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bm.brooks · 06-20-2017, 10:46 AM

Background
I like to start reviews by providing some information on my qualifications so you can judge if you want to listen to my opinions, if you don’t care about my background just skip ahead.

I began reading book on electronic devices back in the days of Pocket PC. I moved on to e-ink starting with the Sony PRS-500, then made the jump to the PRS-505 to be able to use ePub instead of LRF. The next jump was to the PRS-T1, to gain network capability. The browser and networking not being the most robust, I moved away from e-ink and switch to a Android tablet (~8.5 Inch size). While I enjoy the tablet for better surfing, the size, weight and glare resulted in not the best reading device. I recently ran across my old PRS-T1, and started reading a few books on it. The light turned on, figuratively speaking since the PRS-T1 doesn’t have one, and I remembered why I liked the e-ink devices.

Over the 15 years and 10 devices I have read close to a thousand books electronically, a 60-40 split between fiction and nonfiction; throwing in a couple of dozen computer related technical books. I have converted books from paper, text, and HTML into eBooks. I have spent thousands of hours tweaking eBooks using Calibre, Jutoh and sometimes the raw HTML.

Hardware
Where to start? I would recommend you pop over to the-ebook-reader.com and read Nathan’s various posts on the Inkbook Prime. I am going to try and not cover the same ground and really just add in bits and pieces here and there.

For me one of the biggest criteria on selecting a eReader is the ergonomics on holding the device. While I do read a lot sitting in a chair, riding in a car, etc. the place I do most of my reading is in bed. This means that gravity is working against me, which I have discovered more than once when my android tablet has slid out of my fingers and crashed into my face. Your mileage may vary but for me the size of the Prime is a great match of the size of my hand. I can easily grip the Prime, fingers on one side, thumb on the other and still be able to use the buttons.

Probably not a surprise to anyone, the Prime is mostly plastic. If you grab opposite corners and bend you get a little flex, but surprising little. In normal handholding, you don’t hear or feel any flex.

The side buttons were kind of a shock to me. From the various pictures I had come to the conclusion that movement of the buttons went from the side toward the middle, in other words squeeze the device to turn the page. Instead the buttons travel from the front to the back. For me the force needed to press the button is fairly good. Just holding the device (one handed) even if my fingers are on the button very seldom does it flip the page. On the other hand, with most software I have seldom had to hit the button twice to actually make the page flip.

I am less pleased with the sensor button at the bottom. It really isn’t a button that you hit and move on to something else, it is more a put your finger on it for a second or two to register then move on. The nice thing is that you really don’t need to use the sensor button that often, so I tend to forget it is there.

Power button is on the back in the upper right corner. A fairly nice position for turning on/off the Prime using your index finger, really annoying position if you are using a cover (unless the case has a hole cut in it)

Reading in a variety of lighting and orientations, I have have used the front light at all levels. I haven’t yet seen a shadow or a discoloration. If I had to pick, I would say the light has a slight bluish tint from white. At the lowest setting the light is too bright for my eyes when reading in a dark room. Most eReader software can easily reduce the light further down for acceptable reading level, however it is a rude awakening if you jump out of the software back to standard android. The is no built in auto-light level, the light level can be manually adjusted (or turned off) in the notification area.

Battery duration is such a hard thing to rate, it is dependant on so many things, wifi usage, lighting level, even the apps you are running. Add to that, since it is a new device I am frequently adding and removing software, hooking it up to the computer, etc. So far I am experiencing about 10-11 hours of on-screen time. This would put it on par with a good Android tablet, but somewhat less than a dedicated eReader.

Compared to a regular tablet or smartphone, the touchscreen is less responsive. Doing a slow scroll or trying to select a value on a scroll wheel (like font size) really doesn’t work. Not sure if this a limitation the touch screen or the slow refresh of e-ink. Flicks work fine, so paging through a book or scrolling a website isn’t a problem. It really is just the fine control that is missing, something not really needed to read books.

CPU-Z does confirm the CPU is a quad-core 1.6GHZ, the result is that I really haven’t seen any lag in any application I have tried.

OS/Built-In Software
While the Prime is running Android, Arta Tech has done a couple of tweaks from the standard. The biggest is that Arta Tech has written a custom settings app. It has the basic items such as setting up Wifi and Bluetooth, along with some Prime specific one such as controlling the e-Ink display and buttons. Some of the obvious or not so obvious controls missing are for sound, screen locking, and google account management, none of which I really need. I believe the android standard settings app is still in there, I have had apps kick me into it, but it isn’t directly accessible.

