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While e-readers and e-books are creating a storm in the US market, we have barely noticed its presence here. Maybe Malaysians are still fond of the traditional form of books. Iriver is the second only known brand of e-reader that has recently reached our shores and it still remains to be seen if it will create a wave of change.
Not being a very tech savvy person, I did not recognize the iriver brand when I first heard it. It seems that this brand is more commonly associated with digital audio players. My second immediate thought was how it would perform as an e-reader.
The white exterior exudes a touch of sophistication and it is said the color is much preferred for long readings. The monochrome display is somewhat of a downer at first, given our latest obsession to have everything not just in colour but in high definition and 3D. But that is easily overlooked once you start reading. As the screen uses e-ink just as Hanlin V5, you can even read it at the beach without worry of glare. EPUB and PDF looks best, but it can also read TXT. It’s not all words as you can even put in visuals in JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG, but bear in mind it will all appear in black and white.
With so many e-books, why read only one at a time? You can add bookmark to whichever book, whichever page that catches your fancy. You can even set more than one bookmark to the same book, perfect for sharing. If font size is not big enough, the page can be enlarged up to three times or even flip it horizontally for better reading experience.
Want some music to accompany your reading? It supports MP3, WMA and OGG. As the device comes with a built-in 2GB, you can store plenty of e-books and music to boot, depending on your format and file size.
Battery life is suitably impressive as it can last up to days if you are doing nothing more than just reading. This is perhaps due to the auto power save mode which is great especially when you’re distracted midway and forgot to turn it off. A screen saver comes on after 10 minutes and if it still doesn’t detect any activity after an hour, it shuts down. Not to worry if you were in the middle of a book, once turned on, it opens up to the page where you had last left it.
However, if you would like to keep at the same page but don’t want to shut down the device or wait for it to go to sleep mode, just slide the power button to lock. This is akin to locking your keypad on your mobile phone.
Transferring files from your computer to the device is as easy as drag and drop after plugging in the USB cable. You will be prompted to select one of two choices – connect with removable disk or battery charging. At this point you will realize that the USB cable also doubles up as your battery charger and the makers recommend that only the original cable is use to prevent malfunction.
Weighing 284 gram and measuring slightly smaller than half an A4 size paper makes it easy to carry around. The makers probably foresaw this and equipped the device with a diary, a memo and recording capabilities. The QWERTY keyboard allows for typing, or rather thumbing of words.
If all you want is a fancy free e-reader with big storage capabilities, then the iriver story will work fine in giving you seemingly endless stories to last a long, long time.
