Illiad, a new ebook reader

One of the joys of attending conferences is finding the unexpected product that someone brought with them. At EuroOSCON, this came in the form of the Illiad, a new ereader from iRex Technologies BV.
The Illiad is an incredibly light and thin electronic book reader with a touchscreen and stylus. The resolution on the electronic paper screen is excellent. The hardware currently comes with the following interfaces: USB type A connector for USB memory stick, CF type II slot for memory extension or other applications, MMC slot for MMC memory cards, 3.5mm stereo audio jack for headset, WIFI 802.11g wireless LAN, and 10/100MB wired LAN. It has 128MB of internal memory for content, but will also be able to pull content from USB sticks, CF cards, MMC cards, and the internet. The full specs can be found here.

The firmware currently supports PDFs, HTML, and text files. Free, Illiad-formatted ebooks can be downloaded from Many Books. The Illiad also supports notetaking and annotating. It uses handwriting recognition software from Vision Objects (only available on Windows) to convert the notes. An SDK for third-party developers will be released by the end of the year.

The Illiad is currently available for 650 Euros. The Illiad is very light and feels like a good piece of equipment. If it comes down in price I may snag one for use on the road.

A writing sample:
hellow.jpg

A sample book, to turn the page just push the long bar on the left:
itext.jpg

A sample newspaper page (to read an article just tap the screen with the stylus):
inews.jpg

Update: I have put hi-res versions of these photos up on flickr in my EuroOSCON set.