Comic Book Free Software

Full Review of the iRiver Story HD e-Reader

The iRiver Story HD e-reader features a six inch e-ink display with a tremendous resolution of 1024×768 pixels. It certainly packs a punch and you can see where they fit the HD into the selling point. Pictures and comic books look wonderful and very vibrant in comparison to other e-readers on the marketplace.

The screen itself features the latest generation e-ink PEARL technology and displays 213 DPI. You can see other examples of e-readers that use a PEARL screen, if you go check out the Amazon Kindle 3rd generation, Sony PRS-650 , and Nook Simple Touch .

The e-Reader does have a Freescale i.MX508 800 MHZ CPU processor, which should make the device snappy, but sadly it does not. The page turn speeds are on par with the lightning quick Amazon Kindle, but you really notice the lack of speed with this e-reader when you are doing routine tasks. When I clicked on an ebook to open it, it look almost 35 seconds for the book to actually open. I also noticed the lack of speed when opening the bookstore.

There is a 2GB memory to store your ebooks and content, but only 1.5 is really usable. You can further enhance the memory via the SD card up to 32 GB.

Looking at the device physically, it has a full QWERTY keyboard in order to make typing easy and convenient. It bypasses the D-PAD found in most devices and instead uses a slider bar to scroll up/down/right/left. Most e-readers that have a D-Pad or Trackpad make you click in the middle to function as the ENTER button. The Story HD instead has a physical ENTER key on one side and a back key on the other. In order to access numbers and symbols you have to hit the corresponding buttons in order to access them. This makes it tedious if you are entering passwords that require captial letters, numbers, and lowercase letters.

The design of the Story HD is very minimalist. Aside from the keyboard there is only a Mini USB connection and a slider on the back of the device to turn it off and on. There is no audio functions, no headphone jack, or anything else. This e-reader is JUST for reading.

You can connect up to the Google Bookstore to buy your books via the WIFI connection. If your router password has more then 20 characters you are out of luck. The Story HD has a restriction on long WIFI passwords and simply says “Password is too long.” We had to disable our WIFI password in order to get this to work.

In all, the design of it is very nice. It is white on the front and an accented brown on the back. It has pseudo gold keys that make it look very solid. I found this device was far too slow in doing any task, other than reading. Whenever you connect to the Google Book Store, even though you are connected via WIFI, it constantly lets you know that it is looking for a WIFI connection. This makes the entire shopping experience an exercise in patience. iRiver has not divulged how much RAM is in the Story HD, but I would guess 64 MB.