Asus Eee Reader DR900 – First impression, photos and video

*UPDATE* The ASUS DR900 is one of the first e-reader provided with a touchscreen capacitive screen. I have heard about the product more than one year ago, in August 2009, so there are lots of expectations on the product.

The device is a 9” screen electronic reader, endowed with a Wifi (there is also a version with 3G but it is not available now in the market). In spite of a 9” diagonal screen (longer than the standard e-readers in the market) the size of the DR900 is comparable to a standard book (222 X 161 X 9.7 mm), due to the lack of a physical keyboard which is replaced here by a virtual keyboard thanks to the touchscreen capability. The size of the screen is perfect: you cannot easily read newspapers or professional papers with a 6” screen; and the weight of the DR900 is 3 oz. less than the 9.7” Kindle DX, that I will use here as a reference for a comparison (I have owned both the new Kindle 6” and the last Kindle DX).

Nota: la recensione è disponibile anche in italiano.

Video Review

Description

The box includes a black plastic cover to protect the reader: of course it is not as elegant as Kindle’s leather covers, but it is for free. The technology here is a SiPix, in opposition to the Pearl e-ink technology used by many other reader devices. Imagine for simplicity that the screen is formed by lots of bigger balls containing a fluid and some smaller black and white balls in their interior: as soon as an electrostatic field is applied to the screen some of the smaller balls go to the upper part of the big balls and form a letter or an empty space (all white).

Well, in the e-ink technology the fluid that lies inside the big balls is transparent whereas in the SiPix technology the fluid is black, so by definition the screens endowed with the SiPix technology should look darker than the others.

Let me mention that the name EEE Note appears in a side of the box: this may generate some confusion since, up to now, by the EEE Note everybody referred to the next EA800, a sort of digital notepad with a capacitive 8” black/white LCD screen that can be used also (but not mainly) as a reader.

The version in my hands has a Wi-fi, so you can get a connection at home or if you find a hotspot. There is a version with a 3G, but it is not in the market up to now and I have heard you have to buy a SIM card at a local telephone company (whereas 3G is free in at least 100 countries with Kindle if you purchase in the Kindle store).

In the last months I found many previews of the DR900 speaking about a beautiful readability and a fantastic speed in turn paging, even 10 times more speedy than Kindle. Is it true? Let us switch on the DR900…

Performance

The touchscreen does correctly its job; the sensibility is good and a soft touch is enough for the main issues that appear in the home page. The point here is that the screen is too dark. Even worse: many of the letters are somewhat faded and unequally black. A paradigm states that the difference among e-readers and LCD tablets (or PC’s) is that the screen looks like a true paper. Here however the screen reminds very much the thermal gray paper of the old fax machines, known to be barely readable. The background color is not as white as we saw in the pictures that came out officially and that can be seen in ASUS home global page.

Of course the touchscreen has an obvious drawback: the presence of a glass surface implies screen glare and fingerprints; instead in the non touch e-readers the screen is more similar to a plastic opaque surface and does not reflect the light, allowing really you to read the under bright sunligh.

The menu has several issues, the most important ones are:

Read Books: the main function in a digital reader. Pages can be turned either by the two buttons in the right-hand side of the screen or via the touch of a finger: at the beginning this seems quite smooth but in many cases, especially if you press too fast or pass too often your finger from the right to the left hand side of the screen, pages do not go further and stop turning for a while: after a few seconds you literally jump 3 or 4 pages ahead. I could not turn 10 pages in less than 20 seconds (an average of 0.5 pages/second) wheras with Kindle I regularly reached the speed of 0.66 page/second.

A button on the down side of the reader or a movement of the finger from down to up opens a menu where you can find: talk, annotate/bookmark, zoom, dictionary, highlight. Here these functions work perfectly: “talk” reads the text pretty well. You can add bookmark/annotations wherever you want: you press “Annotate” and then you select the line where you want to write the annotation: when a book icon appears you can press and write the annotation inside a new box which can be closed by saving it. Of course there is a way to look at all the annotations/bookmarks in a book and to jump to the chosen one. This is a point in favor of the DR900: you can give a name to your annotations/bookmarks. So if you are delivering a lesson you based on a book you can immediately jump to a specific section or page by giving a quick look to the index of the annotations. Writing with the virtual keyboard however is not that easy: there is a lag between the finger input and the moment where the chosen letter appears on the screen.

