New flexible displays for "pocket ereader"

Readius is a new (not yet available in US) e-book reading device that will be extremely portable. It's not quite there but they are getting real close.

There's a NYT article for general description but you need to look at Readius web site to see it held in a person's hand and get a sense of how small it is. Of course there are demos on YouTube. Holds 22 lines of text and does 16 shade grey scale. The specs from their site are:

• Weight             5.6 g complete display module
• Size (diagonal)    5" active area
• Refresh            0.5 s
• Grey levels        16
• Resolution         QVGA, 320 x 240
• Email              POP3 and IMAP supported
• Audio              MP3 / AAC / WMA 
• Images             JPEG / PNG / GIF / BMP 
• Memory             RAM   128 MB 
• Internal Storage   256MB 
• Extendable Storage High Capacity Micro SD 
• Operating system           
• Open OS          
• Microsoft Win CE 
• Connects to PC or Apple Mac via USB cable

Readius can behave as USB mass storage device or connect with the PC client, works with Bluetooth 2.0 EDR for accessory connection (eg. headset, keyboard). And when fully charge it's good for up to 30 hours active reading or 7500 page refreshes. I can't find the citation but I think I read/heard it will connect to the internet the same way an iPhone does (don't quote me on that)

Sadly it's expected to be more expensive than the Kindle. At least to begin with.

Note: For comparison, on Project Gutenberg the ASCII version of War and Peace is 3.13 MB uncompressed.