Samsung e-Reader with Slider Form Factor Announced

Samsung has announced its E6 e-Book reader in U.S., almost two months after it was first showcased at the 2010 CES - along with its bigger brother, the E101. The latter is yet to be announced though.

Samsung has tied up with Barnes and Noble bookstore to offer the E6 owners a sizable section of titles in the e-book format. The E6 has in sight the likes of the Amazon Kindle and even Barnes and Noble's own e-Book reader, the Nook. It is interesting to see Barnes and Noble tying up with Samsung to offer content for the E6 which competes with it's own Nook.

That said, the E6 is quite a looker - for an e-Reader that is. It has a very unusual slider form factor - probably a first for any e-Book reader on the planet. It has a 6-inch e-Ink display with a very crisp 600x800 resolution. Easily readable both indoors and outdoors, it also happens to be quite compact. The E6 comes with 2GB of internal memory, which should be sufficient for storing lots of data. However, if you feel 2GB isn't enough for the kind of reading you do, you can always use a microSD card to increase the memory to a colossal 16GB.

The E6 supports Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) and Bluetooth 2.0 and can also act as a wireless music player if you have lots of free memory and a pair of Bluetooth headphones that you can wirelessly connect using Bluetooth. There is a headphone jack as well as built in speakers. The speakers can also be used to listen to Samsung's text to speech ability in which the reader actually reads out content for you.

The E6 comes with an electromagnetic resonance (EMR) stylus pen. This gives the user the freedom to add annotations and "writing" on the e-Book screen.

Samsung is yet to reveal the price if the E6 and it is largely expected to be priced nominally compared to its competitors.