Amateur's (re)view of PocketBook Era Lite after roughly 15 weeks

[Krzysztof]

Hello. I'd like to share my view on a PocketBook Era Lite, which I was using for about 15 weeks at the time of writing this post. This is not supposed to be a fully featured review of the device but rather a take on sharing my opinion about it after using it for some time. And just for the record, I've bought this device myself, if that's something that should be mentioned here. Let's go.

1. The Outside
   As for the build quality, I find the device to be a rather solid piece. The edges align well, the buttons are tactile and easy to navigate under the fingertips. I'm using a magnetic flip cover with my unit. The cover attaches by means of a magnet and some plastic studs and hold very well. Once I've dropped the device on the floor and the cover popped-out at one corner, but it didn't caused any persistent to the cover nor the device. Overall, the device handles well, it seems to be rather lightweight. The "flip" side of the flip cover has chamois-like texture which facilitates handling of the device. The unit itself has on it's back a plastic cover which consists of parallel straight groves which I found more difficult grip but I also didn't use it for longer that a few minutes just after I've received the device. Below I've attached some photos of the device presenting its front, back, a view of the edges and alignment of the attached flip cover.
   
2. The Inside
   The bezel around the screen is the only "edge" of the device which I'm not fond off, although I don't say that there is something wrong with it really. It seems to be rather sharp to the touch, however, I don't touch it often if at all while using the device.
   
   The 7" E-ink Carta 1300 screen looks good to me, but notice that I'm using a rather bigger font (at least my wife say so). The backlight, which may be turned off, has fine control over both its intensity and temperature. The latter was a new feature to me (since I came from a Kindle Paperwhite 7th gen) and I was curious to give it a try, especially because I'm usually reading late at night before the night's rest. And it turned out to be perfect to me, especially when coupled with the dark mode available on the device. A set of low light intensity, warmest temperature and the dark mode felt like a game changer. Below I put another image of the device with some text visible on it.
   
3. The Software
   The device comes with some flavor of Linux which is called "PocketBook OS".
   I don't want now to deeply cover the software here, but rather just skim over it marking some ups and downs of it.
   
   The first "up" is that I found the default reading application good. Although I didn't tried any other application, but I want to point here and emphasize it that it may be replaced with something else. I find that a strong side of the device, that one is easily allowed to and may put any "user's" applications on the device that one may want. Maybe I'm biased (since I was using Kindle for a long time) and that's actually a standard in the e-reader's world, but anyway, that's a good thing even if not the safest, broadly speaking. I found the built-in dictionary sufficient for what I need, although inferior to one which I use on some other Onyx Boox device, however, better that what I had on the aforementioned Kindle.
   
   Alas, the software isn't just "ups", since there are some (serious) downs. Let's start light. The touch is working as one may expect from an e-ink device; it lags, but eventually does the job. That's fine, although Android based Onyx Boox devices which I was using felt more responsive. I found an e-ink device to be a nice web-browsing device, however, that may not really be conveniently achieved with this PocketBook. The built-in browser lacks navigation buttons in the top bar (like back/forward buttons, although they're present inside a drop-down menu), it works really really slow and doesn't have tabs. However, I wasn't really trying to find out whether there are some alternative web browsers that could be launched as "user's" applications, so maybe some of the caveats here could be amended.
   Now the worst part I found about the software, and that is that it's buggy. When I was using the rotate feature some times, it append to me that the text didn't fully rotated with the whole screen leaving some rectangular artifacts on the screen. Usually it autocorrected after a jiffy, but once I had to hard reset the device. But that wasn't the only occasion on which I had to hard reset it. The device froze several times (over the whole time I had it, so not that frequent, but still) when I was reading a book occasionally using the dictionary. When the device was turned on again, I had to forward some of the pages that I've already read. And while I'm on the dictionary. It sometimes happened that it weirdly lagged when I tried to turn it off, or other times I couldn't turn it on, since word highlight wasn't registered.
   It also sometimes happened that when I turned off some pop-up dialog (from the backlight adjustments) the buttons (text-less) remained for some time visible on the screen, which just made the device overall feel less polished up...
   
