Hi everybody,
My wife and I received our
PB302 today. They are currently charging as the instruction manual advices to charge the devices during 8 to 12 hours before first use. So, the first real test will be tomorrow. I'll update this post.
However, I can already comment on the non-electronic parts that come with the PB302:
- The leather casing is great, all ports are accessible except for the round one on the side where one plugs the wall charger. The word pocketbook is embossed
- The wall charger (version with US socket) is pretty small.
- The wrist strap is a little less elegant, with advertisements for Pocketbook and bookland printed on it, but if you don't like it, buying a new one will for sure not ruin you. Moreover, it's just long enough to allow you holding the PB302 in most directions, and it can be used with pouch on, so it's quite convenient.
- The warranty: There is an issue (maybe with Pocketbook USA?) that makes that the warranty cards we found in the boxes are one-year warranty cards. Our seller, tvpupsik, is currently helping us to resolve the problem by us sending the right cards.
A few pics to illustrate all that (click for bigger):
The white PB302 with the light pouch. It's charging and you can see that it can't be completely in the pouch.
The pouch of the black PB302 (next to a pencil to get an idea of the size)
The black PB302 with its strap, charging.
Running the device: First impressions
Please note two things:
First, I believe that we have the new versions of PB302, with more memory, and possibly a bigger battery. So if you have the previous version of the
Second, we updated the devices to firmware 15.2 a few hours after switching them on the first time. My comments apply only to the upgraded 302 with firmware 15.2
Reading:
Loading files is in general, fast and flawless. The default (Adobe) reader failed to properly display Polish characters in PDF files, but the other one (pdfviewer) didn't have this problem. I had to stop the crashed reader (and sometimes the browser or the bookstore) application, and that's really easy, just long press the round button. It's instantaneous, and the reader itself doesn't need to be rebooted. Linux ftw.
Books have to be read in good luminosity conditions (obviously), but even more so because the e-ink screen background is not white but grey. This is a good point in high luminosity (outside, sun) as it's less tiring than a white page. But you have to be extra careful in the evening at home.
Other applications:
Connecting to the home wifi was impossible without shortening our 63 characters WPA-PSK passphrase at home. This is ok while at home, but it may be an issue at work. A great point though (if you have some knowledge of GNU/Linux environments) is that you're able to read a system log in case of failure, which allowed me to determine that the issue was indeed the password lengh
It seems like the graphical interface that allows inputing the passphrase chokes on long strings, because the underlying wpa_supplicant complains about not receiving any passphrase.
In any case, this is not a major problem and once you're connected, it works great. You have the possibility to store several AP parameters, so if you move with your PB, no need to reconfigure everything each time. In the same vein, you can have user profiles, and several users sharing one PB will not complain about their "last open books" not being theirs, etc...
The English online (bookland.net) store is accessible from the device, with a dedicated icon in the Books section, but it's embryonic. The good point is that it's not empty, you can download project Gutenberg books directly from your device. The less good point for now is that it's all you can do. On the Ukrainian website,
http://bookland.net.ua/ , you can register, login, search books or browse them by various categories and whatnot, but it's all in Ukrainian.
However, my wife found that a great news source is the Ukrainian PB website. If, like me, you don't read Ukrainian, just use Google Translate (it will pop-up automatically in Chrome, otherwise got to translate.google.com) to translate from Russian to English.
For instance, the
specs page becomes:
translation
Note: how to flash your 302 with the latest firmware:
1) Backup all your data.
2) Download and unzip the following file:
http://pocketbook-global.com/downloa...de_ws_15_2.zip, or whichever file is the latest firmware for PB302 (there is a sticky thread about it, read it)
3) Place the .BIN file at the root of a microSD card
4) Switch off the 302, plug it to the power. insert the microSD
5) Hold down the two larger buttons ("next page" by default) on the side of the device, and at the same time switch on the device. Keep these two buttons pressed until the machine has booted and tells you that it'll update the firmware.
6) Follow the on-screen instructions. Reboot in the end. I also reset before rebooting, just in case. For that, use the stylus to press the small button on the back of the 302.
(to be continued)