Chinese startup to show e-book entry at CES

PORTLAND, Ore. —A new e-reader called Boox 60 from startup Onyx International (Guangdong, China) will debut next week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

The Boox 60 uses the same 6-inch E-Ink Corp. electrophoretic touchscreen display as most of the other e-books, including Amazon's Kindle, and will retail for $349. The 800-by-600 pixel screen supports 16 levels of gray. Users can write letters and notes using a supplied stylus as well as annotate and highlight text in the books they are reading.

The Boox 60 uses a Freescale i.MX35 microprocessor running at 532 MHz with 128 Mbytes of RAM and and 512 Mbytes of flash memory which is expandable with an SD card up to 32 Gbytes. A USB port and built-in WiFi can be used to upload books, and a built-in 1600mAh rechargeable lithium-polymer battery affords enough energy to turn 8,000 pages (electrophoretic displays only use energy when turning pages).

The Boox 60 supports these formats: PDF, EPUB,TXT, HTML, CHM, RTF, Mobipocket, PDB, JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF as well as MP3 and WAV for listening to music via the 3.5-millimeter stereo headphone jack. Multiple languages are supported, including English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese.