As always, the electronic versions of books do little for the user, but rather, imitate one another with the hopes of selling more than their competitors. Give us Color! Give us access to online libraries! Make the E-Reader a touch screen! Find people who use these gadgets regularly and see what is truly needed. Don't just look at the competition.

Al, check the vendor website, they have done exactly what you've asked, they checked with users before going to production. The 6 and 9.7 inch models will have touch screens, wifi and bluetooth available. Why because users asked for it! Astek has been in direct communication with users at mobileread.com and other sites specifically so their machines would not be "also ran" devices. The 5 incher is a basic model, so it does have all the features available on the bigger machines, but it offers a low cost entry point for users. This company is very responsive to user requests. They are adding dictionary support because users said they wanted it. They expect to bring out a color model next year. Since they are a union of companies including PVI that makes eink screens they have as good a shot as anyone at pulling it off. Right now the biggest problem with color, besides price, is the refresh rate.

Correction: I inadvertantly forgot a "not" My post should say "The 5 incher is a basic model, so it does NOT have all of the features of the larger models. Sorry

Refresh rate is a problem with color Bistable LCDs, which is what devices like the Flepia (sp?) use. Color eInk just uses a RGBW filter on top of an existing B&W display, so the refresh rate doesn't change. The effective resolution does drop however, since the screen's pixels are divided into different color groups.

Having seen a demo of color screen I can tell you that refresh rates were longer than for gray scale images and resolution was less.

For the life of me I just can't understand why everyone wants every silly thing imaginable from a reader before they will buy on to the idea.

As an avid reader I am looking for something that will read like a book allow me to carry my entire library (very cool concept by the way) and won't have to be plugged in after 40 minutes of reading.

Remember its for reading. MP3's and music? Any readers that were even moderately comfortable to read would make huge MP3 players (go running with that strapped to your arm) and remember its supposed to be for reading. Does your book display the internet, backlight or video?? I would rather have a simple reliable device doing the task it was designed for than a buggy swiss army knife of a device that does nothing well; we already have one of those its called Vista.

As for colour I see a future for colour e-ink and the technology will get there but with the life cycle being about 3-5 years for most consumer electronics I will buy one now and wait till then to upgrade to colour. Colour is kinda pointless now anyways until magazines and newspapers start offering electronic subscriptions. E-ink will never have the refresh rate or colour depth of an lcd so its use is specific to basicaly reading and commercial signage.

Thats my opinion anyways MrBrad

I own a sony reader and look forward to getting the 9.7" astak reader. The only thing that would make it better in my opinion is adding Mobipocket capabilities. Since most ebooks are either Mobi (kindle), sony or Microsoft .LIT formats, these units will be limited since they use only basic formats.