4. Final thoughts
   Honestly, I really like this e-reader, however the software makes this a bit harder. On the one hand, the build quality and handling are really good, nothing to complain about here. On the other hand, the device's functionality is there (and it may be extended) but it sometimes disappoints during simple tasks, and I don't mean the web browsing here but the core, i.e., the e-book reader application. Honestly, it's just good enough to not to entirely refrain from the device, but it's irritating enough to make one will to change it over time or to reconsider other choices before deciding to buy one. Although the price is quite attractive, since it costs about a Kobo Libre and a half, while competing with it (I guess).

I hope that you found that at least somewhat helpful if you decided to read through this review. If there is something you would like me to share, I'll be glad to answer your questions.

-Krzysztof

[VladimirS]

Thank you for this review !

It is insane for devices to freeze this often, but happens also on mine Inkpad 3, it's nuts!
Just plain regular usage and this happens.

It looks great on those photos !

[JSWolf]

Have you checked the books the device freezes with? Do they have any errors?

[Krzysztof]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Have you checked the books the device freezes with? Do they have any errors?

Hi. It's hard for me to track back all the incidents that I had, however I can refer to one that happened recently; that was a book which I got from Project Gutenberg, so I think that no processing was applied to the e-book before it was ready to read (I'm using Calibre for books management). So while reading the book I didn't notice any artifacts or wrongly encoded characters in it, if that's what you're asking about? If not, please, tell me whether you have any particular errors in mind?

Thanks,
Krzysztof

[VladimirS]

Some Pocketbook devices, even older generation, exibit this freezing behaviour.
Inkpad generation of Pocketbook suffer from this from time to time and from device to device.

Sometimes, books can be cause, for sure. But as far as we speak of Pocketbooks,
I think some other problem affects readers.

My current conclusion is that, taking into consideration particular mode of operation
(method) of eink displays, I predominantly put blame to battery degradation problems:

1. old, used batteries (several years of regular or heavy usage)
2. new batteries, but chemically old (warehouse storage, storing at high or low charge levels).

All freezing occurencies with my device happened during page turning process,
or using Photo Frame app which just displays sequentially slideshow of given photos.

In another post, I gave a detailed description of problem, if you are interested,
give a look to this post.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...2&postcount=56

Cheers !

[Krzysztof]

VladimirS, I read your post you pointed to and your explanations of this freezing phenomenon seems reasonable to me. However, there is a one or two things here; this particular model of PocketBook, i.e., Era Lite was release just this year and I bought it shortly after it was released...

If the cause for freezing is in fact aging then either I'm a really heavy e-reader user - which I don't think I'm, since I'm using my reader daily for about 1-2h max - or the battery the manufacturer put into my unit was already impaired for some reason (which I don't think impossible, but undesirable for sure if that's the case).

If we may safely assume that both reasons could be rejected, then I would aim my finger vaguely in the direction of the software itself, although this is just where I would likely start my research if I were to find it out what is the reason here and not a strong argument. However, the SW is not public.

Although I have to admit that I may be too much attached to the hypothesis about fault SW, which could be seen in my review, since I posted the issues with freezing under "The Software" section... Maybe I have too much trust in the HW

[nhedgehog]

Hi, just a remark from another user.
Most of the freezing I experienced are due to the device, trying to add a slightly incompatible book to the database. That process is taking a lot of ressources if the book does not fit the (whoever knows) limitations of this process. The only way to avoid it and filter the responsible book out, is, to fill the book with a limited number of books, and look if it is still working as expected ... and then another portion....
Apart from that I do recommend a look at KoReader, which expands the reading comfort so much that I would miss it a lot if PB wouldn't support it anymore.

[Krzysztof]

I think I'll give this KoReader a try. This is not the first time I hear about it. Thanks

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Krzysztof

Hi. It's hard for me to track back all the incidents that I had, however I can refer to one that happened recently; that was a book which I got from Project Gutenberg, so I think that no processing was applied to the e-book before it was ready to read (I'm using Calibre for books management). So while reading the book I didn't notice any artifacts or wrongly encoded characters in it, if that's what you're asking about? If not, please, tell me whether you have any particular errors in mind?

Thanks,
Krzysztof

Just errors. You'll find error by using the epubcheck or epubveri plugin for the calibre editor. There is a plugin that can check ePub for errors in the library that you can then fix.

The plugin is called epubveri library. Sometimes a Reader can have a problem if the eBook error(s).