Entourage Edge dual-screen Android eReader first look

The problem with tablets and eReaders is that they both have their uses: E Ink screens are great for reading text, but rubbish in bright light; LCD screens are great for the internet and video, but don’t work well for reading a lot of text.

With the Entourage Edge you can have both. We took a hands-on look at this dual-screen reader at the CES 2011 show in Las Vegas. The two screens are connected via a clever hinge that lets you view the screens side by side, or fold them back-to-back to keep the footprint down.

The eReader side uses one of the older 6in E Ink screens with 8 shades of greyscale; the newer E Ink Pearl uses 16 shades and looks a fair bit sharper. This side has controls to turn pages. The LCD side is a 7in 800×480 colour touchscreen for use with Android, and has the standard buttons on the right-hand side.

Currently the Edge runs Android 1.6, although an upgrade to Android 2.2 will be coming out. However, the device can’t connect to the Market, so you have to download applications manually to install them using the built-in WiFi connection, which is a bit of a pain. We couldn’t find out which processor the Edge is using, but it’s fairly slow and we noticed that pulling down the menu at the top of the screen was noticeably jerky.

There’s 4GB of memory, with 3GB free for storing apps and eBooks. Both PDF and ePub are supported, and the Edge supports Adobe Digital Editions for DRM-protected books. Cleverly the screens are linked together, so you can highlight paragraphs from a book and look them up on the Android screen.

The Entourage Edge is a different style of eReader and quite clever, but we need to use it for longer before coming to any judgements, as Android seemed a little sluggish when we used it on the show floor.