As Nathan mentioned Arta Tech includes an setting screen to setup/define the side buttons (I have not found a control for the sensor button at the bottom). You have individual control for each button to configure paging how you want to and/or how your reader software wants it. For example Left page back; Right page forward or Upper page back; Lower page back. Beyond paging you can also include Back, Touch Panel on/off and Refresh screen into the mix. Unfortunately changing the setting requires a reboot, annoying if you are jumping between reading apps.

I have had no issues connecting to any wifi or bluetooth devices. Keeping the wifi on all the time is a power drain, so Arta Tech has implemented a timeout. The surprising (annoying) part is that it seems the timer starts when turn on the wifi, not when you stopped actually using it. Assuming the timer is set to 5 minutes, turn on the wifi, open up the browser do some surfing, start a download. It has been 5 minutes since the wifi was turned on, so off it goes even though you are still downloading.

Android is known not to be the most friendly on e-Ink resulting in a lot of ghosting. When doing various actions at the OS level or in some apps, such as the browser, the screen will periodically do a full refresh, that nice black to white blink effect. I am guessing that there is a little timer running in the background to force a full refresh to eliminate ghosting. I have yet to see this happen in any eReader application I have tried.

Speaking of screen refresh, or more specifically ghosting. I am going to break ghosting down into two different types, the traditional light gray you see in white areas and a new (?) one of letter fragments that don’t erase. Most eReader software, e-Ink aware or not, has very little traditional ghosting. In normal reading you cannot see the ghosts, you have to stop and closely examine the white areas. Non-reader apps are hit and miss on the gray ghosting, never really a problem but more noticeable in some apps. When flipping between screens once in awhile letter fragments, an example would be the upright of a capital F, will remain on the left edge of the screen image after the page has refreshed. This black bar will hang around through multiple partial screen refreshes until either a full screen refresh happens, or your text (graphic) aligns with the fragment. You can force a full screen refresh by clicking the refresh button in the notification area. This occurs more frequently when jump between apps instead of screens with the same app.

The built-in launcher is mixture of a the fairly standard book display of current, prior, next married with a standard android dock bar at the bottom. One of the buttons on the dock bar will open the app drawer to get the rest of your applications. This launcher doesn’t have the ability to add any widgets from installed applications. Clicking on any of the books displayed will launch the InkReader (built-in reader) application. Even if other reader applications are installed the launcher will not prompt for default reader app. I did stumble across a way to change the default reader to another, but it didn’t really gain me much. The books shown in the launcher are managed by the InkReader, not the launcher. Every time you started a new book you would need to open it once in the InkReader so that it showed up in the launcher. In the app drawer you do not have the ability to change the ordering of the applications. One little quirk of the app list, if you install FBReader it is not listed.

The InkReader app does what it needs to, it allows you to read books in ePub format. From a functionality standpoint it has some nice features, along with a few quirks, from a customization format I want a little more.

You can pop up the TOC. However clicking on a chapter doesn’t jump to that chapter. TOC has a search, but I could not make it work.
In the same area as the TOC you can switch to looking at notes perform searches (these worked for me) on notes. Notes are created from doing a bookmark (note is first couple of lines of the page) or selecting text and adding a note (see below). You can edit the entered note or delete either type of note within the TOC area.
You can search for words in a book. When doing a search the matching locations show up in a secondary list, along with some context, from which click on the list item to jump to the location.
Selecting a section of text, using standard android controls works well. You can bookmark, write notes, highlight, lookup in dictionary, or do a web search on selected text
Pinch-to-zoom works to adjust the font size.
Margins - Small, Medium, Large
Interline Spacing - Small, Medium, Large
Orientation - Works, I really haven’t tried reading sideways for an extended period of time
Day/Night mode - works. Night mode does a full screen refresh on every page.
Fonts - 5, beyond what is built in the ebook
Font Size - 8 levels

Probably the biggest point is how well does it format the pages. In the book I am currently reading there is a section where one of the characters is telling a story. In comparing the section across reader apps, all of them correctly render the story in italics, however in InkReader the section is also indented. This matches the formatting of Bookari, FBReader, Coolreader and Calibre. In Moon+Reader and Alreader there is no indent. End result is that InkReader seems accurate, it is really a different question if you like accurate or want more control on the layout. On this size screen and with the option sizes of the fonts, the extra indent results in a lot of dead space.

