ECO Reader - an 3 month owner's review

[teemac]

I now have owned & used the ECO Reader for several months and overall am very happy with it.

I am nearly 60, male, ride motor bikes and rally cars, build and fix computers, was an accountant until a stroke and several heart attacks fixed that problem, now do whatever I can.

Not being a writer, the following brief outline of my short ownership of the ECO is a bit shabby, so do please excuse spelling, grammar and punctation.

When I first bought ECO Reader the firmware was out of date and needed updating. Long story short - I had to buy approx 16 different SD cards between 2gb and 8gb, spend nearly $450 and travel approx 400km (I live up the bush north coast NSW Australia) to find one that would work to update the firmware. Christine at DA was very helpful and patient while I went through all the various cards until I got one to work over a 3 week period. I have seen that some other Hanlin v3ext clones (this is what the ECO Reader is, but firmware changed for OZ) come with a tested & approved 2gb card for updating firmware included with the original purchase. This is something that would be cheap and save a lot of cost and hair pulling for new customers. DA does have one for sale , but I did not know it was available until very late in the saga above.

Even with the firmware updated the 7,000 pages between recharges as advertised was extremely inaccurate. I found that after the system settled down and was able to average usage correctly for the battery monitor, I only got approx 1,000 page openings. By page openings I mean at the view magnification I used (I think it was 3 - PDF & EPUB) I could page through 1,000 screen pages at that magnification before the battery meter was on it's last bar. The books I read have approx 300 - 400 pages of real world sized pages in them.

Having been involved with building & using computers since cpm & dos 2.0 and also Linux for the last 3 or 4 years, I do not consider myself a complete dummy. I only use Linux (LinuxMint8 x64) on all my computers at home (i7 920 water cooled, laptops, media centre & work machines etc) and haven't bothered with windows since before XP ended several years ago. Plugging the ECO into the Main Computer system was always hit and miss - sometimes I could copy/delete/rename etc sometimes not, other times write/read protect errors, folder does not exist etc etc. I even took it to a neighbours house who was still in the windows world and tried the ECO on that OS, same problems. I was able to eventually copy off the DA supplied Free eBooks to one of my hard drives and reformatted the ECO. All my problems went away - it now connects, reads, writes etc perfectly. Whether it was the existing format was partly corrupted or a problem somewhere else, I never found out.

Storage for my various technical libraries, fiction and non-fiction collections all now reside on 4gb SDHC cards. I could not find any 8gb cards to work consistantly - sometimes yes and sometimes not - 16gb don't even try.

I now use Tirwal's v1.8 firmware. The firmware that is available for the ECO Reader from the suppliers - DA Direct - is currently several months behind all the other readers (last ECO firmware being Oct 2009). Many options are available in Tirwals Firmware that the standard firmware does not have (ECO Reader firmware is to be updated sometime in Jan 2010 I have heard). Tirwals Copy/move/delete tool menu now being my favourite. I have also found that Tirwals Firmware has tripled my battery life. I can now read 3 or 4 books (approx 3,000 screen pages) before needing recharge.

The only thing I would have change if I could on the ECO would be the page forward/backward buttons - they are too far down the left side of the reader. When I hold the reader and need to change pages I need to move one hand down to the buttons each time to change pages - the buttons are out of reach. This gets very annoying after several hours reading on my old arthritic wrists. The bottom buttons also require me to move my grip to change pages every page also.

The reset button is on the back of the ECO and requires you to slide the ECO out of it's cover each time to use it. If the reset was on the sides somewhere it would be much easier to use. Many times in the early days I was too quick changing pages & it would lock up the ECO and have to be reset to get control again. I found when removing the ECO from it's cover the recharge flap must be opened and the ECO slid to the left & jiggled a bit to fully remove the reader from the cover because the flap stops it from being fully removed. Eventually I just turned the ECO cover around 180 degrees and put it in left side of the cover. Now the flap does not need to be fiddled with to get the ECO out to reset in the now very rare time I lock it up.

Overall I am happy with my ECO and the support from DA (Christine - Thank You) and aside from the above few niggles, the ECO meets my purposes exactly.

