Ebooks have been 'the next big thing' for over a decade now.
By teaming up with Borders to put its eBook reader in bookshops at £180, Elonex is hoping to finally crack the mainstream market in the UK – but is the eBook the right device to do it?
It's certainly very portable; even with a 6" screen and an SD slot, the eBook is much smaller (8mm thick) and lighter (180g) than the Sony and iRex iLiad ereaders (or the Kindle).
The e-ink screen is clear and easy to read, inside or out and at almost any angle. And e-ink gives you phenomenal battery life compared to an LCD screen; Elonex says 8,000 page turns (it's only turning the page that uses power) for a full charge and we read for several hours without seeing any change in the battery status.
But e-ink has drawbacks too. As with all e-ink readers, 'turning' the page means refreshing the screen, which means resetting all the e-ink cells to black and then redrawing the, causing the screen to flash a reverse white on black image of the page momentarily. You may find this disconcerting and distracting.
With image-heavy PDFs, like presentations, we often saw artefacts from previous pages on screen (so the graphics from one page would appear ghosted on the blank background of the next slide) and page turn can be slow - over 5 seconds to load the next page in a PDF presentation and 4 seconds for a PDF ebook.
Text and HTML pages take about 3 seconds but books in ePub format load and turn the page much more quickly. Again we occasionally saw the remains of the menu on the page after we'd opened and closed it.
Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
mahmoodshah
January 16th 2010
2. Be Warned. Elonex do not honour their manufacturer warrenty
My partner, purchased an Elonex e-book reader (for £169) from Borders in Preston last month and gave that to me as a gift. A day or so into using it a thin line appeared on screen when it was on which I ignored as a minor inconvenience. A week or so later that line started widening and eventually the screen froze altogether. We contacted their customer service for a refund but were told that because Borders have now closed so we are not eligible for a refund but you'll be sending us a replacement product after you've received the faulty one. We posted that to you a day after that. Somebody from your customer service rang my partner and claimed that the screen of the ebook reader has a very thin crack and replacement will cost us £140. This is grossly unfair as there was no visible crack when the e-book reader was sent off. Even if we believe that a crack is there, it must have already been there (may be while moving in supply chain) when we purchased it as there has no dropping or anything like that at all. There is no evidence of physical damage, even a tiny scratch which would be there if there was any accidental impact.
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johnjo
November 15th 2009
1. This is maybe not as cool looking as the Cool-er but it works better and there are more options on books. I can't find it on Borders anymore. The only web site that seems to sell them now in the UK is www.buyingcheap.co.uk
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