CES 2006 Picks and Pans

The TechZone looks at the picks and pans of CES.

Most impressive device - Sony's ebook Reader. With an estimated street price of $299-$399, this technical marvel may be the device to kickstart the digital book world. It's about the size of a piece of paper folded in half, and it's half an inch thick with a cover that opens like a book. This device had stunning clarity - as good as a real piece of paper. It uses revolutionary e-ink, which requires no power to display. This means the only power it uses is to refresh the page, so one charge lasts 7,500 page turns! You connect the ebook Reader to the PC to load digital books; each book is about 1MB, so it can hold 80 books with its built-in memory. Let's hope this is an open device so people can add any digital publications they wish onto it. Amazingly, Sony botched the page turning buttons by putting them in the wrong spot and making them tiny metal nubs, but hopefully they'll get that right with when the production versions ship in Q2. They should also ditch the built-in mono only MP3 player, which kills the battery life, and stick to making it a spectacular digital book reader.

Read on over at The Tech Zone.