Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics engineering video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones hi it's E-reader review time now. Uh, as you may know, some time back I Reviewed the new Amazon Kindle 3 when it came out, that was a very popular review and tear down. So I thought I'd have a look at this new I River story HD it's just come out on in Sunday in the US not available in Australia yet but one of my viewers John Chandler thanks John He picked me one up it came out on Sunday when it came out and fedexed it to me.

we have it for review and tear down. Is it as good as the Amazon Kindle 3 which is its clear competitor. Let's find out and we'll do a quick unboxing here. Now here's the box and it's very reminiscent of the Amazon Kindle box which I so loved.

And here it is. It's got the same sort of uh, you know, plain packaging, recycled cardboard look. Although nowhere on there does it say that it's actually uh, recycled cardboard at all. whereas Amazon do actually claim that and Amazon have this great frustration free packaging I Love it, You just all you do is you.

uh, ZIP the uh, the cardboard cord across like that and you open it up. No tools required. Fantastic. But can't say the same thing with the IR River story.

HD There's just tape on the side like this. and to open it up, Shock Horror. I've got to actually get my knife out. get it in there and slice the thing open.

How offensive. Let's not quibble over the packaging. Let's see what we have inside. Shall we open it up? Tada No.

Got to open up again. Tada There it is. And of course you would think just like the Kindle you would think it's already switched on. but it's not.

That is all you would think that was like a some sort of some sort of um, act, some sort of protective display on the front of the actual unit itself comes in the plastic like that. but it's not. It's the Eink display. It's the gorgeous Eink display which takes no power, which is why they can actually, uh, ship it with an image on the display like that and from behind the camera.

I Didn't see this nice little tab here which allowed you to just pull up the unit like that. Excellent. I Like it. and what have we got under the bottom of the box? Here to? we've got a USB that's a mini B uh mini connector.

so obviously that's what's on there and we've got uh, some sort of quick use guide. How we have we the basics. There you go, setting up your story HD How to plug it in ETC forign stuff we don't need that, we're going to take a look at the actual Um Story HD device itself. Now you may have notied this barcode Inside the Box It was just sitting loose on top, but it's actually an RFID tag.

If you can see inside there, there's actually a chip and the antenna coil in there. It's one of those RFID tags. Now, if you remember my tear down of the Uh Kindle, it actually had an RFID tag built inside the actual unit itself. whereas I don't know I Haven't torn down this one yet yet.

Uh, we'll have to see, but obviously it it most likely hasn't because they had to ship a separate tag with it. and having an RFID tag like this in inside the actual box, it allows them to uh scan during the production process, scan the actual Uh unit, and figure out which Uh serial number is there and all sorts of stuff. So they've obviously uh allocated this barcode to this particular serial numbered Uh unit, and here it is compared to the Amazon Kindle 3 cuz that is the natural comparison. Obviously, it's a clearly a a competing unit.

It's almost exactly the same size. it is a little bit. um, it is a little bit wider than the Kindle like that, but it's almost identical. Uh, length.

There's no difference there at all. And thickness. Ah, there's not. There's bugger all in that as well.

they're They're basically the same thickness. so really, there's not much difference between them and the display are virtually identical size. except of course, the story. The Big Marketing Point of the story: HD is that it claims to have 60% more pixels or a HD display compared to the well.

They don't mention the Uh Kindle but they compare to other competing ebook readers which of course they mean the Kindle 3 and I don't know I prefer the charcoal finish of the Kindle 3 over this. This one's a bit flashy. We've got these uh, sort of uh, copper colored uh buttons I would probably say they are and there's no Uh controls on the side. There's no page turning controls like you had on the Kindle.

So um, I've never used an Iiver uh Story device and Iiver E-reader before, so I have no idea how to even turn the displays. I Guess I'm going to find out. and if we take a closeup look at the quiry keypad here, it's in the straight alignment as per the Uh Kindle I don't know, that's not as, um, nice I Guess as the traditional uh spaced keyboard, they've got their four-way looks like a four-way uh cursor bar here, which you obviously push up and down and then click left and right and on the bottom. Here, we've got a USB mini B connector.

Now the Kindle has the micro uh USB connected now. Um, the mini is not is not nearly as robust in the number of Uh insertion as the micro USB connector used on the Kindle. so I guess if um, that could potentially uh, wear out quicker. but uh, there's nothing else on the bottom there.

