With high hopes to excel in the e-reader market, Samsung launched its pocket-sized e-reader SNE-50K in South Korea on Monday.

Lew Jae-young, vice president of Samsung Electronics said, "We seek to become a bigger player than Amazon or Sony in the e-book market."

But the much awaited SNE-50K is lagging behind Amazon's Kindle as it is not designed to support wireless connectivity, which is a strong feature of Amazon's Kindle. Amazon's Kindle DX possesses storage capacity of 4GB that lets its users to store 3,500 books, documents etc, while Samsung's e-reader has just 512MB of storage capacity.

Another drawback of Samsung's e-reader is its limited library. Users can access only 2,500 titles, to which 1,000 new titles are added every month, much less than Kindle's library of 300,000 titles.

Although, both SNE-50K and Kindle have 600 x 800 pixel resolution, yet SNE-50K has only 5-inche screen, much shorter than 9.7-inch screen of Kindle DX.

However, Samsung's SNE-50K can work as a notepad. It can recognize handwriting.

The SNE-50K costs US$274, whereas Kindle 2 and Kindle DX are available $299 and $489 respectively.