LG Announces Solar e-Reader

As sub-Saharan Africans schools increasingly turn to ICTs in order to reduce the cost of education and improve learning, e-books can be a powerful and inexpensive replacement for paper-and-ink textbooks. The only problem? E-books have to be read on delicate and power hungry PCs. Even with low cost alternatives, laptops, and netbooks, electronic classrooms are a vision for the future and not the present.

Enter LG’s new solar powered e-reader. This Kindle competitor will allow a day’s worth of reading after charging in the sun only 4 or 5 hours.

The 6-inch display panel will employ a thin-film solar cell that is both lightweight and small enough to avoid adding extra bulk to the eReader at a mere 0.7mm thick (about the width of a credit card). The solar LG reader could help stave off the worry about running out of battery life in the middle of an engrossing reading session.

Mashable remains unconvinced of the product’s competitiveness in Western markets. Indeed, when compared with the recently-gone-internaional Kindle, it may not be much of a steal if you leave close to regular and quality power. For those of us who’s power supply is uncertain and unreliable, an e-reader powered by the sun is an appealing alternative.