There's nothing on the top and if we turn it over here, it's a it's a rather I Don't know if it's a nice brown type of uh color on the back, but there you go. there's a story. HD With the FCC stuff the specs, and uh, basically down here, here's our power button which we slide across and uh, there's really not much else designed by IR River of course and this looks like this looks like the SD card slot. There it is.

You lift it up and bingo. Oh, it's got a nice little uh, hinged attachment here which just flips out of the way. That's really nice and it's a standard SD card. Of course that is one of the major things lacking on the Kindle is expansion capability.

Now I am surprised they've gone with a standard uh SD instead of a Micro SD but I think that's really good on a product of this physical size. There is really no need to go to the micro um micro SD card format. It's great for mobile phones and things like that, but when you got a product this big really, you should just be stand using standard SD and they've done that. and I think that's terrific.

But uh, of course there's no one of the things lacking which is on the Kindle is a headphone socket. you can actually play uh, music and you can get talking books and things like that. the I River doesn't have that. That's pretty disappointing.

Not that I've ever really used it, but I'm sure there might be a lot of people who use the audio capabilities of the Kindle. Let's switch it on and see what we get. We just have to slide the button here, which is uh, once you get to know that it's under the bottom I Guess you can just uh, slide it like that which is quite good. It's uh, better than I think it's probably better than the one on the edge on the Kindle I Don't know the the boot time is H I Guess because it's the first time we literally the first time I've ever switched this on.

There we go. It's got to go through a setup process there. Um, which I think the Kindle had to do as well. So I I'll have to link my uh, my Google Books account with this thing that's not done whereas the Amazon Kindle when it ships if you because you order it directly from Amazon uh, it, it already comes preconfigured with your account and your name information.

You can do that online before you actually get it. So when you actually take it out of the box and switch it on, it says you know hello David and uh, it's already registered for you. There you go, welcome to your I River story! HD Press enter to confirm Tada and it's updating and There we go. It's uh, it's it's on.

it's ready to go so let's switch that off again. There we go it. Uh, just like the Kindle it comes up with a um, some sort of random picture I'm not sure if that's a same every time I'd like to think that it actually changes and let's switch it on and bingo that switches on very quickly I Like it and it actually shipped with a reasonable amount of battery life left. and by default it comes with the uh sign in thing here which I'll have to do and it says what book you're currently reading.

by the looks of it and it looks like it does come with a couple of books populated. There's no extra uh page there, but it looks like it does come with excellent. The Time Machine by HG Worlds Now let's scroll down here. Now you have to use this uh scroll, uh, this four-way joystick kind of button here and wh that popped to the end the time machine.

Okay, how do we do that? I Guess we go. Enter: Probably too bad if you're uh, left-handed perhaps because the enter button over here whereas this only has home and back. So if you're using it with your left hand, um I figure you would have to come in here with your right hand and press enter. but uh, with your right hand.

Here you can hold the thing in one hand you can scroll around like that. I Don't mind this. uh, four-way joystick so far. Actually, my first impression is reasonably quite good.

It works reasonably well. There's a reasonable height on it so that your thumb can, actually, uh, get it like that it actually get good purchase on the button. I Kind of like that, but let's press enter and see if we can go into the time machine. Load in HG Worlds Love it! Beautiful! The Time Machine By HG Worlds and I assume this is how you scroll the pages.

This is a digital copy of book that was preserved for generations and once again, that seems to be like a scanned version of the book. It doesn't seem to be. Oh no. There we go.

We've gotten into proper text, but looks of it and there we go. If you take a look up at the top right corner up here, there's a tiny little number four that shows that we're on page four of the book and it's absolutely tiny. They have made that as minuscule as possible. Based on the the higher resolution of this display, you really can't see that.

If you were visually impaired, you would never be able to see that. It's crazy. So really, that's one of the disadvantages. I Guess of having a higher resolution display is that when you're a designer like this, you are temp Ed to actually use the resolution of that display and that's just crazy.

I can barely read that and I've got perfect eyesight. I'm currently on page six there and watch like I go from page five. There it is up there. a tiny five up there.

I'll jump to page six and it jumps to there the position, the page indicator and I jump to page seven. There we go and it's down here. What's going on there? It just seems to jump I Got down a page 12 and it's just jumped up to the top again. Crazy By default I Think it's just.

it's just hasn't got the contrast that the Kindle seems to have. and if we zoom in here and take a look at the uh, take a look at the text here. I mean I'm sure we can change the font on the Ey River and the font size and things like that, but I just much prefer looking at the Kindle display. At first glance here, let's have a look at what they claim here on the back of the IR River box.

