[machinogodzilla]

My PocketBook 902 has just arrived. It actually looks better than on the pictures, feels solid and smells nice, seriously. The screen is actually bigger than the whole Kindle, nice. The bezel seemed too wide when I looked it up on the Internet but it makes holding the device easier whether in a portrait or landscape mode (the screen rotates itself!) and is actually spot on for my hands.

Pleasantly surprised (I didn't expect much from this device) I couldn't wait to see it in action. I've tried all the menus, a game, a music player and the speakers and all was good, a bit basic at times, but good. The preloaded EPUB books looked fine too, although by default they were displayed using a massive font size.

However, when the time came to fire up a PDF text from Safari Books that sent shivers down my spine - I was reading and not feeling very comfortable. I tried another one and had to strain my eyes again even though the font wasn't very small. I thought this was it as I intended to read mostly PDFs on my ereader.

As you may have guessed I also have a Kindle that arrived not long before. With its screen smaller than the smallest paperback novel that I have in my library it's totally unusable for my purposes but the rendering of text is much better. I can open the same book that I tried on the PocketBook and reading is a pain but only because the letters are so small, they are small but perfectly legible.

There is no contrast control in PocketBook and it's badly needed. Text on Kindle looks better even at the default setting and you still have two higher levels of contrast available. It's not just that it's darker, it also seems fuller so the thin lines in letters are well visible.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a showstopper, you can still read from the device and I'll most likely keep my PocketBook but if there was Kindle 3 DX available I would go for it instead just because of the issue I described. So developers, do something about this core feature instead of improving silly things like Bluetooth connectivity, something that prompted me to write all this.


A picture is worth a thousand words. Below you can see a comparison of the two readers (PocketBook on the left, Kindle on the right) as good as I could make it with my simple camera at night with artificial lighting. There are all three levels of contrast in Kindle shown, starting with the default one. The pictures are as they came from the camera, no photoediting apart from cropping and resizing. Click for bigger ones.


Edit: removed dead links to images