The mewling, puking newborn that is the e-book market has few contenders. If you discount the iPhone (and you should, because right now it's still a pain to get any text on there) then you're left with Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader. The Kindle is probably the best of these -– the only place it really loses out is battery life.
So, any newcomer really needs to beat the Kindle, either on price, features or availability of books. Unfortunately, the Dutch BeBook does none of these. It costs €330 ($510) against the Kindle's $400. It doesn't have a dedicated store and most significant of all, it doesn't have the Kindle's killer feature, an always on EVDO internet connection.
Which is a shame. The BeBook has the looks to beat the others, supports all the usual formats (pdf, doc, txt, wolf, html, mp3, png, tiff, gif, jpg and bmp), has an SD-card slot to boost its 512MB built in memory and, because it uses e-ink, the battery will last for weeks. It's just that nobody will buy it.
In fact, the only advantage it has is that it is available worldwide, unlike the Kindle. Once Amazon sorts out its production troubles, though, and cuts some deals with non-U.S. telcos for web access, the BeBook will just be an interesting footnote in e-book history.
Product page [My BeBook]