Fast page turns using Cortex CPU Great. Well let's try it out, shall we now? I've got a very large ebook on here and I'm like 90% of the way through it. so I'm near the end of an ebook here and I'm right at the start if that matters. I'm not sure, but I'm right at the start of the time machine here on the IR River And let's do a page turn.

No, that's pretty Bo that's slow. That was slow slower there. Well, if anything, it's slightly slower than the kind. Do I think? it's certainly not better.

so I don't know about that claim there about faster page turns. It's certainly not faster than the competition faster than the previous. I River Maybe, but otherwise. nope.

Now one of the great things about the Kindle I loved is that you could use it either left or right-handed single hand like this. and if I'm sitting in bed or I'm sitting in the bathtub or something and I'm reading my Kindle here. I Can page I can hold it like this and Page forward and page back even with either my left hand or my right hand with the buttons on the side that you can just use up and down so you can use it both left and right-handed But yeah, I don't think I want my thumb in that position I don't know. it's just a personal preference thing.

I Guess you'd get used to it I'd have to use it for a long time to see how beneficial that is. but if you scroll down, you actually, uh, turn to the the next page. If you scroll up, you turn to the previous page so it can be used both left and right-handed That's all right. Let's pop up the option menu on both of the units.

It pops up slightly quicker on the Kindle and uh, you can navigate. Of course, you've got to navigate using the square controller down here. Now this is where I do actually prefer this. Uh, quite nice.

Um, joystick large joystick style button on the IR River That's one of its advantages when you going through menus and selecting things like that. But as I said, the enter buttons over here. the uh Kindle one is in the center so you know there's there's not much between them really. But um, I find that uh, the Kindle they've got it right.

Look Big. Nice readable menu like that. Huge. Massive.

the I River They're taking advantage. they trying to take advantage of that high defin display and they've made the font smaller. It's not nearly as readable. I Don't like it as much.

Here's one thing I don't like with their menu system. if I pop it up here. Okay and let's say we want to adjust the text size there. press enter and I've decided no I want to I Didn't want to do that I Wanted to go back to the option menu.

You can't just press option to take you back. It's crazy You think? Okay, there's a back button over here. Great. You press the back button.

No, it takes you back to the book. Anyway, let's take a look at the text adjustment size here so we'll adjust text size. and Bingo! You can adjust the size of the text and it does actually do it in real time on the display there not particularly quickly. It actually takes quite a while to cycle through the larger fonts like that, but that's not bad at all now.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get this on camera, but if you can see there, there is a ghost image there left behind from the menu. I'm trying to going to try and get it here. If I get the right angle it it it actually really is quite visible and if I call up the option display again just look. You can see the A you can see that box and the A button there.

If I go in again and go into the menu. there it is you can see it and if I go back like this, it remains. There's a ghost image there. it's You do get a little bit of that on the Kindle but it's not.

It's not as bad as the Iiver. so I think the ghos in is worse on this display now. I'm in the option menu here and really I can't find anywhere to change the type of font. You can change the size of font, but you can't change the type I Think that's ridiculous.

Um, it doesn't have a rotation sensor in there so it doesn't automatically flip around. but it does have a dedicated button which the Kindle doesn't have you have to go through a menu to actually get to that. And here's that annoying thing again, if you're I'm still in the text size menu and I can't just go and press that. I've got to actually press back to go back to there.

And then I can press the rotate uh menu, but it only calls up the menu. It doesn't actually let you uh, actually choose a default position that I'm aware of and it's rotated it like that. There you go. Um, but it would be nice if you could have a preset rotation and then you just hit that and it toggles between the two of your preferred orientations.

and there's that ghosting on the display. Again, the E in display. it clearly hasn't uh, dropped all of the uh, all of the whatever. they are like carbon crystals or something all the way to the bottom and you can see it.

You can see the ghost ghosted text on there and that's that's no good at all. I don't like it. One of the great features I love about the Kindle is that you can highlight passages of the book and you can share that with other people. And likewise, here, it actually shows that eight people, eight other people have highlighted this particular sentence in the in the book itself and I can add to that.

and uh, you can actually switch that um on or off, but that's quite nice. And the IR River really doesn't have a nice. uh, functionality like that. I Kind of miss it I Really liked that interactiveness of the Amazon Kindle You could just share your reading experience with other people.

