The BeBook e-book reader is a product of Endless Ideas BV, headquartered in Netherlands, and well known for the companies like Shell, Philips, TomTom and Heineken. Endless Idea’s mission is to provide consumers with innovative products with an uncompromising, elevated experience. The BeBook is an e-book reader and does not try to replace books; it only lets you read digital content on the go, as you do on paper.

Announced on January 22, 2010 the BeBook Neo is the latest addition to the BeBook family and the first Wi-Fi e-reader in the world with access to eBook stores worldwide. As tells the company besides reading your favorite e-books on this new e-reader model, you can also make notes, scribbles or easily add, save and erase annotations. The reader has a touchscreen element and draws on a Wacom-made tablet surface that allows for margin notes or highlights.

Building on the success of the BeBook One and BeBook Mini, the Neo features the latest WACOM touchpanel technology, providing readers a very fast and more natural reading experience. Running on a 532 MHz Freescale processor and 1600mAh Li-ion battery, the BeBook Neo offers browsing and operating speeds of up to 2.5 times faster than other e-readers on the market. The powerful battery of the BeBook ne will allow for up to 7000 pages turns. The e-reader depends only on Wi-Fi to get online and points users to multiple third-party stores rather than to an internal shop.

With BeBook Neo on your hands you will have easy access to e-book store simply clicking on your country and then you can see a clear overview the third party e-book stores. It’ll have basic surfing abilities as be able to surf Wikipedia and Google. Endless’ reader supports must popular e-book formats including: EPUB, PDF, TXT, HTML, RTF, MOBI, CHM, PDB, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF and other. Don’t worry also about e-reader’s memory, BeBook Neo comes with 215Mb internal memory, which can be supported a microSD slot that can take up to 16GB cards.

The Neo features 6-inch E Ink screen, and 6-inches seems to the standard for e-readers, as the Kindle, Sony e-reader, others, all feature the same size and weights just 298g including battery. The BeBook Neo comes with also a 3.5 audio jack and a USB port with OTG support included in the package.

The BeBook Neo is available for pre-order now for $299.99 USD, and will be made available in the second half of February.

The BeBook was released in late 2007.  Since then it has been rebranded and sold as different names in countries around the world – lBook, DigiBook Reader, Apollo-Hanlin, Walkbook, Papyre, HanLin eBook, Astak EZ Reader, and Eco Reader.

But the company who created this portable ebook reader, HanLin, has been in the game since the year 2000, so they definitely aren’t a fly-by-night startup.

The BeBook is of average size and weight for an electronic reading device.  It use eInk technology for its screen display and has buttons on the bottom and side to navigate and control the display.

Specs

• Weight - 7 oz
• Thickness - 0.4″
• Size – 7.25″ x 4.75″
• Screen Size - 6″
• Battery Life - 9000 page turns
• Storage – 512 MB  internal + SD external slot
• Price - $280

The BeBook comes stock with a leather case, which is a welcome change from many other portable ebook readers that require you to pay extra for this accessory.  Upon turning on the BeBook, the first thing I decide to play with is the interface.  There’s a Menu button, “return” button, and 10 number keys.  In order to choose a menu item or select a book it’s as simple as pushing the corresonding button.  Not very difficult!

You can also move through pages by pressing the appropriate button on the left side of the device.

Where the BeBook really shines it with all the different file formats it can handle.  A heck of a lot more than most competitors, that’s for sure!   The list includes:  PDF, TXT, RTF, EPUB, LIT, PPT, WOLF, DOC, CHM, FB2, PRC/MOBI, HTML, DJVU, MP3, TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, RAR, ZIP.   Wow.

It has a decent battery life, and with the external SD slot it’s doubtful you’ll ever fill it up completely with books.

Summary

The BeBook is a pretty darn good device.  It’s simple to use, works exactly as advertised, and it’s obvious from its evolution that HanLin is willing to continue its improvement in future versions.  Also, it has excellent support for many different ebook formats.  It you want a decently priced ebook reader that doesn’t force you to use a proprietary format (like Sony and Amazon), you’d likely be satisfied with the BeBook.

If you’d like to read more or buy a BeBook, you can here.

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