Panasonic’s e-reader Raboo UT-PB1 is now official

A couple of weeks back we reported that Panasonic had revealed their very own ebook reader that they were aiming to launch in Japan, and that they also partnered up with popular Japanese online retailer Rakuten, who will be supplying the books. Well if you’re living in Japan, good news as the device is now official and it will be making its way to Japanese consumers on the 10^th of August at 34,800 Yen, which is roughly about $440.

Just a quick refresher for those who may have forgotten, the Raboo UT-PB1 e-reader will be running on Android’s Froyo 2.2 with a 7-inch LCD touch screen sporting a 1,024×600 resolution, while being powered by a dual-core CPU (exact processor speed is still unknown even at this point), a 1.3MP camera, 8GB of internal memory (although only 4.5GB will be made available to the user), a microSDHC slot, and 16 apps pre-installed (a browser, mail client, Adobe reader, etc.) as well as WiFi connectivity.

For those who were hoping that it could double up as a tablet, it’s looking a little grim there. While it may be running on the Android platform, it seems that access to the Android platform will be limited and you will instead have to contend with whatever UI Panasonic will be offering.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Tablets
Tags: e-reader, ebooks, froyo, Japan