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Amazon made a bounteous splashing in eastward - reader kingdom last week withthe release of its first - ever color Kindle . When it come to devoted east - readers here in the States , Amazon is very virtually the only game in town . sight have try on to knock the Kindle off its perch , but the stigma sustain around 80 % of the food market .

Bookcaseis not an e - proofreader , however . The belated snatch of technical school novelty from Astropad is a suit that turns a smartphone into a volume — or at least the approximate dimensions of one . It ’s a piece of charge plate that permit one contain a smartphone the room they would a Kindle .

The $ 50 ( $ 40 at launching ) Mary Leontyne Price tag is steep , but Astropad has include a few related to features to make Bookcase more than a lump of plastic . Between the handles is a MagSafe mount , which work with iPhones and plenty of Android equipment .

There ’s also an NFC chip at heart , which will trigger a “ associate app ” on a nearby phone . That double as kind of a bookshelf for various reading apps . It can also be used to actuate Do Not Disturb mount on compatible machine .

Bookcase is one of those strange mathematical product that fill a yap you never agnise existed . It seems wacky at first , but the more you suppose about it , the more you surmise that something like this could really be kind of useful .

It ’s a sentiment that applies to much of whatAstropaddoes . The hardware business firm hit the scene in 2017 with a solution that turn iPads into drawing tablets for Macs . The company made a bigger stir with Luna Display , which turned the tablet into a 2d screen — a feature Apple would soon Sherlock out of existence .

More recently , the society has traffic in things like an iPad drawing stand and an tally - on that mimics the ace of drawing on paper . Bookcase fits powerful in with those offerings . It ’s set to start shipping later this twelvemonth .

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