Skip to main content

Asus DR-570 and DR-950 e-Readers to Bring Newsstands to Your Hands

dr950-3E-Readers were a hot commodity this CES season—with over a dozen new models revealed—but not all of 2010’s e-readers made their debut at the Las Vegas Tech tradeshow.  Taiwanese manufacturer Asus has gave InGear exclusive details of its new DR-570 reader yesterday and then today released some other details on another 9-inch e-reader ultimately confusing most tech writers. Asus said yesterday that it has developed a 6-inch, high-brightness, OLED color-screen e-reader that will run for 122 hours under real-world conditions–meaning it would be running programs such as Flash video over its built-in Wi-Fi or 3G—all on only one battery charge. Then Asus was like “oh yeah, we also have this 9-inch one that’s way cooler and will come out sooner.”

dr950-1
Image used with permission by copyright holder

So, there are two Asus e-readers: the DR-570 and the DR-950. Very few details have been leaked about these e-readers, but today there were some major information spills on Asus’ new devices. The ElectricPig.co.uk claims the Asus DR-950 has a 9-inch Sipix panel and packs a 1024×768 resolution display, offers RSS feeds, translation and text-to-speech, 2 or 4GB of internal memory, and an SD slot, Wi-Fi and HSDPA or even WiMax, plus a USB port for sideloading, a 3.5m audio port for music. The Asus DR-950 will also support PDF, TXT, Audible, MP3, ePub, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP file formats.

dr950-2The same sight also reported that the rumored 6-inch e-reader, the DR-570 will sport a 5.7-inch OLED display, boasts a sharp 768×1024 resolution with a 0.03 second refresh rate, 4GB of flash storage, 412MB of RAM, a 1530mAh battery and an SD/SDHC card slot, and it weighs just 200g. The Asus DR-570 will also be quite the multimedia machine—supporting ePub, PDF, TXT, MP3, MP4 and AVI files and play back Flash videos. The devices are expected to be out at the end of 2010, with the DR-950 launching sooner than later.

Dena Cassella
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Haole built. O'ahu grown
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more