Ok, so what is wrong, at least in my opinion, with the built in reader app?

There is no additional control of the front light brightness within the app, the system level is the only level. Already established it is too bright in a dark room for me. I can do white font on black, but then you will experience a full screen refresh between each page (i.e. the white screen eye blink effect). This point is a non-starter, I am not bouncing between apps while reading a book, InkReader in well lit, something else in the dark.
Every once and awhile spacing in eBooks is annoying, extra large margins or a large line height. In physical books there is a need for a reasonable size margin, for binding and holding. The bezel and rigid nature of the reader eliminates most of the need, I would want to maximize the content on a page, margins for me would be next to nothing, very little and little. Everyone has a different preference on interline spacing, my preference is a very tight line spacing. End result is that just having 3 levels of interline spacing and margins works many times, but then the bad books shows up and your option is switch to a different app, preprocess in Calibre, etc.
Unless I am reading from across the room, I don’t need the largest 3-4 font sizes. My ideal reading size would be somewhere between 2 and 3. It would be great if they chopped a few sizes off the top and added ½ sizes to the bottom.
None of available fonts (Andada, OpenDyslexic,Droid Serif,Vollkorn,Merriweather), would have been in my 10 choice of fonts on a regular android tablet. Merriweather works reasonably well on the e-ink display, but comes across as a fairly bold (thick) font. Preferably I would like to dynamically load a font from the font directory.

Other builtin apps

Library - Is a pretty basic book lister. 5 books per page, list format with cover. You can sort by title, author or last accessed date. You have the ability to star (favorite a book) and list just your favorites. Arrows button to page through list or jump ahead (confusingly not jump to end just ahead some pages)
Files - Lot of crashes, just get something else like Solid Explorer.
The app store has 10-20 apps, mostly reading related. Only a few apps are displayed by default, more show up if you search for something.
Drive and News I haven’t tried
Bookstore, as Nathan mentioned the books are not in English. No help for me
Dictionary - Not what I expected. The app just allows you to do download a dictionary file in English or Polish. Within the InkReader app, when you select a word the “dictionary” pops up. Instead of a definition of the word, the dictionary allows you to translate the word in a second language. I.e. English into German.