The I River doesn't seem to be the same. One of the great things about these ebooks is that they have dictionaries built in, so if you don't know what a word means, then you can just, uh, call it up. Now let's try it on the Iiver here. We've got dictionary.

Let's select that and takes a second or two, but it pops up. It's got the Collins English dictionary in it. New Edition for advanced Learners There you go, but it looks like you can't just scroll around the document and highlight a word. It looks like you've got to type it in.

The Kindle on the other hand, is much nicer. You don't have to enter any mode at all. All you've got to do is just move the cursor around like this and you can scroll around the document. Let's uh, look at the word science there and it's automatically popped up the top with the definition for the word science.

But hey, let's give it a go. anyway. I've typed in the word science I press enter and what's it going to do? Well, it takes its time and there we go. It's a really, it's a full-on dictionary.

There you go. It's a little bit more comprehensive than the Kindle but really? I Much prefer this um just the cursor. uh, live scrolling capability of the Kindle to this one. And the great thing about the highlights feature in the Kindle is that you can actually view all of the highlights in the book that that other people have actually um that have actually highlighted and Bingo And there they are and you can just scroll down and you can jump directly to the location in the book.

There's no competing capability on the Iriv that I can find so far. Let's see what we've got back at the home menu. If you press home, you get back to the main screen and let's press the options button and see what we get. Just like the Kindle you can turn the wireless offer on I haven't set that up yet.

You can go to the Google ebook store which uh, we'll see later how if that's any better than well, it's hard to judge whether it's better than the Amazon Kindle Store. You know there once again there are going to be books that are available on one that aren't available on the other and there will be ones that are available on the same store and their different prices, etc. etc. But Google have a lot of free ebooks.

probably more uh, free ebooks than the Amazon Kindle Perhaps that's one of their claims to fame fame? You can refresh your books, you can uh, do do bookmarks. Uh, it's not the same as highlighting searches. You can call up the dictionary straight away, sign into to Google and settings. That's what I'm interested in.

Let's go down here and have a look: Wireless Controls System Settings Personal Information Power Settings System Wizards Device Information Wireless Controls System settings Personal Information Power Settings System Wizards Device Information Let's set that auto Sleep settings I'm not sure what the difference between uh, power off and sleep is, but I guess we'll find that out in due course, but it's set for 15 minutes, so let's go back. If we can press the back button, it does get us back to the previous menu. uh, personal information System settings. Let's see what we have in here.

We have date and time. I'll have to set that for Sydney Australia because I got this from the US uh English Of course they probably got different languages in there Library View options and that's about all. Um, that's not terribly exciting at all. And if you go into the wireless controls up here, it does actually have an airplane mode.

which I guess if you got those, uh, fussy flight attendants, you can switch it to airplane mode. but a lot of them don't understand. Um, these ebook readers. They don't actually do anything.

Uh, they're not actually running when they're just sitting there on the page. So it's unless you actually have I Mean airplane mode would switch the wireless off, but why you can't Just you would switch the wireless off, anyway. most of the time because it it's just going to chew your power. So really I don't understand why they've got an air an airplane mode like that.

they should just have uh Wireless off and on. I Just went into the wireless network there and I had no problems at all. Just typed in my password for uh, my wireless network and it worked. A treat.

It connected straight away, no problems whatsoever. and it's got a tin in the little wireless icon up there. Once again, it's pretty darn small and so is the time up there. They've really, they've They've got to make those these uh symbols on the display bigger, The menu options and things like that, they're not as readable as they are on the Kindle and they're both pretty identical.

When you call up the menu, when you're reading a book, you've got the uh. Once again, you've got the title of the book up here, which I like, but once again, it's a really small font, harder to read, the time's not as easy to read, and uh, the battery symbol is is probably easier to read on the iriver. That's about the only thing that they actually got. uh right there.

and this is interesting. Look, what's just popped up. Uh, after I connected to the network. you know, 5 minutes.

3 to 5 minutes after I connected, it's said a system update is available. Would you like to download the system software updates? You bet. Let's give it a go. Oh problem connecting to the W Ah what? what? Give me a break I Didn't even give me a chance.

