Raiden's Realm: Review: Astak 5" Easy Reader Pro

Review: Astak 5" Easy Reader Pro (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 30, 2009 at 01:26pm
Section: Mobile Computing
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As an emerging sci-fi novelist (see my books here), I've actually been taking a vested interest in Ebooks of late. Of course, I've also been taking interest in them from the perspective that they've become yet another battleground in the widening war of media freedom, an important theater in the much larger war of user freedom.

And like any digital product, you need a device that can handle the format. Preferably one that is powered by an open source operating system. That's where the Astak 5" Easy Reader Pro ebook reader comes into play here. The Easy Reader pro is a nice little device that keeps things sleek and simple without sacrificing features, or going overboard.

Here are a few of the features and specifications of the device:

SD card slot expands memory up to 16GB (there's 512mb internally)
Ability to reflow any PDF document
Font increases 3 levels or more (ie, you can zoom in on documents for better reading.
8 grayscale levels for more detailed resolution
Faster page turns
Samsung Arm9 400MHz processor (unless you're an uber geek, this probably doesn't mean a lot)
Right/Left hand buttons and Scroll Wheel (ie, for turning pages)
Text-To-Speech capability
Supports English, French, Spanish, Chinese & more
Open Format / Supports 20+ non-DRM formats (IE, if it's a major supported media format, it can probably read/play it)
Major Formats Supported: ADE (Adobe Digital Editions), PDF, TXT, PDB, DOC, HTML, FB2, LIT, MP3, EPUB, and PRC

Well, that's just a taste of what the device can do. The device itself is powered by Linux, and boots pretty quickly. Although, never having tried any other ebook readers, I can't compare it (at least not yet) with how fast the others boot. Especially those with proprietary OS's.

The entire package comes with the 5" screen (that's the total viewable screen size measured corner to corner. The device itself is 6"x4" in size.) that operates at a resolution of 600x800. Total boot time is about 10-12 seconds, which seems long given what little the device does, but I guess that's a reasonable boot time given how slow e-ink screens are.

The device boots up initially with a menu of 5 things, including "Recent files", "Digital Editions", "Restore_PC", and two PDF's. As stated above, the onboard memory is only 512mb, so given that most ebooks are only a half meg in size (about 512k), that comes out to about 1024 ebooks you can put on the device. Honestly, that should be plenty, even for the most veracious of readers.

But, should that not be enough, you can expand the device up to another 16 additional gigabytes of storage using an SD card. Speaking of which, I found the SD card slot a bit of a challenge to work with. On more than one occasion the card got stuck either going into or coming out of the device, requiring some creative fiddling to allow it to travel the remaining distance it needed to, without either damaging the card or the device.

The e-ink interface is intriguing as well. I think that e-ink, a display technology that only uses power when changes are being made to the screen, is a great technology. Is it without its drawbacks? Not really. One of the drawbacks that's most readily obvious to me is that the display has to go through a complete wipe and reset before displaying the new information, causing an annoying blinking that is likely to bug most users.

Now this is not the fault of Astak. I will state that up front. I loved the reader. I just don't like e-ink screens. At least not until they can make them such that they are able to make seamless transitions between pages, and with no blinking.

But again, technology gripes aside, the device performed well. I can't say it was without faults, as I've listed above, but it did well. The 10 button page/menu system is actually quite ingenious. Instead of having to navigate to your item of choice, you just press one button, and you're done. How is that helpful? Well, for one, since eink screens have to go through a full refresh each time a change happens on the page, it saves bigtime on the battery.

The device itself uses NO POWER AT ALL, except when booting, shutting down, changing pages, reading/writing files, or playing MP3 files. If you're just reading a page, no power whatsoever is consumed. I haven't the foggiest how they pulled that off, but they did...somehow. And really, that's an awesome thing too, because it allows you to maximize your battery life to unbelievable levels.

And speaking of battery life, I found it to be very good. The battery meter didn't even move an inch the entire time I was playing with it, and that was a lot. That may have something to do with the design, as the Astak reader allows up to 8000 page turns per charge. That's nearly 3 days of continuous reading, assuming you spend 30 seconds on each page. That's a lot of reading!

Page turning is pretty quick, although it takes up to a full 2 seconds to complete a page turn, and up to a full five seconds to do a directory read. But slow page turns (I'm going to lean towards blaming some of that on the e-ink screen, and not so much on the reader itself) is the least of your worries. If you want to read books on this device, you had better be in a well lit room, or have a good reading light, and a sharp pair of eyes, or else you won't be able to read the page well enough.

I actually found that when reading a book at the default font pitch displayed by the reader, I couldn't read the text on the screen, because it was too small. Yes, you get a huge amount of text on the screen at that resolution, but it's nigh on impossible to read without a magnifying glass.

