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MacEachaidh · 06-09-2010, 05:00 PM

I'm another one who's been a little vocal in my disappointment with some aspects of the Story. For me, a product that doesn't deliver on features it claims to support is a bad start; it's even worse when you find the manual doesn't even mention some features, let alone give instructions on them, and the company's own tech support staff answers enquiries with replies like "I haven't got any information on that" and expect that to be the end of the matter. (The tech support staff both at the distributor's officer here in Australia and at the iRiver office in the US have told me they have no procedure whereby they can ask Korea a question on the product and get information back, and neither office has any incident tracking system to record any questions, problems or feedback comments.) It makes me doubt it's either a market-ready product or a customer-aware company manufacturing it.

Despite all that (and it's not a small thing), I'd have to say that overall I am very happy with the Story. I really like the look and feel of it, the size, the display and the weight. (It's in the Goldilocks zone: not too big, and not too little; not too heavy, and not so light it's flimsy.) If I could get some confidence that iRiver was trying to address its shortcomings (three of the four document formats - TXT, DOC and PDF - I would consider broken to any reasonable level of functionality; and even though ePub works fairly nicely, the Story doesn't support some of the nicer capabilities in the full specification, like embedded fonts ... without them, artistic titles, colophons and even common extended European characters are out of the game; and even though it says you can install your own fonts, you can't actually use them for, say, displaying the books, so what's the point?) ... if I felt there was any kind of roadmap for improvements, then my vote here would have been an A rather than a B.

As it is, there's a lot about it I like, but I'm not able to say "Jeez, this is a great little gadget!" ... disappointingly, it's more like, "Oh well, never mind, you can't have everything".

06-09-2010, 05:00 PM	#10
MacEachaidh Browser Posts: 745 Karma: 578294 Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kobo Touch, Kobo Aura HD	I'm another one who's been a little vocal in my disappointment with some aspects of the Story. For me, a product that doesn't deliver on features it claims to support is a bad start; it's even worse when you find the manual doesn't even mention some features, let alone give instructions on them, and the company's own tech support staff answers enquiries with replies like "I haven't got any information on that" and expect that to be the end of the matter. (The tech support staff both at the distributor's officer here in Australia and at the iRiver office in the US have told me they have no procedure whereby they can ask Korea a question on the product and get information back, and neither office has any incident tracking system to record any questions, problems or feedback comments.) It makes me doubt it's either a market-ready product or a customer-aware company manufacturing it. Despite all that (and it's not a small thing), I'd have to say that overall I am very happy with the Story. I really like the look and feel of it, the size, the display and the weight. (It's in the Goldilocks zone: not too big, and not too little; not too heavy, and not so light it's flimsy.) If I could get some confidence that iRiver was trying to address its shortcomings (three of the four document formats - TXT, DOC and PDF - I would consider broken to any reasonable level of functionality; and even though ePub works fairly nicely, the Story doesn't support some of the nicer capabilities in the full specification, like embedded fonts ... without them, artistic titles, colophons and even common extended European characters are out of the game; and even though it says you can install your own fonts, you can't actually use them for, say, displaying the books, so what's the point?) ... if I felt there was any kind of roadmap for improvements, then my vote here would have been an A rather than a B. As it is, there's a lot about it I like, but I'm not able to say "Jeez, this is a great little gadget!" ... disappointingly, it's more like, "Oh well, never mind, you can't have everything". Last edited by MacEachaidh; 06-09-2010 at 05:12 PM.