The world's first e-reader and netbook hybrid is set to start shipping next week. The dual-screen eDGe, made by Entourage, comes with a 9.7-inch E Ink screen on the left half, and a touchscreen LCD on the right, meaning you can use it as an e-reader, a notepad, or a regular netbook -- at the same time.
"Pre-orders received by January 12 will start shipping at the end of this week. New orders will ship in March," says Doug Atkinson, Entourage's VP of Marketing and Business Development, in an interview with E-Reader.info.
The other big news is that Entourage launched its owne-book store to compete with the bigger boys, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the upcoming Apple iBooks store. Why not simply partner with someone already in the book business?
"Having our own e-bookstore allows us to offer books and documents based on our customer demand," says Atkinson in the interview. Entourage is mostly aiming at public domain books - about a million of them in a partnership with Google - but have also managed to sign up publishers like Oxford Press, Ingram Digital and LibreDigital.
As reported by Gadget lab in January, the device will come with 4 GB storage, 2 USB ports and a SD card slot, weighing roughly 2.5 pounds. Which, when you consider Macbook Air's 3 pounds, isn't that light.
The $490 device runs on Google's Android OS and will be able to handle Microsoft Office documents.
There seem to be some pretty cool features, though, especially when it comes to playing around between the two screens. You can drag a grayscale image from the E-Ink screen and view it in full color on the LCD one, or attach video (on the right screen) to a passage from an e-book (on the left screen).
When using two screens, or primarly the LCD screen, the battery life is 6 hours. When only using the E-Ink part, you can squeeze out about 16 hours out of your eDGe, the company claims.
Note: In case you were wondering why the weird capitalized letters, Entourage people say the "DG" in eDGe stands for "Digital Generation". Edgy.