Now hitting the zoom button and increasing the font size to the first or second level seems to help a lot. Now after some careful experimentation, it appears that some of the fault of that lies with the ebook itself, and not so much the Astak reader. But that doesn't change the fact that each and every one of the ebooks I tested showed up with fonts too small to read.

Comparing the screen side by side with a standard matte colored novel page, I found that in medium to low light the printed novel was actually considerably easier to read than the ebook reader screen. In normal to well lit conditions, they're about the same. One downside to the ebook screen though is that, depending on how concentrated the light is, you may suffer from screen glare that will make the page hard to read. The matte texture of the screen helps to minimize that, but it still happens.

The unit also comes with two ways to turn pages. There's a left/right set of arrow keys on the left side of the device face, as well as a toggle switch on the right side of the device. And if you want, you can also use the 9 and 0 keys to go forward or back in the book. The 6 key will allow you to add a bookmark, the 7 key will take you to the catalog, and the 8 key will zoom. The 1-5 keys will take you to existing bookmarks within the ebook.

Another thing to watch for is that, if you start playing with the bottom buttons, you will quickly find yourself out of your book and back on the main screen. You then have to get back in and pray you bookmarked your spot before you left. Speaking of which, the bookmarking feature is nice. It allows you to jump right back to the page you were last at in the same way a paper bookmark allows you to quickly find the page you were on in a normal paperback.

But if you didn't bookmark your place, and you're quite some distance into the book already, the page advance button allows you to skip 10 pages at a shot. If you were closer to the back, just open the menu and load the book starting on the last page, and then navigate into it backwards. And if by some amazing chance you remember your page number, you can even jump straight there by telling the reader what page number to go to.

Another neat little feature is the ability to rotate the page. If you don't like reading vertically, and prefer to read your pages horizontally, or you simply wish for more horizontal space, then the rotate feature will swing the text around so you're reading your book as though it were on the tablet. You won't get more words on the screen, but you will get a slightly wider presentation of the page. This is good if you're viewing certain types of PDF's.

Another neat feature is that the reader can actually read the pages to you. Not sure why you'd want this, but it's there if you need it. On a side note however, I wouldn't expect to get too used to this feature, as the technology is very low grade, gritty, and rather dated in quality. But it works in a pinch.

Now, you might ask, what's the quality of the screen like? Overall, given it's limitations, it's pretty good. It's only got 8 levels of gray scale, so detail is something that this device doesn't have in great quantities. But given that it's an e-ink screen, and you're really only using it to read ebooks, and not watching the latest blockbuster on it, you're fine.

Another nifty little feature of the device is the ability to listen to MP3's. Now that's obviously the *only* thing you can do when it's activated (ie, you can't listen to mp3's and read your books at the same time), but that's alright. Supposedly you can, but I couldn't get the device to do anything except let me listen to the mp3's. An interesting side note too is that the device won't play mp3's, or read a book to you using the voice synthesis system unless you have the earphones plugged in.

I suspect that's one of those pebkac prevention tools to keep silly users from doing silly things they shouldn't and thus running down their batteries unintentionally.

Now I wish the device could multitask and allow both playing mp3's and book reading at the same time, but I guess that since it can't the intended purpose was not to listen to music, but rather to give you the ability to either read an ebook, or listen to an audiobook on the same device. And again, it may be able to, as others have reported that it can. I however simply couldn't get it to do that.

Charging the unit is also pretty easy. Just plug it into a PC, or use the included wall plug to charge the device. It takes a little bit to charge it up the first time, but after that charging is pretty quick and the battery lasts a surprisingly long time as stated above.

So, what's my impression of the device? Well, other than the few quirks that it had, I liked it. Was it without quirks? Nope. Then would I recommend this device to others? Yes, absolutely, positively, and without question.

Yes, it's got a few quirks. But then again, what device doesn't? You'd be hard pressed these days to find ANY electronic device that is 100% perfectly suited to everyone, or even yourself, or without fault. So I give a lot of deference to electronic devices in that regards. But overall I liked it and would recommend it to others looking for an open source, Linux powered ebook reader.

To check out this ebook reader, or others like it, just head on over to www.astak.com and click on the ebook reader section. (I say that because they sell more than just ebook readers)

EDIT: A reader has pointed it out to me in regards to the MP3 function that you need to start the mp3 playing first, and then go to the main menu to start reading your book. I couldn't get it to do that, but if they say it can, I'm willing to believe them, since they're a strong user of this device.

Also, on another side note, I forgot to mention that plugging this reader into your PC should allow it to be picked up by Linux and mounted as a regular drive. However, not all distros appear to play nicely with it, and some won't even acknowledge its existence. (this for certain works in Windows, but Linux seems picky about it depending on the distro being used) But in cases like that, the SD expansion card slot is a sufficient alternative. And honestly, I think that's the better way to go anyways.

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