Infibeam was the first Indian company to launch E-Book reader – Pi – in India.

One look at the new Wink E-reader and it is quite clear that the device is clearly inspired (if not copied) by Amazon Kindle.

One differentiator (if I can call it) that Wink has is that it supports 15 languages on its device. Wink comes in 2 specifications Reader-A & Reader-B

Wink E-Reader Specifications

• Dimensions: 185mm (L) x 124.6 mm (W) x 10.9 mm (H) and weighs 260 grams with battery
• Display: Gray Scale: 16-Level gray scale, resolution: 800x 600 pixels,
• Screen Size: 6” measured diagonally.

Reader-B has the following specs in terms of dimensions, weight and display:

• Dimensions: 262mm(L)×170mm(W)×11.9mm(H) and weighs 430 grams with battery
• Display: Gray Scale: 16-Level Gray Scale, Resolution: 1024 x 768 pixels,
• Screen Size: 9” measured diagonally.

Wink Reader boasts of an internal memory of 2 GB and that could be expanded up to 16 GB and will be able to support file formats like txt, pdf, rtf, doc, html, wolf, chm, fb2, djvu for content reading, and also play multimedia files of the format mp3 and aac. It has a 400 MHz ARM9 processor, Internet using GPRS with Quadband.

The makers claim that the battery life of Wink is extremely high as one can leaf over 8000 pages with a single backup.

Wink Reader is priced at Rs. 11,490/-

My Opinion:

I am not really sure if India has that big an e-reader market. Yes, there are definitely people around who are willing to buy and probably the numbers are steadily growing. But one has to take into consideration that Indian consumers can easily buy a more matured product in Amazon Kindle.

Even from pricing perspective Amazon Kindle works out cheaper than Wink (with all duties etc..). Additionally, the next generation Kindle is a much superior product than its predecessor.

What wink is banking upon is the local language content, which it promises to offer in loads. I am not sure if that alone is enough for Wink to really attract sizeable number of consumers.

Would love to hear your opinions…