|
Well I guess I will weigh in here.
I have been using a Jetbook color for a few days and while this should not be considered a review let’s call it my first impressions.
I was expecting SLOOOOOOOOW. It’s not really. I mean it’s not as fast as other 9.7" devices but neither is it the slowest Eink reader I have seen. It’s very much dependent on the document of course.
The color is as I expected and what I remembered from seeing it in Hanvon's booth at CES although I do not remember the background being this gray. I have a feeling that might be a software issue and I’m going to try something later to see. I’m going to create some text which are on a white colored background to see if the device will actually show the whiter background or if that is as white as it can be.
The amount of educational stuff on it is astounding. Really you couldn’t put this much information and learning tools on any other device this size at this price. I’m not sure yet if it’s all great stuff though. The language learning seems to be very good but I looked at the geography stuff on board for a moment this morning and it was just a big wall of text. All of that color ability wasted.
The dictionaries work well and the audible dictionary is included so you can hear the pronunciations as well as see the definitions.
The problem overall with the device is that it’s very much incomplete. The ePub reader is straight adobe and so the ability to manipulate the ePub is minimal compared to Onyx and Pocketbook for example. There are no margin settings, no rotation, no line spacing, no font changing etc.
The page numbers appear in the margin , at times obscuring part of the last word as most digital readers will have seen in the past, but there is no way to turn that off.
Changing the font size is even somewhat difficult. You have to choose a zoom percentage AND choose "fit page" or the text won’t fill the whole display. That is very cumbersome.
PDF reading is straightforward with nearly no customization available. There is no mark up capability at all, besides marking a passage for summary. I know the scribbling and highlighting is supposed to be coming in the update but this was working at CES LAST YEAR (2011). Why doesn’t it work now when they are shipping?
There is no way to choose your refresh rate. This is bothersome, much more than I have experienced elsewhere. Mainly due to the choices they have made as to when a full is done and when a partial is done. For instance, go to the science bits and choose the Periodic Table of Elements. It pops open without a full refresh. This leaves colored ghosts from the menu obscuring parts of the table.
There is no way to choose to rotate to a different screen orientation that I can find. For PDFs, I have found this to be essential sometimes in order to make looking at tables easier.
The Hanvon device has Hanvon's own finger and pen touch tech. The Jetbook has only Pen. This leaves you with awkward navigation at times when you think you can choose something with your finger but you can’t so you then have to select the right button.
There is no column reading as with the PocketBook devices and as mentioned by others there is no Persistent zoom reading for PDF. You can’t change page when it’s zoomed in. In fact, once zoomed you can’t even open the menu for dictionary etc. You have to exit the zoomed mode back to "fit page" in order to open the menu.
Panning is with the buttons only and not with the stylus; with Onyx for example you can "drag" the page around with the pen.
There is no "selection zoom" like with Irex, Onyx and a few others so you can just select a particular diagram or picture to zoom in on to full screen.
As far as I can tell, there is no text to speech for reading the text aloud to you. I find this peculiar because of the other wonderful speech recognition and text to speech available in the language learning sections.
There are other odd choices like the options in the right edge menu. Why isn’t font size available there? Why can I only open the main "menu" with the button, why can’t I bring it up with the stylus? Why can’t I change page with a swipe or tap of the stylus?
In short, the educational side of thing seems to be fairly fleshed out. Especially the language training which you would expect from Ectaco, although I can’t say anything about the adequacy of the educational references included for each subject not being an educator. However, they do appear to be extensive.
The reader side however is woefully inadequate. It has none of the capabilities for customization you would expect in an ePub reader this year and its PDF capabilities amount to being able to read a pdf full screen. It doesn’t recognize the comic formats at all.
There is currently no point to having the emr pen. It’s an expensive component currently only used to touch points on the display that could have done with other less expensive tech
The speed and color issues are minor comparative to the other issues.
|