Entourage Edge sports two screens, one for eReader, one for Tablet

The Entourage Edge is one intriguing little hybrid between an eReader and a tablet. It opens up like a book with 2 screens facing the user. There is a 1200 x 825 pixel 9.7-inch eInk screen on one side, and a 1024 x 600 pixel 10.1-inch color LCD on the other. It measures twice as thick as the Apple iPad, but it has 2 screens so that seems fair. It weighs in at 3 pounds, which is kind of heavy for a device that you are supposed to carry around like a book all day. The hinge has a 180° range of motion, which allows you to open it up and lay it flat on the table.

The eReader portion of this device boasts a Wacom enabled screen, where you can scribble annotations and notes on your ebooks. Page turns are at a miserable 3-5 seconds per turn, but that’s normal for an eReader. Battery life when using only the eReader is just over 16 hours.

The tablet runs on Android 1.6 (Donut) which has a Marvell Armada PXA168 processor (1.2 GHz but capped at 800 MHz by the software) and 512 MB of RAM with a resistive touchscreen. Several apps are included in the tablet, but you won’t have access to the Android Market for more apps. Entourage mentioned that they will implement their own marketplace in the future. One interesting app that is included in the tablet is DocumentsToGo, which allows you to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It can even read PDF files, but you probably want to stick with the eReader for PDFs, unless you really need to see colors in your document. Battery life when using only the tablet is only at 6 hours.

Other specs include 2 USB ports, 1 mini USB port, a headphone and mic slot, WiFi 802.11 b/g, 4GB internal flash memory, an SD card slot and a SIM card slot. It doesn’t have 3G connectivity. It’s priced at $499, which is pretty cheap considering that it is both an eReader as well as a tablet.

Read [LaptopMag]