Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Txtr Slashes the Price of the Beagle e-Reader to €19.99

our-thoughts13

Txtr is best known for its multilingual ebook store that is available in Europe, Canada, and other markets. The company has dedicated apps for both iOS and Android that allow customers to buy books and read them directly within the apps. One of the company’s little known offerings is the Txtr Beagle. This is a very low-cost reading device that connects up to your tablet via Bluetooth, which you can use to transfer ebooks to it. The Beagle was supposed to see a global roll-out with a very low price tag, due to telephone carriers heavily subsidizing it. This never panned out and the Beagle has been relegated to only being available in Germany. Today, Txtr has announced it has slashed the price on the Beagle to a paltry €19.99.

Txtr is feeling the heat of competition in the summer months with a number of  other e-reader companies offering discounts. TrekStor Pyrus Mini is on sale at Thalia for €35 and the Kobo Mini is on sale at Saturn for €29.

Good e-Reader was very proud to be the only company in the world that legitimately reviewed the Beagle and we had a solid month with it to seriously evaluate it. The Txtr Beagle features a five inch E Ink Vizplex screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. Most e-readers these days do 16 levels of grayscale, while this model only does 8. Txtr has informed us that the final model will have E Ink Pearl, which should give it 16 levels of grey and sharper/crisper text. There are 4 GB of internal memory and five ebooks can be cached at any given time. We noticed we had way more than five books loaded on the Beagle, and it only took a bit longer to open them up, so you are not exactly limited to five.

The Beagle boasts of one year battery life, thanks to the 2 AA Energizer Lithium Ion batteries that are included in the box. It also is being billed as the world's lightest reader, but that's not entirely true. The Wexler Flex One currently wears that crown at 110 grams, while the Beagle is 128 grams (with batteries) and 111 grams (without batteries).

This is an extremely bare-bones reader. There is no WIFI, Mini or Micro USB ports, or any expandable memory via SD. There are three main buttons on the bottom of the screen which function as the Left/Right and Home. About the only thing it has is Bluetooth, which is used to facilitate copying ebooks right from your phone or tablet to the Beagle.

The Beagle is officially now the cheapest e-reader in the world, but I would not recommend buying it. It takes batteries, the screen technology is 3 years old and you need Bluetooth to load anything on it.

Txtr Slashes the Price of the Beagle e-Reader to €19.99 is a post from: E-Reader News

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