Neonode to debut touchscreen e-book reader this April

Another e-book reader is on the way: Neonode, previous known for making mobile phones, will be dipping into the electronic ink pool soon with the introduction of the touchscreen JinYong Reader.

Named after Chinese martial arts novelist Jin Yong, the 6-inch, ARM-based e-reader will first pop up in the Chinese-language market in April, and it isn't known yet if it will ship anywhere else.

But until then, we know that the reader device will  feature Neonode's optical touchscreen - most likely upgraded from the one we previously saw on the Neonode N2 smartphone way back in 2008.

With 2 gigabytes of internal space (plus a spot for a microSD card up to 16 GB), there's room for up to 1,500 e-books in PDF, ePub, HTML and TXT formats. It will also recognize the basic image formats like JPEG, BMP and PNG.

What is striking is that the Swedish-based company proclaims that the JinYong Reader will be the "slimmest multi-touchscreen capable eReader ever" without actually stating a figure. Curious.