06-20-2017, 10:46 AM	#1
bm.brooks Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 144422 Join Date: Aug 2012 Location: Minnesota Device: Sony PRS-500;Sony PRS-505;Sony PRS-T1; Inkbook Prime	Inkbook Prime Review Background I like to start reviews by providing some information on my qualifications so you can judge if you want to listen to my opinions, if you don’t care about my background just skip ahead. I began reading book on electronic devices back in the days of Pocket PC. I moved on to e-ink starting with the Sony PRS-500, then made the jump to the PRS-505 to be able to use ePub instead of LRF. The next jump was to the PRS-T1, to gain network capability. The browser and networking not being the most robust, I moved away from e-ink and switch to a Android tablet (~8.5 Inch size). While I enjoy the tablet for better surfing, the size, weight and glare resulted in not the best reading device. I recently ran across my old PRS-T1, and started reading a few books on it. The light turned on, figuratively speaking since the PRS-T1 doesn’t have one, and I remembered why I liked the e-ink devices. Over the 15 years and 10 devices I have read close to a thousand books electronically, a 60-40 split between fiction and nonfiction; throwing in a couple of dozen computer related technical books. I have converted books from paper, text, and HTML into eBooks. I have spent thousands of hours tweaking eBooks using Calibre, Jutoh and sometimes the raw HTML. Hardware Where to start? I would recommend you pop over to the-ebook-reader.com and read Nathan’s various posts on the Inkbook Prime. I am going to try and not cover the same ground and really just add in bits and pieces here and there. For me one of the biggest criteria on selecting a eReader is the ergonomics on holding the device. While I do read a lot sitting in a chair, riding in a car, etc. the place I do most of my reading is in bed. This means that gravity is working against me, which I have discovered more than once when my android tablet has slid out of my fingers and crashed into my face. Your mileage may vary but for me the size of the Prime is a great match of the size of my hand. I can easily grip the Prime, fingers on one side, thumb on the other and still be able to use the buttons. Probably not a surprise to anyone, the Prime is mostly plastic. If you grab opposite corners and bend you get a little flex, but surprising little. In normal handholding, you don’t hear or feel any flex. The side buttons were kind of a shock to me. From the various pictures I had come to the conclusion that movement of the buttons went from the side toward the middle, in other words squeeze the device to turn the page. Instead the buttons travel from the front to the back. For me the force needed to press the button is fairly good. Just holding the device (one handed) even if my fingers are on the button very seldom does it flip the page. On the other hand, with most software I have seldom had to hit the button twice to actually make the page flip. I am less pleased with the sensor button at the bottom. It really isn’t a button that you hit and move on to something else, it is more a put your finger on it for a second or two to register then move on. The nice thing is that you really don’t need to use the sensor button that often, so I tend to forget it is there. Power button is on the back in the upper right corner. A fairly nice position for turning on/off the Prime using your index finger, really annoying position if you are using a cover (unless the case has a hole cut in it) Reading in a variety of lighting and orientations, I have have used the front light at all levels. I haven’t yet seen a shadow or a discoloration. If I had to pick, I would say the light has a slight bluish tint from white. At the lowest setting the light is too bright for my eyes when reading in a dark room. Most eReader software can easily reduce the light further down for acceptable reading level, however it is a rude awakening if you jump out of the software back to standard android. The is no built in auto-light level, the light level can be manually adjusted (or turned off) in the notification area. Battery duration is such a hard thing to rate, it is dependant on so many things, wifi usage, lighting level, even the apps you are running. Add to that, since it is a new device I am frequently adding and removing software, hooking it up to the computer, etc. So far I am experiencing about 10-11 hours of on-screen time. This would put it on par with a good Android tablet, but somewhat less than a dedicated eReader. Compared to a regular tablet or smartphone, the touchscreen is less responsive. Doing a slow scroll or trying to select a value on a scroll wheel (like font size) really doesn’t work. Not sure if this a limitation the touch screen or the slow refresh of e-ink. Flicks work fine, so paging through a book or scrolling a website isn’t a problem. It really is just the fine control that is missing, something not really needed to read books. CPU-Z does confirm the CPU is a quad-core 1.6GHZ, the result is that I really haven’t seen any lag in any application I have tried. OS/Built-In Software While the Prime is running Android, Arta Tech has done a couple of tweaks from the standard. The biggest is that Arta Tech has written a custom settings app. It has the basic items such as setting up Wifi and Bluetooth, along with some Prime specific one such as controlling the e-Ink display and buttons. Some of the obvious or not so obvious controls missing are for sound, screen locking, and google account management, none of which I really need. I believe the android standard settings app is still in there, I have had apps kick me into it, but it isn’t directly accessible. As Nathan mentioned Arta Tech includes an setting screen to setup/define the side buttons (I have not found a control for the sensor button at the bottom). You have individual control for each button to configure paging how you want to and/or how your reader software wants it. For example Left page back; Right page forward or Upper page back; Lower page back. Beyond paging you can also include Back, Touch Panel on/off and Refresh screen into the mix. Unfortunately changing the setting requires a reboot, annoying if you are jumping between reading apps. I have had no issues connecting to any wifi or bluetooth devices. Keeping the wifi on all the time is a power drain, so Arta Tech has implemented a timeout. The surprising (annoying) part is that it seems the timer starts when turn on the wifi, not when you stopped actually using it. Assuming the timer is set to 5 minutes, turn on the wifi, open up the browser do some surfing, start a download. It has been 5 minutes since the wifi was turned on, so off it goes even though you are still downloading. Android is known not to be the most friendly on e-Ink resulting in a lot of ghosting. When doing various actions at the OS level or in some apps, such as the browser, the screen will periodically do a full refresh, that