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