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Steven A. Godun “sgodun” (North Brunswick, NJ) –

  

  

UPDATE 2011-01-10: I’ve reduced my rating from three to two stars, given the additional experiences that I’ve had with this reader. My review has been updated to reflect those new experiences (particularly in the realm of power management and button controls).

I’m a very casual book reader and a very serious gadget enthusiast. I got this book reader as a promotional item at a popular mattress store (yes, really) when I bought a new bed for my daughter. I thought it would be an interesting gadget to play with and since it didn’t cost me anything, I figured what the heck.

It arrives in an attractive box which contains the reader itself, an AC power adapter (charger) with cable, a USB charging/data cable, a pair of earbud headphones that look almost exactly like the original iPod earbuds, a black fake leather case, a couple of “STOP!” warning pages (one English, one French) telling you to read the manual before using the reader, and a 40 page manual (20 pages each English and French).

Have you ever gone to a flea market or dollar store and found shelves upon shelves of cheap Chinese knock-off versions of popular products? Like, you’d never find a “Voltron” toy set or Brillo soap pads or Breyer’s ice cream or Clorox bleach, but you’d often find things like “Lion Force” or “Robo-Lions” toys, “Brilly” soap pads or “Brayer’s” ice cream or “Chloro-Max” bleach. They were all similar enough to ‘the real thing’ – similar packaging, similar color schemes, similar logos, etc – but were usually quite a bit cheaper, and never quite as good as the real thing.

The iView book reader is just like this. It sorta looks like a Kindle or Nook, and has a color LCD screen like an iPad, but isn’t anywhere near as good as any of them. This is a product designed for people who think they might want an ebook reader but don’t want to pay for the quality afforded by brand names and are okay with sacrificing quality for price.

I’m not going to reiterate the specs as they’re already listed in this Amazon page. There is one discrepancy I noticed. The Amazon page says that it supports up to 32GB SDHC cards, but the manual with the unit says 16GB. As I don’t own anything above an 8GB card I was unable to verify either claim.

The screen is reasonablty bright with a matte finish, making it easier to read in bright light or outdoors. (Are you listening, Apple?) The plastic case is nicely textured, not unlike a laptop’s trackpad, making it easy to grip. The buttons are clearly marked. It supports a reasonably wide assortment of file formats including PDF so it’s not terribly difficult to find content for it. (One of the first things I did was download a few books from the Baen free library and it worked perfectly.) Connecting it to the computer with the provided USB cable makes the device show up as a standard USB storage device. To load content onto it, you simply drag and drop from your desktop. There is no sync tool; in fact, there is no software to load onto your computer at all. Screen quality is good. Not great, but good. As a book reader it supports several text sizes so those of you with failing eyesight can adjust the text size quite a bit. Battery life is decent; I ran it for several hours at full brightness and only lost one (of four) battery bars.

This is where the cheapness starts to come in. It weighs about a half pound, the same as the current model Kindle, but its shape makes it feel heavier. There are, IMO, too many buttons; 23 in total and they’re not all placed logically or conveniently, nor do they perform unique functions. For example, on the right side are “up/down” and “left/right” buttons. When navigating the menus the logical action would mimic an iPod’s controls; up and down to move the selection cursor, left and right to drill down and up through a menu selection. In practice, left/right and up/down work identically (left and up both move the selection up, while right and down both move the selection down). You select a menu option by pressing the button at the bottom center of the unit, inexplicably labeled “M” for some reason. Also, there is a directional button (up/down/left/right) surrounding the “M” button which exactly duplicates the functionality of the side-mounted up/down and left/right buttons. So, yeah, there’s FOUR ways to move the menu selection at any given time – left, up, left directional button, or up directional button to move the selection up, and right, down, right directional button, or down directional button to move the selection down. Why, I don’t know.

Power management on this device, as a whole, is just weird. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out all of the power management rules and I don’t want to bore you with the details. Suffice to say, here are the highlights:

1. There is a physical power switch on the bottom edge of the device, AND a power button on the bottom of…

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I bought this product in November 2010 and had similar power related problems as well as poor logical design with keys serving no apparent function. But that was the good news, now the reader is as dead as a doorknob and will not even turn on or hold a charge or even turn on with a charger. Along with no power, the product seems to have eaten my additional memory card and I cannot retrieve it. Tried to contact and call the manufacturer for warranty work and have not received the courtesy of a reply. Not sure if they really are in business. Save your money and go elsewhere. By peterbenezracpa@hotmail.

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