Brief instructions I use for the new Tirwals Firmware v1.8

UPDATE FIRMWARE (same for all firmwares) - download zip file - unzip - copy v3update.bin to fat16 formatted 2gb or less SD card with no other file in the root (other folders seem to be ok - just no other files in root)
Plug ECO Reader into wall power with USB cable supplied with reader - or fully charged reader - plugging into USB on a computer not recommended for this procedure.
Turn off ECO Reader - Hold power button down long time (wait for second series of multiple beeps).
Put SD card with new firmware in slot - Hold in Volume Up buttom (top button located on right hand edge of reader) and at the same time hold down power button (only button located on top edge of reader) until second set of multiple beeps - screen will change - release all buttons.
Message will come on screen checking update data - wait several seconds - Press OK to continue when prompted and wait - several processes will show on the screen - do not interrupt - takes about 3 to 4 minutes to complete all of them. When finished press any key when prompted and remove SD card.
System will restart with new firmware. Remove Reader from power cord and wall.

BOOKMARKS - To save bookmark while reading file from SD card (SD card must be unlocked - slide on side of SD card must be in upper position) F6 quick to make new default bookmark in next available slot (5 slots available) - F6 long (hold down until screen changes then release) to find old bookmarks. Same procedure for reading from builtin memory.

THIS NEXT ONE IS REALLY COOL.
TOOLS menu - Open, Delete or Copy and Paste an existing book.
Find book - press number of book and hold - long press - wait for second set of beeps - a tool menu will appear - open, copy, delete - back arrow to cancel tools.
OPEN - just opens the file to read.
COPY - copies a file including it's folder structure from SD Card to Internal Storage or from Internal Storage to SD card. A restart may be neccessary to see changes.
DELETE - Deletes book number pressed.

TIME/DATE/LANGUAGE CHANGE (apparently needed for some DRM eBooks) - go to main menu (press OK) then 6 (settings).
Tirwals firmware comes with Spanish as default language.
- 1 'button press sound' is off by default - select 1 - toggles button sound on/off
- 2 to change language - press number of language then OK - back to settings menu
- 5 to change time/date - add leading zero to any number if under 10 - time is 24 hour clock format hh:mm - type number for hours then automatically moves to minutes - type minutes number - page forward to jump to date - if English language, date format is dd:mm:yyyy - type number for day - then moves to month - type number - then moves to year - type full year (eg:2010) - OK to go back to main settings menu.

I hope anyone that reads this stuff above can understand it - as I said earlier, I am not a writer.

Also a big thank you to this forum for it's many hints and helpful people (Special thanks - Tirwal & LARdT)

[PinkTissue]

Wow....what a lengthy review.

I am sorry to hear that your Eco Reader cannot use anything bigger than a 4 GB SD card. I could use a 16 GB SD card. I have a couple of 8 GB SD card which worked as well. I have thousands of books residing in the 16 GB SD card which together takes up around 4 GB of the 16 GB SD card. I am *thinking* of trying a 32GB card once the price drops.

Could it be the brand of the SD card? I have used Kingston and Sandisk SD cards with no problem.

For the updating of firmware, I almost drove myself crazy looking for a SD card that is less than 1 GB in size, I could not even buy them! I finally located one 512 MB SD card which allows me to update the firmware.

I used to have the problem of locking up my old Hanlin reader by turning the pages too quickly but to date, I have no such problem with Eco Reader.

Btw - I used the firmware at the Jinke website rather than the Eco Reader website.

[Tirwal]

Hi:

In mine it's possible to use 32 Gb SDHC card. Take care, SDHC. SD only till 4 Gb.

Try it.

Bye

[teemac]

@Pink Tissue

I have tried nearly a dozen brands in my original foray to try to find one to act as my main flash updater card, including those you mentioned.

The ones I found best were the cheaper brands - FujiFilm & Silicon Power were the only ones I could get to work properly for flashing firmware.

@Tirwal & Pink Tissue

Also tried bigger cards 8gb - seems to only work if I keep the data on them under about 3.5gb - if I go over this the card becomes unstable.

It may have been the original out of date firmware - I'll give it a try over the next few days on couple of different 8gb cards I have left and see if it works any better.

My complete library is about 7gb of Tech manuals, Fiction & Non fiction, help files and other documents - all in NON-DRM PDF or ePub and scattered over about 3 or 4 cards of 4gb capacity. If I could get then all on one 8gb or 16gb, that would be perfect

If I get any satisfactory results, I'll post back here.

Thanks for your comments.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by teemac

My complete library is about 7gb of Tech manuals, Fiction & Non fiction, help files and other documents - all in NON-DRM PDF or ePub and scattered over about 3 or 4 cards of 4gb capacity. If I could get then all on one 8gb or 16gb, that would be perfect

If I get any satisfactory results, I'll post back here.

Thanks for your comments.

Just as a data point: I'm using a 16GB SanDisk Ultra II with some 11GB on it that works fine with all firmware versions I tried. The card I use for FW updates is a 1GB Kingston.