Startup:
Starting the device is done by holding down the on/off button. Booting times are OK, I did not time it, but I started the STAReBOOK a few seconds after my Iliad and it still finished booting when the Iliad was still showing between 50% and 75% loading bars. There is a bootup picture and a shutdown picture...they are actually quite cute...:-)
Updating the device:
I received the device with Firmware 1.11 installed. The newest version on the website was 1.12 so I decided to update. I downloaded the update, copied the files to the SD card and started the device. The update was checked, verified, and installed. It showed me a "completed" message and asked me to restart and that was it. Very nice and comfortable.
Navigating:
The device starts with a short and to-the-point menu. It gives you access to your files, both on main-memory and on Sd-card, offers a few settings and a favourites (last read books I guess) section.
The top of the menu-screen always shows the last book you read. The cursor is on that selection at startup, so all you need to do is press enter and you can continue reading your last-read book right away.
Navigating is fairly fast and there is little to explain. There is a "back" key on the side of the device and a menu key that always brings you directly back to the main menu.
The settings hold few surprises. You can select language, sleep-settings, volume, memory (shows how much free memory you have in the internal and on the card), music mode settings and the "about" section that shows the firmware version.
Reading:
So, I prepared a few books on my computer (I'll go into that part of the process later) and transferred it to my 1GB SD-Card I still had lying around. (I did not use the supplied 512Mb card yet, but I saw that it's from A-DATA, so it's not even noname...impressive.
First impression:
In comparison to the Iliad, the screen is very small. It's a 6" screen, 9cmx12cm, should be just like the Sony Reader. I haven't read much yet, butI'm slowly starting to get used to it. I had the 8" Iliad screen for over half a year on a daily basis now, so it's understandable that this screen seems small at first I guess..
The Good:
Page-turning is VERY fast, it's faster than the Iliad can do, even with the newest firmware and Scotty's enhanced PDF viewer. Loading of files is also impressively fast.
Most interesting: I tried a small (<1MB) and a large (>35MB) and they showed no real difference in page-turning speed and file-opening speed. Very nice!
Text looks crisp, it's an eink screen and there are no surprises here. I could not see any ghosting while reading, only slight aftershadow of the shutdown image when the device is turned off.
Ergonomics are OK, I liked the Iliad left-handed pproach better since I like to eat and read at the same time and am better at eating with the right hand...
One-handed operation is OK, especially since the device is VERY lightweight. However, the page-forward key is slightly too close to the edge of the device for comfortable handling over longer periods of time. It is however easier to handle with one hand than the Iliad (again, the wieght makes a difference).
Navigating inside books is acutally done very nicely.
You can jump to a specific page-number (press enter key, "type in" the page-number with the arrow-keys (little selection menu from 0-9 pops up over the text) and off you go. Simple and efficient and much less intrusive than the popup keyboard of the Iliad.
Setting bookmarks is a new feature that was added in the recent Firmware update.
It works perfectly as far as I could find out in my initial tests. You press the "bookmark key" on the side, a menu pops up asking you to either set a bookmark or view your bookmarks. Setting a new bookmark is just one keypress away. Navigating through your bookmarks works just as easily. You select "view bookmarks" and then you get a list of bookmarks and the corresponing page-number. Finito.
Enlarging fonts is done with just one keypress. There are 5 "steps", 5 font sizes and the size you originally used when you created the file is the smallest (you can't go lower than that).
So, my initial impression of this device is WOW!!!
It looks nice, feels nice and is nice to handle. The firmware is also very nice, smooth and fast. Just the way it's supposed to be.
Unfortunately, there is a bad side as well...and that bad side is rather serious at the moment. While the device performs flawlessly, both where hardware and where Software are concerned, the file-format .stk that is the only supported format at the moment is a real limiting factor.
I don't really mind having just one format at my disposal (I only used PDf for my Iliad), but the Software that created the .stk files is almost completely useless. (eRead 3.0, buil 614)
It does not allow you to do any manual formatting. It does not allow you to use anything but plain text as source and it does not allow you to choose a font either.
VERY BAD...and very unfortunate because it makes it incredibly hard to create nice-looking ebooks for the STAReBOOK. the Software is still being developed so there is hope. I've sent a few questions off to Ivan and will see what he says.
I'll do a few scans (or rather try...
) of the menus and of a book being displayed so you can see where my troubles with the font and the layout lie.
So, to give a short conclusion to this short-term test:
The device is cool, the device-firmware is cool. The format and format-creating software need work.
If what you are after is a handy ebook, then this might very well be the ideal candidate for you. (once it becomes possible to actually create nicer-looking ebooks for it)
The device is more expensive than the Sony Reader (it's 420$ at the moment) which is a bit hard to swallow since Sony has the ebookstore AND support for additional "free" formats. The free ebooks (with dubious legality...
) are not really too much of an asset since they seem to be very badly formatted, at least some of them are...I tried one and it had all kind of weird stuff going on...lines starting in the middle of the page and things like that...
I'm not sure where development of the STAReBOOK is going...but I have seen several new versions of the eRead software in the last months, so it's moving somewhere...and there are noticeable jumps forward in the development, even in the last weeks so I guess it could work out OK sooner than many would expect. Since the Iliad is in a completely different league (and fighting with lots of problems) and the Sony Reader is only available in the US (like the Hanlins only sell to China apart from a few samples) this could very well be a good candidate for the European Market. I'm not sure what the stance of Staretek is about international sales, but they handled the shipping of my sample unit so professionally (I have never seen a package go through customs in Germany so smoothly and with no charges applied) I guess they do have some experience.
This was the short-term review. I'll let you know how the device progresses, how the battery-life is (it's probably already beaten the Iliad...
) and whether I find anything else and of course I'll try to answer any questions about the device you might have.
For thesting the Battery-life I'll just leave the device on at all times (I turned the auto-power-down off) and read on it (transferring books only through SD-card to avoid recharging there) and see how long it takes until is goes flat.
I hope there are not too many mistakes in this text...if there are, I hope they don't compromise readability...
I can't remember when I last typed so much in one go...
