and is said to cause less eye strain.

The LCD on the Biblio will feature a resolution of 960 X 480 on a 3.5-inch screen, which is more pixels than the new FWVGA support on Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7. The device will also have 7 GB of user accessible memory for book storage and "a slide-out dynamic keyboard that can display a numeric pad in the portrait orientation or full QWERTY in landscape" according to Engadget Mobile. If you are fluent in Japanese, you can visit KDDI to learn more about the Biblio and other devices.