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At first glance it’s hard to tell the Bookeen Cybook Odyssey apart from any other eBook reader with a touchscreen E Ink display. But the Odyssey has a faster processor than most eReaders and that lets the device refresh the screen much more quickly. The slo sceen refresh rate we usually associate with E Ink is at least partially due to the slow controllers.

don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to want to watch grayscale videos on the Bookeen Cybook Odyssey or anything, but the company is confident enough in the screen speed to use animated effects throughout the user experience. For instance, when you tap on a book from your collection, the thumbnail icon for the book cover will get larger and larger until the book opens.

There are also drop-down menus and support for scrolling throughout the user interface.

There’s also a web browser, but I wasn’t able to test it out since there was no internet access.

The Cybook Odyssey has an 800 MHz TI OMAP ARM Cortex-A8 processor, a 6 inch, 600 x 800 pixel display, 128MB of RAM, WiFi, 2GB of storage, and a microSDHC card slot.

It runs software base on Linux, supports 20 different font sizes, and can handle EPUB, PDF, HTML, TXT, and FP2 files as well as common image files and MP3 music. It also supports Adobe DRM.

The company says the battery should last for about 25,000 page turns.

The Cybook Odyssey available in the US for $160. It sells for about 150 Euros in Europe.