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I owned an Onyx i86 ML Plus for a few days, but I have now sent it back. On paper it was brilliant - open Android, Google Play store, an 8 inch screen at 250 ppi - not far short of the screen resolution on my Kindle Voyage; 8 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot; and frontlit. Even the ribbed left hand side made it easier to hold.
In practice, though, it was a disappointment at almost every level. The space available for apps is half a GB and this filled up very quickly. The Kindle App didn't work properly at first and many of my books didn't show up in the Cloud section of the app where they should be when not downloaded. Apps would constantly crash and eventually, after two factory resets within two days to try to solve this, no app would open at all and the system would let me download only one app (Kindle) before saying the memory was too low to download any more. Even the onboard OReader wouldn't open. A real disappointment.
I'm now looking at the Indiegogo campaign for the Icarus Illumina XL and pondering whether to get it when my refund comes through. While it has a much lower screen resolution, this may not matter much for just reading the printed word. But I'm nervous now whether the great specs (other than the screen resolution) will really translate into reality on this one either.
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