Sharp Announces Galapagos e-Reader

Sharp has announced it’s new e-reader, with a sly grin, called Galapagos along cloud-based content services. http://bit.ly/9ajRZP

Sharp is stepping up its activities in the e-reader and tablet markets, and like Amazon, it appreciates that success will rely on a strong store and cloud-based platform, not just neat devices. It has unveiled the Galapagos media service, which will initially offer two Android e-readers and a bookstore, and will later be expanded to other content and device types.

The Galapagos bookstore will offer subscriptions for newspapers and magazines as well as free samples of some ebooks and the ability to organize and categorize downloads. This is similar to the Amazon Kindle experience, though Galapagos will not have such as wide range of content, at least at first - it will go live with about 30,000 titles. This will grow with international expansion and at that point, Sharp will support various standard ebook formats, notably ePub, pdf and HTML. In Japan, it will support XMDF (ever-eXtending Mobile Document Format), which was developed by Sharp but has not found its way far outside Japan.

“Sharp regards Galapagos as a positive terminology,” the company said in statement, insisting it would evoke a “tablet terminal with cutting edge technology and knowhow cultivated in Japan, integrated with global de facto standard technologies.” See the full article over at ReThink Wireless

[Meanwhile, we also enjoyed this Tech-Eye post — Eds]