$13 Txtr Beagle Ebook Reader To Sell For $69

Nate the greatest writes "Remember that really cheap 5" ereader that everyone was talking about back in October? It turns out that the price was too good to be true. Txtr, maker of the beagle ereader, has confirmed today that the beagle will be coming to the US market in the near future. But it's not going to cost $13. Instead this ereader will cost $69. It seems that txtr isn't having much luck selling the beagle to telecoms (where it was going to be marketed as a smartphone companion device), so they have instead decided to try to sell it in the retail trade, where it will have to directly compete against the Kindle. That is going to be a problem because the beagle is much less capable than the Kindle, even though it costs the same. The beagle won't work without a companion Android app which is needed to transfer files to the beagle over Bluetooth. That app requires Android 4.0 or above."

Comments

How does the beagle find competing against Amazon?

[Cryacin]

Ruff.

$13 at the fire sale?

[billstewart]

I hope they make enough of them that when the product fails, they'll be able to sell them off cheap. Assuming it's easy to jailbreak, there may be uses for it.

$13 dollars would have been subsidized

[Tim the Gecko]

From the linked article:

"As for price, the 10 to 20 euros mentioned before is the subsidized price; I don’t know what the actual retail will be. If you want the lower price you will need to contact a cell network which carries it and buy it from them – with contract, probably."

So it was only a $13 ereader in the same sense that this is a $0.01 cellphone.

It needs the companion app at $69?

[Michalson]

It really doesn't take a lot of power to read an eBook. Some of us have been doing it since the Palm days (for reference I had no problem reading eBooks on a 4MB Palm IIIx, which used a 16 Mhz low power SoC version of the CPU that powered the Apple Lisa).

Reading the specs for the device it seems that its 4 GB of storage are used to hold 4 bit uncompressed bitmaps - the companion app must render each page as a bitmap, send it to the device by bluetooth and then the device just dumps it on the screen with no processing power at all. That would seem to be the 'cost savings': take out the CPU and RAM and replace it with a simple 8 bit controller linking BlueTooth, flash and display, or at least that must have been the original sales pitch before anyone actually sat down to design it.

By comparison a $30 photo frame contains a CPU powerful enough to decode JPG files fast enough to display them as a slide show. That's more powerful then the Palm at half the cost of the Beagle. Part of that is because the cheap ARM CPU inside costs under $2 and has all the power you could need.

I think the simple truth is that 80-90% of the material cost of the Beagle (and it's competitors like the entry level Kindle, Nook, Kobo models) probably comes from the eInk screen and the NAND memory. There just wasn't a huge savings to be had by eliminating the CPU and RAM. They seem to have saved $10 after markup over their competitors (who not only have CPUs but touch screens and rechargable batteries as well). This seems like a pie in the sky sales pitch that wasn't aborted as soon as they discovered the cost savings where not there.

Slightly ahead of its time.

[Dan East]

The architecture of this device is just slightly ahead of its time. It is, literally, a secondary display for a primary computing device. Electronic ink is optimal for reading when there is enough ambient light, so it would be much better than reading a book on a cell phone (plus the screen size is larger too). However, there are two places where this would be the killer app, and neither are mainstream yet: Google Glasses, and the iWatch. Both of those are wearable computers, but they both have sub-optimal displays. That's where an external display would be extremely useful. It would make a whole lot of sense to just extend your existing wearable computer into an ebook reader, instead of having to carry (and thus synchronize / manage data / etc) a discreet device.

Imagine - you have your Txtr in your hand, or simply propped up on a little stand or laying on your lap as you read. To turn the page, you just give your wrist (the one your iWatch is on) a little flick, and the page turns. Pretty much optimal.

This really is the future. Your iWatch or Google Glasses will be your primary computing device for everything. Want to watch a movie at home? It simply outputs wirelessly to your TV (with an Apple TV box attached). Want to browse the internet? Use an external display that looks like an iPad, but that is merely a display and touchscreen. Want to read an ebook? Grab an eInk screen. Got a lot of typing to do? Whip out your bluetooth keyboard. I predict devices in a laptop form factor (including touch screen) that is nothing more than an I/O device for your wearable computer.