Tag Archives | Spring Design Alex

E-Reader vs. E-Reader: Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 2, 2009 at 9:15 pm

Back on October 19th, a company called Spring Design introduced an e-reader called Alex. It had two significant features in common with Barnes &  Noble’s Nook, which was introduced a day later: Both sport a large monochrome e-ink screen and a smaller touch-sensitive color display below, and both run Google’s Android OS.

Spring Design is now saying that the similarity is too close for comfort, and that it’s suing Barnes & Noble:

Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.

I’m not a lawyer, and have no insight into the backstory here–and while I’ve played a bit with an Alex, I’ve yet to see a Nook in the flesh. So I’m not taking sides. But the two e-readers do look similar (that’s the Alex on the left):

Spring Design Alex

One way or another, I hope this is resolved quickly: The Nook is due to ship late this month, and is, for the moment, the Amazon Kindle’s most promising competitor. Spring’s press release doesn’t say whether its goal is to prevent B&N from shipping the Nook at all

2 comments

Spring Design Springs into the E-Reader Game

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 19, 2009 at 4:33 am

Those rumors about the imminent announcement of an Android-based e-book reader with both a black-and-white e-ink screen and a color touchscreen below it? They were true–except for the part about it being announced by Barnes & Noble. A company called Spring Design has announced an e-reader called Alex, and conceptually, at least, the hardware sounds very much like what the Barnes & Noble device will supposedly deliver.

Here’s an image of Alex (and a smaller one of the B&N gadget, borrowed from Gizmodo, to its right).

Spring Design Alex

Alex has a 6″ e-ink display and a 3.5″ color touchscreen; it’s got an SD slot; it runs Android OS and claims to deliver full-blown Web browsing, which no other e-reader has done to date. The press release mentions connectivity via Wi-Fi, 3G, EVDO, and GSM; I presume that it means that versions of Alex could support any of these options, not that it delivers all of them in one device.

What’ll show up on that color screen?

Ideal for professional, educational and entertainment markets, Alex dynamically transforms the reader’s experience with images, videos and notes inserted as ‘Web grabs’ or with custom text created by the user or other secondary authors pertaining to the subject being displayed. Users can create their own images and notes and capture them to augment the original text or just dynamically grab relevant content with Link Notes™, Alex’s innovative multimedia authoring tool to enhance multimedia publishing.

So when can you get your hands on Alex, and how much will it cost? Not clear. The company says:

Spring Design is currently in discussion and enlisting major content partners and plans to release the Alex device for selected strategic partners by the end of this year.

…which would appear to mean that it doesn’t have a bookstore in place yet, and isn’t entirely sure how Alex will be sold, or by who. It’s a logical guess that it may be making this incomplete announcement because it expects Barnes & Noble to make its big splash real soon now, and wanted to get some attention beforehand. (That might also explain Plastic Logic’s sudden announcement of the upcoming announcement of its Que e-reader.)

In both its Alex and Barnes & Noble incarnations, the idea of a two-screen e-book reader is a reaction to the contrasting deficiencies of e-ink and LCD displays–e-ink can barely do photos and is slow to refresh, and LCDs eat up battery juice too quickly. I look forward to the day when nobody thinks the dual-screen kludge is necessary. In the meantime, though, it’ll be fun to check out these devices, and to see if a small company like Spring Design can compete against giants such as Amazon, B&N, and Sony.

8 comments