Good news everyone! My STAReBOOK arrived just now. I can't give you a big review yet of course, but I'll just put up a few pictures of this pretty little device. A few things I can say so far:

Booting up is about 4x faster than the iRex iLiad. The device is very small and light, it's easy to hold with two fingers (!!!) and it comes with a nice set of accessories. There is even a 512MB SD card in the box.
It also has a user replaceable battery (!!!) (as you can see in the pics) and it's recognized as a mass-storage device in Windows, showing up as two devices, one for the main storage and one for the SD card.

The device has some of the style of an Apple iPod and feels nice in the hand because the back is slightly rubberized. I have not transferred any books onto it yet, but I'll do that this afternoon and try my best to give you a short pre-review this evening (German time).

For now, enjoy the pictures! (sorry for the bad quality in some, I was in a hurry...)

And here some more:

And the last one for now...I'm off for lunch... :scholar:

Thanks for the photos. Nice looking device. I'm impressed by the replaceable battery with such ease of access. Looking forward to your review tonight.

Looks nice and small. Cant wait for your complete review.

Wow. I only wish it had pen input... not needed for a one-purpose reader, I know, but I need to interact with my reading material more. :(

What I'm waiting to hear is how it feels to turn pages with it.

I like the simple/clean UI but one of the things I like about the Sony is having 3 different ways to flip pages. Depending upon where I am I manage to use all three of them regularly.

The user replaceable battery is definitely a plus.

Well, as far as I can tell right now, there is only one way to turn pages and that is pressing the "right" key on the directional pad. Page-turning seepd is very fast, even better than on the Iliad with the latest firmware and your enhanced PDF viewer...or at least it feels that way. I'll do a more exact comparison later.

While it's a pity that there is no page-bar like the Iliad has and that there is no way (I have found) to turn pages with the left hand, I most certainly don't miss the "click" sound the Iliad pagebar makes when turning pages.

I have also discovered the bookmark features (working fine) and the "jump to page-number" feature that also works just fine.
Enlarging fonts also seems to be fully functional.
Only trouble so far...the font looks ugly and I have a hard time formatting the books properly with the eRead 3.0 software build 614. I'll ask Ivan about that.

I'll give you more details and in a longer version later on. Please feel free to post questions here then I can check things out for you.

So you got the Starebook, that's excellent news, Roland!!

I'd be very much interested in:
- page flipping speed
- booting time / time needed to turn on the device and to continue reading a book
- PDF support?

If there's PDF support and you can give me the screen size, I'll add a template for it on Feedbooks today.

There is no PDF support. It only does the .stk format and I'm not sure whether there is any plan to change that.

The screensize is the normal 6" in 9cmx12cm

Good news everyone! My STAReBOOK arrived just now. I can't give you a big review yet of course, but I'll just put up a few pictures of this pretty little device. A few things I can say so far:

Booting up is about 4x faster than the iRex iLiad. The device is very small and light, it's easy to hold with two fingers (!!!) and it comes with a nice set of accessories. There is even a 512MB SD card in the box.
It also has a user replaceable battery (!!!) (as you can see in the pics) and it's recognized as a mass-storage device in Windows, showing up as two devices, one for the main storage and one for the SD card.

The device has some of the style of an Apple iPod and feels nice in the hand because the back is slightly rubberized. I have not transferred any books onto it yet, but I'll do that this afternoon and try my best to give you a short pre-review this evening (German time).

For now, enjoy the pictures! (sorry for the bad quality in some, I was in a hurry...)


That looks good - I am drooling!
Would you mind to tell where you bought it and for what price? Did you have to pay import tax?
Now, if I just could think of a way to get my wife's approval for a device like that :-)

Klaus

well, that's the nice bit...^^

I did not buy it...I got it for this review...one of the advantages of being a Mobileread.com Editor...and I did not have to pay any VAT or import Tax because the price the company put on the customs paper was 5$...very clever of them and of course good for me...

The device is normally 420$ and you would have to order from China/Taiwan. You could probably ask them to pull the same stunt as they did with my unit (cheating customs), but you'd have to pay shipping of course.

I'll try to get omse info about international shipping from Ivan at Staretek later on. I'd also recommend everyone to wait a bit until I have had some more time to play witht he device and see where it's strengths and weaknesses lie.

I have just switched off the "auto powerdown" feature of the device so that I can see about battery life. I'll give it a full charge now and then try to keep it from recharging by transferring media only via the SD card.

Ducky! You saved the photos from Imageready??! Now how am I going to find out if your camera supports macro mode and video? :)

Photoshop actually...^^

The camera does not support Video (it's a DSLR) and macro mode is a question of the lens...so in this case...no... ;)

Oh, my endless drooling envy!
It's been years that I've imagined e-book-readers, with no batery consumption while the page is being read. The sony and irex seem to have too many bells and whistles. -And this one looks just right. All it needs is a leather, or wooden container, (So I'm not the only Canadian with such odd ideas... way to go yvanleterrible!! Looks great!)
And as I only care to read text... the lack of supported formats doesn't disturb me.
Millionen Danke to CommanderROR for informing us all. (The company websites are just a tad biased.)

The initial Review is up with some more details..I hope you don't mind long texts...^^

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=9481

btw...the STAReBOOK comes with a little leather pouch. I don't think it will protect the device much, but it might at least keep it free of dust and scratches when not in use.

Hmmm. I live an hour from Shanghai. This is sounding better and better all the time. If their future plan is to support different file types, I may pay a trip to their office.

Great review on the link CRoR! :)

Having html support is a must in my case. I won't bore you with details ... ;) ... so hopefully they have that in the pipeline.

Fans at http://www.baen.com, which offers a great free e-library, wanted an affordable, bare bones e-book reader, so they designed a NAEB reader and arranged a bulk purchase of Bookeen USD320.
The device specifications and mechanical design will be exactly the same as the Starebook, but cost $100 less. They need to pre-order 1000 pieces and are taking orders.

More info is posted at http://www.naebllc.com/index.html

Susan

Yup, should be interesting to see their firmware in action. And to be honest, if it was available now, I probably would have gone that option.

As it is, I have the STAReREAD now :)

Will also be very interesting ot see if its possible to push the Baen firmware onto a STAReREAD device (no, I'm not volunteering to kill my STAReREAD, I'll let someone else have that honour).

I think for many of us its an awkward position becoming an early adopter, you pay more, you get less then you get left in the cold when the newer mass market devices come out. But lets face it, I've got sweet sweet eink action right now....

micro

I've also been thinking about that firmware swapping thing.

I guess it depends on whether he STAReBOOK could be recovered. Since the update process works with a SD card there could be some kind of way there...