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First Look at the New Thalia Oyo II E-reader

It’s been 2 months since Thalia first announced that they were going to release a new Oyo ereader, and earlier this week they finally unveiled the the Oyo II.  The original is on the left, with the new Oyo on the right.

As you can see, the Oyo II looks pretty much like the original Oyo. It has the same button layout, 6″ Sipix screen, capacitive touchscreen, Wifi, and card slot, but the Oyo II also has 4GB Flash storage, longer battery life, as well as a faster CPU.

Thalia had it on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is wrapping up today. It’s going to ship in November, and  Thalia will carry it on all 300 of their bookstores, as well as their website. It’s also going to be available via buch.de and bol.de. Retail is 119€, which is a slight discount from the original Oyo (that sold for 139€). I’d say the price drop is likely due to the new K4 being sold in Germany for 99€.

Thalia also mentioned that they plan to release reading apps later this year, with Android coming in December and iOS app coming in January. Readers will be able to use the Android app and the Oyo II to buy directly from Thalia’s ebookstore, where they stock 300k titles with 100 thousand in German.

I think Thalia should have gotten out of the hardware end of the business.  They’re simply not big enough to be selling enough Oyo ebook readers to justify the price. I would lay odds that they are loosing money on each sale.

It would probably have been better to partner with Sony and sell the PRS-T1.  Redirecting it to the Thalia ebookstore would require minimal work and saved Thalia the development cost.

via Heise.de


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Comments


First look at the new Thalia Oyo II e-reader – The Digital Reader October 16, 2011 um 2:14 pm

[…] Update: nope, I was wrong. […]


Takahiro Fujiwara October 17, 2011 um 11:26 am

I found the video of OYO II which was showed in Buchmesse Frankfurt 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kJgpdbh63k

It looks that screen speed is not fast and I could not feel it is new one.

Nate Hoffelder October 17, 2011 um 12:17 pm

Thanks for the video! Sadly, it doesn’t show much useful info.


charlie dulin October 19, 2011 um 1:24 pm

has there even been more production of the Sipix display? They might have done the updating just to try to move displays they already purchased.

I really thought sipix had stopped production


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