Dutch company Polymer Vision announced plans to launch its Readius device—a mobile phone with a large screen which folds out to become an e-reader—in the middle of this year. “Readius merges the functionality of e-readers with features of mobile phones… comes with an Internet portal for searching and personalizing content. Once users have selected content and services based on their preferences, the portal “pushes” the information to them” reports Information Week. It uses microSD memory, works on HSDPA networks and also plays MP3 files. It certainly gets past the problem of small screens—but the screen is black and white, good for reading text but not for other common mobile phone content...as such, I think it’s likely to appeal to e-reader users who want to ditch their mobile rather than mobile users who want to read e-books. Polymer Vision is in talks with content providers about filling the portal with different content for its customers.

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