Brazil’s eBook Reader: Positivo Alfa

Not too many people have seen this device.

A review of it popped up today, but first let’s look at some pictures:

Just about as thin as a Kindle 2!

And it has a touchscreen!

There are more photos here on Flickr.

What about the review? It’s not good [translated from the original Portuguese]:

On what matters most, the Alpha must on no account for the Kindle. Its screen is not a traditional e-ink, but also of electronic ink, with a manufacturing company SiPix. It provides enjoyable reading, though a little darker than normal. The size of six inches is enough, and the resolution of 800 by 600 pixels. One difference is the position sensor, which allows to reproduce the text in landscape format.

This screen has good capacitive response to commands, but the unit is very slow in all operations. In our tests, it took 2.4 seconds to turn a page. Also demanded a lot of patience when you open a PDF file – zooming in a specific region, for example, took 6 seconds. The same slowness appeared when text typed by virtual QWERTY keyboard.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

So, suddenly that $129 Kobo Reader here in the U.S. doesn’t look so bad now, eh?

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