A small review of the iRiver Story HD

[ersott]

Originally Posted by jaxsnop

Not many zooms, it's very poor and limited. Good margins but not settings.
It's a good device but needs a lot of improvements. I prefer my Kindle 3 but with new updates iriver hd story could be a good competitor.

Hello jaxsnop, i´m spanish too

I got a k3, do you think that the screen is much better than pearl?, or not too much difference.

thanks for your attention and sorry for my poor english

[wallcraft]

I have added the HD to the E-book Reader Matrix. Some columns are currently blank, let me know if you have the missing info. For example, the number of font sizes.

[jaxsnop]

Originally Posted by ersott

Hello jaxsnop, i´m spanish too

I got a k3, do you think that the screen is much better than pearl?, or not too much difference.

thanks for your attention and sorry for my poor english

Hi ersott! No, I don´t think the iriver screen is better, simply different. Not too differences.

With the iriver you can find a good definition on images but reading in a grey screen is less pleasant.

It´s a good device but actually, I'm still prefering my K3.Regards!


Hola ersott! Pues no creo que la pantalla del iriver sea mejor, algo distinta, pero no mejor porque tampoco es que tengan muchas diferencias.

Lo notaría más con las imágenes, fotos ,etc porque tiene una mejor definicion y se ven mejor pero al ser una pantalla más gris que en el K3, a mi gusto, no es tan agradable la lectura.

A no ser que hagan nuevas actualizaciones que mejores varios aspectos, sigo prfiriendo el K3. Saludos!

[ersott]

Thanks jaxsnop.

I think, I still wainting for kindle 4 ;-)

[stesc]

Just got the official cover for the Story HD, so here are a few first impressions.
Overall it's quite nice, though it looks and feels noticeably cheaper than the Kindle cover for example. But then again it's only about half the price (19€ vs. 35€). And it's really light too, only ~84g. Once you get it inside the straps (it's harder than it looks), they hold the Story quite tight and secure.
What I don't like is the cutout on the back for the power switch. It's too big, badly placed and the cut isn't even straight. Looks like someone cut it out by hand.

[jaxsnop]

Originally Posted by stesc

Just got the official cover for the Story HD, so here are a few first impressions.
Overall it's quite nice, though it looks and feels noticeably cheaper than the Kindle cover for example. But then again it's only about half the price (19€ vs. 35€). And it's really light too, only ~84g. Once you get it inside the straps (it's harder than it looks), they hold the Story quite tight and secure.
What I don't like is the cutout on the back for the power switch. It's too big, badly placed and the cut isn't even straight. Looks like someone cut it out by hand.

I bought an unofficial white Kindle 3 cover in Dealextreme because the size of both is very very similar. I'm waiting the cover arrives and when I check it I'll tell you my impressions.

[charleski]

I remember seeing a review recently which included a close-up of the screen showing the difference the increased resolution made to the rendering of letters. But I can't find it again despite searching around quite a bit. Has anyone else come across this and got the link?

[stesc]

Originally Posted by charleski

I remember seeing a review recently which included a close-up of the screen showing the difference the increased resolution made to the rendering of letters. But I can't find it again despite searching around quite a bit. Has anyone else come across this and got the link?

Here you go. Might not be the same you saw though. Just pulled it off their website (recently went live http://www.iriver.com/product/view.asp?pCode=002&pNo=86).

[charleski]

Thanks, yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

[jaxsnop]

Originally Posted by charleski

I remember seeing a review recently which included a close-up of the screen showing the difference the increased resolution made to the rendering of letters. But I can't find it again despite searching around quite a bit. Has anyone else come across this and got the link?

You can visit engadget too. There are photos and a video.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by ersott

Hello jaxsnop, i´m spanish too

I got a k3, do you think that the screen is much better than pearl?, or not too much difference.

thanks for your attention and sorry for my poor english

Actually as I study the technology I have reached the conclusion that they are both Pearl screens, just at different resolutions. It is similar to the 5" and 6" Vizplex devices that both have 800 x 600 pixels. The 5" had 200 ppi, while the 6" had 167 ppi. This new screen is 213 ppi making it similar to the 5" screen. The pixels are smaller and therefore a single pixel would seem less dark but the overall technology and engineering is the same. LG is a new manufacturer of the screen and there could possibly be some differences due to that but the engineered screen is the same.

Dale

[cme]

I published an iriver Story HD review on my webpage ... might be interesting for some german members here: http://cme.at/testbericht/test-iriver-story-hd/

For all non-german folks:
I found the Story HDs screen very nice to look at. You clearly can see the difference in font-sharpness compared to the Kindle or Sony readers. For comics and mangas the higher resolution is a big advantage too. Images are much sharper and have much more detail than on the SVGA readers.

Another pleasent surprise was the weight. It is noticeable lighter than the Kindle which is a big plus for long reading sessions.

However, the Story HD has some downsides: There is no notes-function, no audio support (so no TTS), no wireless connectivity (at least not for the current german version) and no integrated store, which all makes the QWERTY-keyboard a little useless imho. Also the homescreen and overall navigation is not as intuitive as on other readers and the settings are very limited.

Originally Posted by adbosch

How's browsing for books on the device; does it allow browsing through folders (e.g. Fiction English - Writer Name - Book Titel, etc.). This is important once you load lots of books.
How many zoom levels?
Margin settings???

There are 8 zoom levels, with not much difference between them. So the font size at the highest zoom level isn't as big as on the kindle or sony.

Largest fontsizes compared:


No margin settings or any other font settings for that matter.

You can organize your books in folders. To do that you need to switch from databse mode to folder mode in the settings. That way you can browse folders on the reader.

The sorting options are only available in database mode. You can sort by recently read, favorites, title, author and images (comics, mangas). The search functions allows to look for the filename, meta data seems to be ignored as far as I can tell.

[wilsonch]

I am interested in the Story HD because of the Google Reader, in relation to the scanned and OCR'd free books at Google Books. Online, in one's browser, one can switch between the PDF and the OCR'd text (epub). The Android Google Reader very gracefully switches between PDF (scanned image) and epub (searchable text) for the free Google books. One doesn't have to download two copies, etc. One doesn't even need to know how to spell PDF or epub -- the tool presents them as image and searchable, flowable text. Can anyone tell me whether the Google Reader software on the Story HD behaves this way?

[wilsonch]

Oh, also I like to pretend to read books in Russian. I realize that the ebooks themselves usually contain the fonts necessary to display the text. But on my Sony the titles in the lists of books all looked like "???? ?? ????? ???" until I found a way to substitute Russian for Dutch. What device-level (i.e., menus, book lists, etc.) languages does the USA version support? Have previous Story readers been enhanced by clever Russians to include Cyrillic?

[cme]

Russian is among the supported languages. Do you have any eBook I could try it with?

As for the PDF/epub thing: The google-version of the reader isn't released yet, but from judging from the german version, I'm pretty sure it will be a regular epub download. Google Books is an open platform, which iriver decided to use. The software still comes from iriver.