The iRiver Story is the latest entrant into the Ebook Reader market, and its iRiver’s first ebook reader.
I must admit I was weary when I first heard bout the iRiver Story, as from afar it could be mistaken for a rebadged Amazon Kindle clone. But I’m pleased to say that iRiver have done a good job designing this ebook reader, and they have invested quite a bit in the packaging and marketing material for their ebook reader.
This is no Amazon Kindle though, the build quality although ok and it doesn’t have the solid feel of a Kindle. But the device doesn’t feel cheap, its quite attractive and the keyboard actually works quite well.
The screen is your typical Vizplex E-Ink screen, featuring 8 levels of greyscale (same as the Sony Touch & Pocket / Bebook) with a resolution of 800×600. The Kindle features a better 16 greyscale screen, but both offer a really good reading experience.
The user interface is intuitive, you can use the keypad to navigate through the menus and there are side buttons available so that you can use the book in one hand for both left and right handed users.
Unlike the Amazon Kindle which limits the ebook formats to their own amazon.com and pdf ebook formats, the iRiver Story is compatible with a wide range of ebook formats including: EPUB, PDF & TXT cover the main formats for commercial ebooks, while the Story also displays office files like DOC, PPT & XLS. For comics & graphic novels, JPEG, BMP and GIF image. This makes this ideal for reading business documents on the road without having to carry a laptop.
Page turns are snappy (for ebook reader standards) and you’ll find the ebook reader comfortable to read all sorts of books on your journeys.
The device comes with a generous 2GB of internal storage, enough to store hundreds of books, and it can be expanded with an external SD card.
We also like the added features which are not available on other ebook readers as yet including the diary, memo facility, the built in speaker and the voice recorder which are all handy but will probably never be used…
At £229 the iRiver ebook reader is on par with most 6″ ebook readers in the UK, but is more expensive than the Amazon Kindle.
In all the iRiver is a good device, especially if you are interested in being able to upload any ebook format, or your own documents which is not currently possible on the Kindle.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
hi!
I was just wandering how good is the PDF support on the Iriver Story? I am thinking about buying it because of all my school books which are heavy 3D imaging books which are normally 300-500 pages big and every book comes with a CD rom which has a PDF version of the book… So I want to safe space and time by just buying a good looking ebook reader, good enough to handle PDFs which are heavy on the images…
Thanks a lot and Ill keep reading!
The thing I’m looking for in an e-reader is that I can read newspapers, blogs and things like that on it (and I don’t think I’m alone in that). All these readers you seem to be reviewing seem much smaller than I’d need for reading these kind of publications or big PDFs etc. If you wrote an article on bigger screen readers I’d be interested in what you recommend.
Hi,
I’d like to know if this reader can zoom PDF documents or enlarge the font size and reflow the text. I’m very interesting on it, but don’t want to read a whole page of my PDFs in such a little screen.
Thanks
Had this reader for a short time and the screen developed a fault, where only half the screen would show writing. I sent it to Singapore’s McCoy Pte Ltd for repair as it was still under warranty and they replied a week later saying that the vendor said it was a customer developed fault and I would have to pay $200 and wait for 8 weeks for repairs or buy a new one from them for $300.
What a disappointment!! To my knowledge there is no way that I could have damaged the screen.
I replied to McCoy saying that I would not throw good money after bad.
Maybe, you can learn from my experience with iRiver Story. If it goes faulty, the chances are they will say it is a customer related fault, even though you registered the unit.
Who wrote this ullage? When you say you were “weary” when you first heard the iRiver story, instead I guess you meant you were wary, unless of course you were tired from having had to write so much drivel!!
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