On Saturday I received a pleasant surprise in my mail box. A PageOne ereader from NextPapyrus
http://www.pageonestore.com
I have been talking with the Vice President of NextPapyrus John Kim off and on for some time since finding out about their PageOne. Recently I have had time to touch base with them again and they were nice enough to send along one of the ereaders.
First the Specs
6" Vizplex Eink display
157mm L x 125mm W x 8.4mm D
200 grams
2GB of on board storage
Micro SD expansion up to 16GB
MiniUSB 2.0
24pin connector (for wall charging)
3.5mm earphone jack
2200mA battery(read: HUGE)
Reading Formats - ePub, PDF, MOBI, PRC, CHM, TXT, HTML, FB2, OEB, PalmDoc, Plucker, TCR, RTF
Image Formats- JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP
Audio Formats- MP#, WAV, WMA
Its SOOO Small. Its got to be the smallest 6" reader available. It's actually not very much longer than a PocketBook 360 and they are the same width overall.
The front bezel area is anodized aluminum and the back is a subtly curved plastic in a "piano black"(a bit like an iPhone). The edge of the alumium has the anodization buffed off to reveal a narrow aluminim edge "trim". The PageOne is also available in white.
Overall is a really pleasing design in hand and so light I will have no trouble holding for hours. I prefer some of the readers I have tried in a case. The PageOne is one I think I prefer to hold naked. They do have a case for it of course and it has a couple of elastic bands on the cover that make it very easy to keep a grip on one-handed. I can bet that its very handy for strap-hanger commuters.
The button controls are by default on the right side of the display in portrait mode. The device can easily be rotated to any of the other landscape or portrait orientations at the push of a button or by a selection in the menu. When you rotate 180 degrees the button functions switch as well so the "back" button operation is always on the bottom, the page forward button remains the "bottom" page button. The page buttons can be reversed in the menu as well.
You can load your own fonts and change the pictures for the load/sleep screen. It does not support any DRM scheme so you need to know how to strip 'em if you've got 'em.
You can choose to change the speed at which pages turn. There are 3 levels: Quality, Normal, Speedy. Quality is a "slow" full refresh which gives you a perfectly clean background and sharp text. Speedy is partial refresh that is so quick it finishes before i move my eyes from the bottom end to the top starting line. It does leave some shadowing after awhile but i find it quite bearable. Normal is a happy medium between the two and is about the normal speed you would expect of a eink reader.
There is also a contrast adjustment. Normal , High and Higher are the choices. The difference between normal and Higher is quite noticeable with the blacks noticeably darker than the whites on the higher setting. High being a more subtle change. I had to ask what it actually does and it was explained that the device actually changes the gamma values. I havent tried it on pictures yet but Im sure it will be more dramatic.
Ill take some pictures soon and make sure to include some other readers for comparison. Ill have some more thoughts after I read a book or two on it. So far its a delight.
Im also going to lend the device to Nate the Great so he can give it a proper impartial review.
Its currently available only in Korea for a price of 234,000 WON which a quick conversion puts at $198.