nice black to white blink effect. I am guessing that there is a little timer running in the background to force a full refresh to eliminate ghosting. I have yet to see this happen in any eReader application I have tried. Speaking of screen refresh, or more specifically ghosting. I am going to break ghosting down into two different types, the traditional light gray you see in white areas and a new (?) one of letter fragments that don’t erase. Most eReader software, e-Ink aware or not, has very little traditional ghosting. In normal reading you cannot see the ghosts, you have to stop and closely examine the white areas. Non-reader apps are hit and miss on the gray ghosting, never really a problem but more noticeable in some apps. When flipping between screens once in awhile letter fragments, an example would be the upright of a capital F, will remain on the left edge of the screen image after the page has refreshed. This black bar will hang around through multiple partial screen refreshes until either a full screen refresh happens, or your text (graphic) aligns with the fragment. You can force a full screen refresh by clicking the refresh button in the notification area. This occurs more frequently when jump between apps instead of screens with the same app. The built-in launcher is mixture of a the fairly standard book display of current, prior, next married with a standard android dock bar at the bottom. One of the buttons on the dock bar will open the app drawer to get the rest of your applications. This launcher doesn’t have the ability to add any widgets from installed applications. Clicking on any of the books displayed will launch the InkReader (built-in reader) application. Even if other reader applications are installed the launcher will not prompt for default reader app. I did stumble across a way to change the default reader to another, but it didn’t really gain me much. The books shown in the launcher are managed by the InkReader, not the launcher. Every time you started a new book you would need to open it once in the InkReader so that it showed up in the launcher. In the app drawer you do not have the ability to change the ordering of the applications. One little quirk of the app list, if you install FBReader it is not listed. The InkReader app does what it needs to, it allows you to read books in ePub format. From a functionality standpoint it has some nice features, along with a few quirks, from a customization format I want a little more. You can pop up the TOC. However clicking on a chapter doesn’t jump to that chapter. TOC has a search, but I could not make it work. In the same area as the TOC you can switch to looking at notes perform searches (these worked for me) on notes. Notes are created from doing a bookmark (note is first couple of lines of the page) or selecting text and adding a note (see below). You can edit the entered note or delete either type of note within the TOC area. You can search for words in a book. When doing a search the matching locations show up in a secondary list, along with some context, from which click on the list item to jump to the location. Selecting a section of text, using standard android controls works well. You can bookmark, write notes, highlight, lookup in dictionary, or do a web search on selected text Pinch-to-zoom works to adjust the font size. Margins - Small, Medium, Large Interline Spacing - Small, Medium, Large Orientation - Works, I really haven’t tried reading sideways for an extended period of time Day/Night mode - works. Night mode does a full screen refresh on every page. Fonts - 5, beyond what is built in the ebook Font Size - 8 levels Probably the biggest point is how well does it format the pages. In the book I am currently reading there is a section where one of the characters is telling a story. In comparing the section across reader apps, all of them correctly render the story in italics, however in InkReader the section is also indented. This matches the formatting of Bookari, FBReader, Coolreader and Calibre. In Moon+Reader and Alreader there is no indent. End result is that InkReader seems accurate, it is really a different question if you like accurate or want more control on the layout. On this size screen and with the option sizes of the fonts, the extra indent results in a lot of dead space. Ok, so what is wrong, at least in my opinion, with the built in reader app? There is no additional control of the front light brightness within the app, the system level is the only level. Already established it is too bright in a dark room for me. I can do white font on black, but then you will experience a full screen refresh between each page (i.e. the white screen eye blink effect). This point is a non-starter, I am not bouncing between apps while reading a book, InkReader in well lit, something else in the dark. Every once and awhile spacing in eBooks is annoying, extra large margins or a large line height. In physical books there is a need for a reasonable size margin, for binding and holding. The bezel and rigid nature of the reader eliminates most of the need, I would want to maximize the content on a page, margins for me would be next to nothing, very little and little. Everyone has a different preference on interline spacing, my preference is a very tight line spacing. End result is that just having 3 levels of interline spacing and margins works many times, but then the bad books shows up and your option is switch to a different app, preprocess in Calibre, etc. Unless I am reading from across the room, I don’t need the largest 3-4 font sizes. My ideal reading size would be somewhere between 2 and 3. It would be great if they chopped a few sizes off the top and added ½ sizes to the bottom. None of available fonts (Andada, OpenDyslexic,Droid Serif,Vollkorn,Merriweather), would have been in my 10 choice of fonts on a regular android tablet. Merriweather works reasonably well on the e-ink display, but comes across as a fairly bold (thick) font. Preferably I would like to dynamically load a font from the font directory. Other builtin apps Library - Is a pretty basic book lister. 5 books per page, list format with cover. You can sort by title, author or last accessed date. You have the ability to star (favorite a book) and list just your favorites. Arrows button to page through list or jump ahead (confusingly not jump to end just ahead some pages) Files - Lot of crashes, just get something else like Solid Explorer. The app store has 10-20 apps, mostly reading related. Only a few apps are displayed by default, more show up if you search for something. Drive and News I haven’t tried Bookstore, as Nathan mentioned the books are not in English. No help for me Dictionary - Not what I expected. The app just allows you to do download a dictionary file in English or Polish. Within the InkReader app, when you select a word the “dictionary” pops up. Instead of a definition of the word, the dictionary allows you to translate the word in a second language. I.e. English into German.