Onyx Boox i63ML Newton Now Shipping in Russia – Carta E-ink Screen, Android 2.3
The Chinese ereader maker Onyx continues to delight ereader buyers this week with the launch of a new model in Russia.
The Boox i63ML Newton is the third device to feature a Carta E-ink screen (following the Kindle Paperwhite and the Tolino Vision). It’s available today from a number of Russian retailers with a retail of 6,990 rubles (about $199 USD).
The Newton runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM. It has 8GB of internal storage as well as a microSD card slot. The 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024 x 758 and comes with a frontlight and an IR touchscreen.
Weighing in at 238 grams, the Newton has a 1.6Ah battery and is about the size of other 6″ ebook readers. Like Onyx’s other models, it supports a wide variety of ebook formats, including PDF, Epub, FB2, PDB, and Mobi. The Newton also supports a number of document formats, including CHM, DJVU, HTML, RTF, and Doc.
There’s no mention of mp3 support (but OGG and BMP are listed) and it lacks a headphone jack/speaker, which means that the Newton _may_ lack the Ivona text to speech features found in other Onyx devices. But on the plus side this device does ship with Google Play. Given the combination of an E-ink screen and 3-year-old OS, I’m not sure how many Android apps will run on it but at least readers will get to try.
This is the third device to use E-ink’s latest screen tech, and it is quite the disappointment. I have been expecting Onyx to release an ereader with a Carta screen, but I was also expecting it to run Android 4.0 or above. Onyx has a smartphone and ebook readers that run a newer version of Android, but the Newton is one of the models that hasn’t been updated.
A $200 price tag is rather steep, and if the Newton had been running Android 4.0 that would have gone quite a ways to justifying the price. The newer version of Android would have enabled users to support more apps, and thus add more features.
Thanks, Leonid!
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