Sharp Galapagos Tablets Expected To Arrive In US Market In 2011

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Sharp originally announced their Galapagos line of tablet readers back in late-September and then first launched them in Japan in December. Sadly though, for a little while things got quite and it appeared as if Japan was the only area that was going to see a release.

Well, flash forward till today and while we are still waiting on something slightly more official, or at the very least — from Sharp, we do have word that Sharp has plans to release the Galapagos line of tablet readers in the US in 2011 and follow that up with a release in China, India and Brazil. The details are fairly vague at the moment and are coming by way of The Mainichi Daily (a newspaper).

So far the details include that Sharp has plans to bring both the 5.8 inch and the 10.8 inch models and that they will come with at least one new feature and one change in file support, both of which sound like a smart move in the US market.

Lets first mention the new feature, built-in 3G. Of course, these will likely be tied to the carriers which could potentially mean contracts, or hopefully month-to-month contract free data plans. That said, it is nice to at least have the option to get always on data for a tablet. Still, while we could expect that, so far there has not been anything announced that would clue us in to which carriers.

Moving onto the change and this comes with some good and maybe some not quite as exciting. First, the change, the Galapagos is expected to arrive in the US with support for Epub as opposed to the proprietary XMDF that they have now. But while that sounds like it makes perfect sense, there is also word that Sharp plans to unveil that with an Ebookstore offering of their own. And while we are big fans of the ebook, we have to ask — do we really need another ebook store?