Toshiba BookPlae DB50 e-reader announced for Japan

Good news for those living in Japan, if you’ve been meaning to hop aboard the ebook bandwagon, you might be interested in checking out Toshiba’s latest e-reader offering which ought to give customers an alternative to Sony’s own e-reader products. Dubbed the Toshiba BookPlace DB50, the e-reader will be linked to Toshiba’s own BookPlace store which might be familiar to some as it is currently available on both iOS and Android as apps.

Based on its specs, the Toshiba BookPlace DB50 seems to be taking a cue from Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet/e-reader with Android 2.3 Gingerbread as its choice of operating system along with a heavily skinned UI designed for the e-reader. It will also sport a 7” 1024×600 LCD display, 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM under the hood, 8GB of internal storage, and will feature a battery life that is said to give the user 7.5 hours of usage.

As far as the size of its bookstore is concerned, at the moment it seems that the BookPlace store features around 43,000 ebooks but is expected to jump to over 100,000 by March. If you’re living in Japan and you’re thinking of picking one up for yourself, expect to fork out around 22,000 Yen (~$284) for it which will also include 5,000 Yen (~$64) worth of BookPlace store credit. It is expect to hit the shelves come 10th of February. [Press release]

Tyler Lee
Categories: Tablets
Tags: Toshiba