Jinke A6 And A9 Ereaders: WiFi, 3G, Multitouch & SiPix E-Ink

Still got an appetite for ereaders?  Jinke certainly hope so; they're showing off their latest designs, the Jinke A6 and A9, and rather than use the by-now traditional E Ink Vixplex panels found on the Kindle and nook they've switched to AUO's SiPix panels instead.  Both models – which right now don't seem to exist in anything but render form – will have multitouch, integrated WiFi a/b/g and optional 3G.

The Jinke A6 has a 6-inch, 600 x 800 display capable of 16 levels of grayscale, together with 2GB of onboard storage and an SD slot capable of taking up to 16GB cards.  It measures 185.x x 124.6 x 10.9 mm and weighs 260g with the 1,600mAh battery in place, and automatically flips page orientation using an integrated accelerometer.  Navigation is either via the hardware controls or the multitouch-capable display.

Meanwhile the Jinke A9 has a larger, 9-inch 1024 x 768 panel – again with multitouch and 16 level grayscale – and doubles onboard storage to 4GB.  It's 262 x 170 x 11.9 mm and 390g, but otherwise has the same features as the A6.  Both can handle FB2, EPUB, PDF, DOC, DJVU, RTF, TXT, HTML, PPT, BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF and MP3 files, including those with Adobe DRM.  Jinke are also showing renders of a second version of the A9 with a QWERTY keyboard.

Shipments of the two ereaders – potentially under Jinke's Hanlin brand in the US, or rebranded by BeBook in Europe – are tipped to begin in March 2010, priced at $265-275 for the A6 and $320-330 for the A9.

[via MobileRead]