The prime moment of scare for the e-reader corporates such as Amazon, Samsung etc at the CES 2010 was the launch of Alex e-reader.

A product offering from Spring, the e-reader has a double-display design and is ready for pre-orders.

It has a six-inch e-ink display on a 3.5-inch LCD. The second display comes at a high premium. It supports EPUB, PDF, HTML, and TXT formats. It also comes with Wi-Fi connectivity and supports full android-based web- browser.

Although featuring a restricted selection of Google Android apps, it showcases the calculator, e-mail, photo gallery, and music player.

The e-reader provides an option to download Android apps from sources like androidfreeware. com. As far as the reading is concerned, currently it has inked deals with Google Books. Spring expects that links will fall-in as and when it strikes future bookselling partnerships.

The differentiating feature of Alex e-reader is that it allows a user to download files and read them directly from the device.

It is priced at $399, $100 more than its competitors like Amazon's Kindle 2 or Barnes & Noble's Nook.