What's going on? Well, I'll try and sign into my Google account presumably it's my standard Google account and uh, see what we can do here. Here's one feature: I really like and I really think they've got right? Just like on the Kindle, they've got a symbol button here, which uh, which swaps between Uh letters and numbers and other you know at symbols and things like that when you're typing stuff in like uh, passwords and you're typing in email addresses if we press symbol, what they've come up with is there's a direct one toone vertical mapping of the keys like that so it shows you how they overlay. so if we want to type in one like that, we just press that and it highlights it up there. It really is quite nice to get that vertical reference position so you can actually just you just visually scroll down with your eyes and you know exactly by looking at that mapping which button to press I Really like it.

It works quite well and if you compare that with the symbol name on the Kindle, it just pops up with that and you've got to scroll around and then press enter. It's not nearly as usable as the Iiver. Big thumbs up for to Iiver for the getting that one right. I Tried to sign in and look I can't and I've double and triple checked my Um Gmail username and password.

crazy I Don't know what's going on? is it because I'm an Australian and ites doesn't let me do this I can get into Google Books no problems at all through my Gmail account on the main computer but it does not Let me sign in here, don't know what's going on at all and I think I might have found my problem here. Look I've logged into Google Books in my Google account and it says you have not linked your Google profile to your Google Books account. Go figure. So it looks like I'm going to have to do that.

Okay, let's give that a try. Here we go: I Guess I Click on this button here your profile has been connected. Refresh the page to see it. Beauty All right, let's refresh and see what we get.

Taada, we're up. I Think maybe I should be able to log in now. let's give it a go. I Tried it again and well, no nothing.

username password you entered is incorrect. Please try again. I'm sick of trying again. just W and what do you know I try a different browser I've opened the Google Books in here and it tells me the latest Google ebooks are not available for sale in your location yet, but I can happily, uh, do whatever I want and effortlessly and uh, read them effortlessly across my device as well.

It's not very effortlessly. if it doesn't let me log into the thing and look. Here's the ad for the IR River story HD Learn more. Let's click on that Google Ebook E-reader Oh look, yeah, that's great I've got one in my hands and I can't log into the damn thing crazy.

Well, if we can't sign into the stupid Google ebook system, then I'll um, copy some eBooks over manually. I've put them. got them on the SD card here. Let's pop it in there and I assume it goes up that way.

There's nothing to tell you otherwise. No, it must. It goes up the other direction. There you go.

and does it pop up with anything? Yes, it does. No, it popped up with something there, but I can't see them on the main screen here. so I'm not sure how to find them at all. I found it.

It's a bit nonobvious, but by default, uh, you're on this Google library tab here and there are different tabs. recent favorites, title and author. and if you scroll the cursor I don't really necessarily like the shape of that cursor either, or the bar here here. but anyway, if you scroll over to recent Bingo we've got some, uh, a mix of basically a recent ones I've opened, but the here are where the SD card ones popped up: I I actually had two uh I downloaded from Google ebooks, a free one Frankenstein and uh in both the Epub format and PDF format and you can see it tells you where it is.

it's on the SD card there document so I think it, uh, can it can certainly recognize PDF Let's see if we can actually read it. uh I've got another book down here the complete guide to Natural Health in PDF format. Let's try that one and see what happens. Takes a little bit to open the book for the first time I don't know exactly know what it's uh doing there.

Here we go and uh, there we go it uh reads PDFs No problem at all. but of course it's um format added in a certain size and it won't automatically um expand that out to actually fill the screen. So the PDF because PDF is a page-based uh format, it's It's not like an ebook format that can uh flow the text through. Of course that's not going to be nearly as good as the Eepb format.

Although the high resolution screen is granted it, it is very, very good so you can. It is better than the Kindle for reading PDFs in fixed page format that are actually too big for this uh screen. so it is it. It is excellent for actually doing that.

There's one thing I do like about uh reading the PDFs on here when you scroll through, it shows you the page number and the total number of pages. I would prefer if that actually stayed there. Um, like it does on the Uh Kindle the Kindle gives you a percentage. It doesn't give you a page uh number for something like that, but I yeah, I just much prefer if it stayed there.

But anyway, that is quite handy to tell you your progress through the book every time you turn the page now. I was finally able to zoom in on that PDF a bit more but it was very slow and very clunky. so I wasn't impressed with that. uh in in the least.

but it has actually allowed me to uh, no, there we go Bingo it's automatically popped back so that's useless. You can't even keep looks like you can't even keep that particular Zoom ratio and uh, and go through pages like that. automattic switches back to full page view. Crazy.

