Infibeam eReader formally introduced, pre-orders now available

Infibeam's Pi reader has been formally introduced, and they are accepting orders with an expected ship date of February 22nd. Selling for Rs 9,999 (US $216.29), it's a fairly interesting offering, and with India's population could be a breakout product if it catches traction in the heavily developing nation.

It's 10mm (a little less than 4/10ths of an inch) and weights around 6.35 ounces (pretty light). With a fairly standard 6" Vizplex e-Ink display it offers a 600x800 resolution, 8 grayscale display and a quoted "7 day" battery life (no word on how many page turns, that's clearly a standby time if I had to guess).

There's half a gig of internal memory (a bit small, but will still easily hold a couple hundred books), it has an SD slot for cheap expansion. They list 4gb maximum expansion, so it's probably there's no SDHC support.

It's rounded out with an earphone jack, MP3 support, font size changes, portrait/landscape, document sorting, search within a book and while no mention of a dictionary it appears to have a built in Soduku game.

Files support included MP3, JPG, BMP, PNG, PDF, ePub, HTML, TXT, MOBI and DOC. It supports DRM, via Adobe Digital Editions for the PDF or ePub formats.

That last point is fairly significant - browsing through their eBook store on the Infibeam web site I see a lot of available titles by Indian authors, meaning there's a new source for titles for those of Indian descent with this reader, or others that support ADE such as a Sony Reader, or B&N nook.