It seemed obvious back in mid-December of last year that Polymer Vision wasn't going to nail its timetable for production versions of the 3G-equipped, e-ink wonder known as the Readius. Now word is that the company will have a commercial version of the phone / e-book reader available sometime in mid-2008 in Italy via Telecom Italia -- provided that everything goes according to its diabolical plans. If you'll recall, the device features a foldable, grayscale, 5-inch QVGA display, and boasts a slew of features, including HSDPA, a 400MHz ARM CPU, and a battery life up to "six times longer" than current mobile phones. We'll admit we're intrigued, but don't make us wait too long over here, okay?

It may not have the same sort of high-tech impact as e-ink, but there's something to be said for reading stuff the old fashioned way with a nice, thick stack of paper -- and Epson would like us to use our phones to do it. The Japanese company has hooked up with Sammy NetWorks to include its muPass platform in printers and phones for managing DRMed e-book content via IrDA -- in other words, buy a book on your phone and beam it straight to your printer over an infrared connection. Epson and Sammy are thinking that the setup will be perfect for distributing periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and the like), individual articles, and out-of-print or limited audience material that can't be justified for a regular production run on the press. Integration should be a snap for phone manufacturers, since Sammy's now managed to cram the muPass system into software. War and Peace, anyone?

Having e-reader functionality on your mobile or handheld certainly isn't new, but a British company is developing software that will reportedly allow you to breeze through War and Peace at an astounding "300 words-per-minute." The company utilizes Rapid Serial Visualization Presentation (RSVP) to display text in "word by word" fashion mid-screen, which forces your brain to simply "absorb" the word rather than read and then subvocalize (that's the real time waster, folks) before moving on. The company claims that the science behind the speed-reading revolution is "word shape recognition," which differs from the relationship between letters that we're used to looking for. While there's no set release date nor price for the mobile version, a comparable PC-ready version goes for £20 ($38), and we're sure this miracle-working software will have you blasting through Engadget's front page in just a matter of milliseconds whenever it becomes available.

LG's introduced yet another cellphone under its Cyon banner in Korea, this one boasting e-reader functionality designed for the visually impaired in addition to the standard feature set. That'll give you the not-so-special ability to play back pre-recorded e-books stored on an SD card and, more interestingly, have books and other documents read to you using the phone's text-to-speech capabilities (let's hope the voice isn't too creepy). Apart from that, the phone packs Bluetooth capability and can also act as a walkie-talkie within a 100 meter range, all in a pearly white slider package.

[Via Akihabara News]