But curiously, if I turn an option called Reflow on here I'm not exactly sure what it is, but if I actually do that, then it does actually give me the adjust the traditional adjust text size thing here, but it doesn't actually work, doesn't actually do anything. And for the electronics people out there, I've got a PDF data sheet in here. Let's and give that a go, shall we? That's a typical data sheet which would be uh A4 formatted and there it is it. You can actually read it.

It it. it's not bad at all. Um, it's quite small of course and uh, zooming in is a pain in the butt, but that's that's not too bad. You can't actually read data sheets on there I Rather like that, whereas on the Kindle it was, the resolution wasn't quite as good.

It was almost there. This one seems to be just there. It just does it. There's one thing I'm not sure if I like or not, but I've got Wireless switched on at the moment and if we switch, switch it off, There we go.

It looks like it comes up with just the same uh screen there I'm not sure if you could get in there and uh, change it. maybe if you root the thing or something like that I don't know. but uh, you turn it back on and it automatically switches the wireless off for you. Well, that's all right.

I guess power saving feature, but I don't know. It might annoy the hell out of you if you really want, uh, the Wi-Fi on when you switch it on. and of course if you switch it off and then back on, it does actually uh, come back exactly where you were before And it's not just inside the uh book either. It's um, actually uh.

menu options and entering in your password and things like that if you switch it off, it does revert to exactly the same spot as you'd expect. And there you have it. That's about all the there is to the Iriver story. HD It's just a basic eBook reader and it does nothing more.

It doesn't have like an extra web browser. it doesn't have text to speech or any of those niceties that are on the Kindle. but I guess it does a reasonably good job of reading a book whether or not the user interface is exactly as good. Well, that's up to personal opinion.

Really Okay, let's see what happens when we plug it into our PC for the first time standard mini B connector. No problems. USB Connect Connected. There it is and it's charging the battery.

Well it. you can select between either charge battery or connect removable disc. I'm assuming that uh, it will still charge if you're connecting to the removable disc or at least I would hope so and I was hoping that it would actually, uh, give you access to the internal drive as well I'm assuming it does, but maybe if you've got the SD card in there, we'll find out USB Connected? it hasn't Oh yep. currently reading oh, what's going on up updating your story HD was doing something well.

there it is. It's certainly charging from the USB or it's uh, claiming too as you'd expect, but uh I tried to connect that in storage mode it said. asked me to connect to the Um external card and I expected it to show up as a mass storage device in Windows Explorer but it doesn't. Aha, it looks like I got it I removed the SD card and I reconnected it and sure enough, device driver software was not successfully installed.

but it has popped up with Story HD as the drive. So there's something with having that SD card in there that didn't work. but here it is: We can access the internal system drive and these are the folders with inside our Um story HD There's the system thing. It's got a whole bunch of system files I don't know what they are Thum no idea what that is, but uh, if we go in there image folder empty.

don't know what that is. maybe you can put images in there comic once again empty. No idea. Book Download: There you go.

That's where it's downloaded the books in ePub format. they're the ones that came uh, pre, uh, pre-installed on the story HD So presumably I can just start drag files from my hard drive directly into there and they will show up on the internal um on the internal memory and manual. There's a user manual in here as well, which I eventually uh found. that's a user guide for the thing that's actually comes pre-installed and Adobe Digital Editions XML file.

Not sure what that is, but there you go, you can access the internal drive no problems at all. But like I said, when you're in this USB connected mode um, it just says USB connected I'm not sure if it's actually charging in that mode or not. There's no charge indicator up the top of the display and I've put the SD card back in and I I connected it up and finally, it's actually decided to pop up with the removable disc. There it is.

so it's not the internal drive anymore. it's actually the uh, it's actually the SD card which I had there and it looks like it has created a thumbnail subdirectory cuz that wasn't on there I didn't create that. And one really important thing for an ebook reader is the weight cuz you can actually get fatigue when you hold it in your hand. It's uh, the Iriver story is 206.

G We'll compare that to the Kindle 233 There we go, so it's slightly lighter. That's a win. but I Just remember, this is the 3G Kindle so it does have that uh 3G SIM card module in there. Plus, it's got speakers as well, so you'd expect it to weigh a bit more so it's probably on par if you take out those features.

