[SJC-Caron]

After a long weekend of playing around with my Likebook Mimas I have the following general thoughts:

If you are primarily reading epubs then you may be better off with the smaller Likebook Mars or Muses, but for PDFs and comics / manga, the larger size of the Mimas is a godsend. Too bad that the Mimas can’t read CBR / CBZ files with its default readers and Moon+ Reader is too prone to reverting to scroll mode from page mode while I’m trying to zoom-in on a particular section.

The way I hold my e-reader, when not viewing it flat on a table, is by holding it with both hands at the bottom of the side bezels. As a result, the part of my thumbs that connects to the rest of my hand is resting over the hardware buttons, leading to several accidental presses. I would advise Boyue to indent the buttons on the bottom of the Mimas by at least the length of the button set in any future revisions of their 10.3 inch e-readers.

On the software side of things the default PDF viewer is decent (the option to automatically crop the white space on the edges of the PDF is great), as is the default notes app (inspite of calling their lined paper template “bars”). Question: if I were to use the Mimas notes feature to start a hand-written diary, how many pages could this file be until it is too big for the Mimas to handle? But their epub reader needs a lot of work still, and its not just an issue of lack of experience with programming / designing around Latin-based languages and alphabets. Even pictures that are supposed to be centred in the epub are presented off-centre. I’m suspecting a CSS rendering issue here, but I seen programs that had CSS issues but didn’t mess-up word and pronunciation spacing, so who knows what the issue is. Also, Boyue needs to include a default serf font as well as the default sans-serf Arial font. How hard would it be to negotiate font usage rights from an open source font foundry like The League of Movable Type? At least Boyue acknowledges this software weakness by including KO Reader in the Boyue App Store.

Speaking of software issues: the default epub viewer, Moon+ Reader, and KO Reader all lack an option to view the epub with the publisher’s default fonts and formatting. Also, each reader program has a different sized centre zone that you double tap on to see the program’s top and bottom menu / settings bars. Moon+ Reader’s centre zone is particularly small, so I’m often trying several times to escape Moon+ Reader’s full-screen mode before I am successful.

In regards to the Mimas’ battery life: if you don’t use (or only use sparingly) the device’s wi-fi then I suspect that you could get about a week of device usage between charges. If on the other hand you have the wi-fi always on then the device’s battery life becomes a day / a day-and-a-half.

Speaking of wi-fi; supported files (such as epubs from StandardEbooks.org or PDFs from OpenStax.org) don’t appear in the Mimas’ books directory once downloaded; you must access them separately from the Mimas’ file directory app and import them into the Mimas’ library program.



Now for the more technical stuff:

While Android Settings recognizes the 128GB microSD card I installed, as does Moon+ Reader, the Boyue file directory and Microsoft Windows (when I connect my Mimas to my computer) do not, only showing the 16GB of space on the main device. How can I fix this? It seems like Moon+ Reader has directly taken over my microSD card, but I can’t access it outside of the Moon+ Reader app.

Side-loading external fonts and dictionaries was relatively straightforward, following the instructions provided in the Mimas’ Quick Start Guide and the Boyue Likebook (BoyueTechnology) Twitter feed. But the annoying thing with installing fonts is that all variants are listed separately (eg: Input Serf Regular, Input Serf Italic, Input Serf Bold, etc.) instead of being grouped together (eg: all Input Serf font variants being represented by the Input Serf font menu listing) as is the case with fonts on my computer. As things currently stand searching through the font options in the default, Moon+, and KO readers is tedious. Would creating sub-folders in the Fonts folder (eg: putting all Input Sans fonts into a folder under Root -> Fonts -> Input Sans) help with this issue at all?

With the dictionaries I downloaded from huzheng.org (pretty much the only source for StarDic dictionaries that I was able to find), I was able to plot them down directly into the existing Dict folder on my Mimas once I extracted them from their tarbal container. But there seams to be a limit to the number of dictionaries the Boyue Dictionary app can support because I can’t access the britannica_concise_encyclopedia at all and of the other three dictionaries I installed one of them only appears intermittently. Other annoyances regarding dictionaries: it would be nice if the listing of dictionary files on huzheng.org would have a date attached to them because for some dictionaries (such as Urban Dictionary and The Collaborative International Dictionary of English) it would be nice to know how recent / current they are. And of course Moon+ Reader uses a different dictionary system, so I need to figure out how to transfer the same files twice, if not find a different GoldenDict compatible dictionary files.

It would also be nice if I could find a simple way to set default apps for file extensions so that all PDFs would use the Likebook’s default PDF reader, that all epubs would open in Moon+ Reader, that CBR and CBZ files open in KO Reader, etc. Right now I have to do this on a per book basis.


PS: I found a full Mimas Instruction Manual on Amazon.com. I hope it helps.