The Alex

The Spring Design Alex.

Spring Design's Web site for its Alex e-Reader begins, "Read me. Browse me. Love me." To each their own, we guess -- but there are things about Alex that you might like a whole lot. The thing that comes to mind immediately is the dual screen.

Alex not only has a six-inch paper-white display but also has a 3.5-inch color touchscreen for accessing the Web. The e-Reader's touchscreen allows you to grab online audio and video and communicate via Google's Gmail. (Makes sense; the device is Android-based.) If books be your food of life, you can download them through Google's bookstore or any other site that supports e-books and documents in ePUB, PDF, HTML, and TXT formats.

(We know, the Nook also has a color touchscreen. We're just going to go with the facts at hand until the soot and dust from the lawsuit settles.) .

Another nice feature is what Spring Design calls "LinkNotes." It allows authors to embed hyperlinks in their books or documents that can be accessed from the touchscreen and send you sailing across the Web, if you wish, in search of their linked content.

Alex's storage capabilities may take you aback a bit. Its technical specifications give it 256 MB of internal memory plus 256 MB of flash memory plus a MicroSD slot for additional storage expansion. That's not a lot of base memory no matter which way you look at it.

The 6-inch monochrome screen has a 600x800 resolution and operates in eight levels of grayscale. According to Spring Design, it can be made to operate in 16-level grayscale if desired. The 3-inch touchscreen works out to a 320x480 resolution at 16-bit color with an option for 24-bit.

While your actual usage will vary, Spring Design indicates that Alex can handle 7,500 page turns or 6 hours of media playback before needing a 3-hour battery recharge.

Specs: Alex  Display  6" B&W: 600x800 / 3.5" color: 320x480  Size  4.7"x8.9"x0.4" Storage  256 MB+256 MB flash+ MicroSD card  Connectivity  Wi-Fi + PC  Wireless Coverage  Wi-Fi  Rotating Display  No  Price  $399.

Review by Information Week - April 2010