And of course, it wouldn't be any fun unless we stuck the thing in the fridge and see what happens to it at low temperatures. Let's do it. I've got the Kindle in there as well, I've got my meter to log the temperature and uh, we'll give it. We go.

Let's give it I don't know an hour or two see what happens? it's been a couple hours. Let's check it out. Oh, it was 1.3 but let's go to the uh minimum minus 1.5 C don't know Fahrenheit for you Yanks but uh, here it is. Oh, it's feeling a bit, uh, feeling a bit.

uh Frozen but let's try it out. let's switch it on and yeah, it's slowed down just like on the Kindle eink display. We found that it actually goes slower at lower temperatures. so let's try and page up.

Is that slower? I don't know, it's hard to tell. but anyway, survived, survived, no problems at all. Beauty and there's that ghost in on the display again. it's terrible I actually thought I was giving it a bit of a thump around I was sort of giving it the old uh twist test to see if it was um, you know, as solid as the Kindle like this, it feels very it feels very on par and I was giving it a bit of a whack and I thought that actually came through uh sh, You know it came through with more ghosting than it did before.

so I'm whacking the thing on the back and uh, I'm not sure if that is actually causing additional uh ghosting on there, but it's I just don't like it at all. It's it's almost a showstopper, but when it comes down to it, ultimately, it's about all about reading a book. and you really need the flexibility of being able to change the fonts and the size and the spacing and all that sort of stuff. And this is it.

on the IR River HD You can change the font size and that it. That's it. It's fixed. But look on the Kindle.

Not only do you get front size, you get type, face, you get line spacing words per line. much more flexible I Wouldn't give this up for quids and of course, you have to read these things at night now. I've got my lights completely turned off in the lab here. it's pitch dark and I'm using my, um, very, uh, tiny little underpowered LED light cuz I don't like having a hugely bright light so it's deliberately underpowered single LED Mighty bright book Le reading light and uh, under the light here I It may be hard to get on camera there, but I swear the Kindle has got better contrast.

It is more readable than the ey. River Um, in terms of display reflection, um, they're very similar. There's not much difference in there. I'd say maybe the Eye river reflects a little bit.

uh, more annoyingly. but um, yeah, give me the Kindle. So the text specs on this thing. Well, it's got an IMX 508 Arm Cortex processor, but as you saw, it's really no quicker than the Kindle.

In fact, it might even be a little bit Tad slower. So really, there's no point to that. It's got got uh 2 gig internal storage SP space which is pretty generous, but it's got. the big selling point is that it's got the SD card up to 32 gig I believe uh SD HD card supported so that's great for um, putting huge PDFs and stuff on there your whole PDF document library or whatever.

but it's only got a 6-in uh display same as the Kindle but the Kindle comes in a 9in model as well which is uh, better. But it does have that HD high resolution display which uh, 1024, By7 68. you can actually read uh PDFs closer you know in more detail which is slightly better than the Kindle Supposed to have a 6 we uh battery life or 14,000 page turns. pretty much on par with the Uh Amazon Kindle 3.

So my verdict on the IR River story HD eBook Reader: well compared to the Kindle I was pretty darn underwhelmed. If I hadn't have used the Kindle before I probably would have thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I expected a bit more I Expected much faster performance. didn't get it. If anything, maybe even slightly slower than the Kindle Free.

Crazy. Uh, but you can't change the font size. with these ebook readers. it's all about the visibility of the display.

That gorgeous Eink display contrast isn't nearly as good on this compared to the Kindle 3. Not even close, it's close, but you know it. This one's much more readable and you can change the font to suit your particular taste. You can't get that here.

Hopefully I'll fix that on an update. Similar sort of battery life. battery life is key with ebook readers. Um, I don't have the 6 weeks to test it, but maybe if I do a tear down, I'll be able to uh, do some battery measurements on it compared to the Kindle or something like that.

But expect the battery life to be pretty good at 6 weeks. But gee, I don't know I expected something. It's got the SD card. yeah, great, okay, but not a huge uh Advanced comp, especially when it doesn't have audio building like the Kindle which is the thing that sucks up a lot of space if you had a lot of audio stuff on there and the HD display.

Technically okay for reading uh PDFs and other stuff at really high resolution, but in the end, give me the contrast of the Kindle any day of the week. I ain't giving up this for anything. See you.