Amazon currently dominates the e-reader market. The Amazon Kindle is the most popular e-book reader, alongside the likes of Nook and Kobo. However, an unexpected entrant has now stepped foot into the market and intends to take on the Kindle. It’s the Mi Reader, a feature-packed e-reader from Xiaomi that has launched in China today.
Mi Reader (or MiReader, as it’s stylized on the tablet itself) features a 6-inch HD e-ink display with 212ppi display resolution, a built-in LED reading light with 24 brightness settings. Xiaomi says that it brightens the display uniformly up to 90% for comfortable reading at night time. It weighs just 178 grams and seems to have a soft-touch plastic feel for a better grip and comfortable use for long hours.
This e-reader is powered by a quad-core Allwinner B300 processor, coupled with 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM. This means you shouldn’t notice any stutter in the UI and can store more than 5,000 books on this e-book reader. It supports multiple formats, such as TXT, EPUB, PDF, and many others. It even packs support for Office documents, thanks to its partnership with WPS Office. You can import PDFs to the Mi Reader from your Xiaomi phone and read on a bigger screen on the move.
Xiaomi says that you have access to hundreds of thousands of books on the Mi Reader. It enables you to login with your WeChat or Xiaomi account to sync your library in real-time from the cloud. You can download your favorite books or documents from the cloud for reading on the move. It allows you to adjust the font size and contrast to read manga more easily and clearly.
Mi Reader comes equipped with a massive 1,800mAh battery that charges via the USB-C port onboard. Yes, there’s a USB-C port on this e-reader as opposed to microUSB port on most Kindles. This is a genuine leg up from Amazon’s e-readers which need you to carry another charging cable on you.
Xiaomi has priced the Mi Reader at 579 yuan (around $83, Rs 5900) in China and it is going to become available on its crowdfunding platform from 20th November. It is priced quite aggressively but do you think it can take on the Kindle? I mean, Amazon started off by selling books and has the biggest e-book collection on planet Earth. Will Xiaomi be able to compete with Kindle in that department? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
