Fujitsu’s long awaited FLEPia, an eBook reader touted for its color display, has launched and is available for pre-order in Japan as of now, although it doesn’t start shipping until April 20th.

It comes with an 8-inch 768x1024 XGA touchscreen, Bluetooth and WiFi, SD card slot good for up to 4GB of storage and a battery life of 40hrs continuous use on a single charge. The device is 12.5mm thick and weighs 385g.

The FLEPia device supports PDF, TXT, HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, XMDF eBook formats and all image formats.

The downside however, is the $1000 price, which in times of the Internet could probably buy you a modest library. You’d think that $1000 could at least get a higher capacity SDs, if you didn’t know that the same money can buy you a much better notebook, or even a 12-inch tablet.

In fact, a quick and careless search on our price search engine reveals that you can get a Fujitsu Siemens 12-inch notebook with a dual-core T2390 at 1.86GHz, 2GB of memory and a 120GB for under €400.

You pre-order this product from Fujitsu's website here.