We’ve stared at the Cool-er eBook all weekend and read it until our eyes bled: want to know if it kills the Kindle or rips up the Sony Reader? Read on for our first impressions.
We’ve seen plenty of eBooks in recent months, but the debut of the Cool-er eBook earlier this month caused quite a stir. Here was something that didn’t bother with 3G connectivity, colour screens or wireless eBook store access: it’s light, bright, and most of all, cheap for an e-reader.
After gazing at the Cool-er eBook all weekend, we’re still not convinced that this will be the tipping point to bring eBooks to the mainstream, but it makes a great stab at it.
The 6-inch e-ink screen performs as well as could be expected: it’s easy to read at length, and you can turn orientation to read in landscape mode if you feel your eyes are having to flick down too often. Font size and style are adjustable, and you’ll want to switch to the serif font immediately for lengthy tomes, but after that it’s plain sailing.
The menus are clear and straight forward to navigate, although jumping to a set page in a document is harder than it could be. The Cool-er eBook did crash quite spectacularly at one point (it froze for at least half an hour), but then this is a pre-production model, so with any luck Interead will have ironed these kinks out by release.
Build wise, Interead has got a lot right with the Cool-er eBook. It’s astonishingly light and thin (Just 181g), and strikes a great balance between screen size and portability, slotting neatly into an inside suit jacket pocket.
There are a couple of minor flaws in the design though. The audio port for listening to music needs an adapter shoved in first before your own flavoured 3.5mm heapdhones. Secondly, the D-pad is quite tough to depress, and not best placed for your grip. It’s no bother when you’re sitting down, but you’ll notice it if you’re reading lying in bed: it doesn’t feel natural to reach down from the instinctive grip to flip the page by pushing down on the clacky circle. A touchscreen would make this much easier, so hopefully that can be worked into a next version. That, and it has “We make reading cool” emblazoned on the back – you might want to cover that up.
Battery life hasn’t been an issue: Interead says the Cool-er eBook will reel off 8,000 page turns per charge, and from what we’ve ploughed through so far, it looks on target to meet that.
Interead is also launching an eBook online store to go with the Cool-er, CoolerBooks.com. It’s live now and reasonably well stocked. None of the Times’ top 10 fiction books were available, but there are books by well known modern author including Dan Brown and Chuck Palahniuk.
The Fiction Classics section though is an absolute gold mine of must read tomes in digital format, all at prices you’d see yourself paying in a second hand book store (Maxing out at £1.50ish). The store isn’t very user friendly or anyone new to eBooks though: a FAQ wouldn’t go amiss so you install the right programs like Adobe Digital Editions before buying. But hey, you can get your books elsewhere if you like, so it’s no biggie.
Although close, we’re not sure this first-gen Cool-er eBook is ready to go mass market just yet. It’s an incredible device that renders the bulky Sony Reader utterly and completely redundant, and for anyone off on a gap year travelthon or sabbatical, it’s an absolute must have. But form and build are far more important in an eBook than an MP3 player, to which so many comparisons are made, and this still needs a little finetuning. But I can’t wait to see – and read – what Interead follows this up with.
Out June | £189.99 | Cool-er and CoolerBooks