The Longman Dictionary (or national language/English) works as well as in other readers, though it is sometimes not easy to pick the word you wish with your fingers (so you may zoom the text and catch it). Personal pdf files can be uploaded to the reader by means of the USB cable (remember to select the “Book” folder in your DR900). The screen can be rotated, it is enough to press the button “rotate”. Finally I could not find a control of the contrast in the setup menu.

Bookstores: in this Italian version I own there is just one available bookstore (Simplicissimus) where I am not able to find newspapers inside. A nice thing with kindle was to receive a digital copy of the Herald Tribune or of a national newspaper in the morning, even in a secluded Greek island. I find no way to avoid completing the form that requires both username and password every time I accede to the ebook store. The last firmware in the English version has 4 bookstores: OpenLibrary, Feedbooks OPDS catalog, Katapor LitRes (Russian), ManyBooks Catalog; in any case I don’t find newpapers.

Music: yes, you can listen to music, the sound is reasonable. Again you can upload your mp3 files in the “Audio” folder from your PC.

Browser: very faded, scrolling is not that easy. It is better to put the finger on the screen and try to “push” it in various directions to read the full page. Anyway it can be enough to read emails. Take care: no video/flash contents, no background music, no animated images, very slow when it encounters dynamic web pages.

Sketch pad: it could be nice if the reader could be used also as a notepad. At the moment you can only draw with your fingers. I sincerely would have some difficulty in writing even easy Maths in that SketchPad. Having heard about a capacitive screen I tried 3 pens I use in my Wacom tablets/screens: none of them is working here. Will Asus deliver a suitable pen? Who knows?

Overall Conclusion

Convinced as I am that the main purpose of a digital reader is to replace books, the DR900 fails to give full satisfaction. Here again the SiPix screen technology is steps behind the e-ink one. Anyway the touchscreen facility is a big improvement in the field of e-readers and this is for sure the first example of a new trend. Asus should implement the possibility of seriously taking notes with a pen.

Last minute: some words about the last firmware C0.0.150

The firmware I used in this review is r.0.0.305. The new firmware C0.0.150 introduces some slight modifications in the main menu (some more ebookstores as I mentioned above) but there is no more the SketchPad application! There is now the possibility of using the device as an audiobook: you can pause when you listen to the text and then start from where you pause and you do not need in this case to turn the pages.

SOME MORE TECHNICAL INFORMATION

• Files cbz: they look nice.
• Export/import: it works but the exported files are backup files: you can open them just if you import them again to the reader.

Carlo Mariconda
http://www.math.unipd.it/~maricond/

Specifications

• Operating System: Linux
• Display: 9″ diagonal Sipix® Electro-Phoretic Display, 1024 x 768 pixel resolution
• Touch Screen: Capacitive
• WLAN: 802.11b/g Wi-Fi
• Storage: 2 GB (internal), Support Micro SD Card for SDHC (expansion)
• Audio: 3.5mm stereo audio jack, Built-in stereo speakers
• Input / Output: Micro USB connector Port x1 (USB 2.0), Micro SD card slot x1, 3.5mm Earphone Jack x1
• Battery life: Read on a single charge for up to 4 days with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks
• Charge time: Fully charges in approximately 4 hours via the included power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via the included USB 2.0 cable
• Dimensions: 222 X 161 X 9.7 mm
• Weight: 440grams
• Accessories: Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable, book cover
• Supported Formats: PDF, TXT, ePub, HTML, FB2, ZIP/CBZ (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP), MP3

Video Unbox – ASUS Eee Reader DR900

ASUS Eee Reader DR900 da sabato in Italia

Asus Eee Reader DR900 in Italia. Specifiche tecniche, prezzo e disponibilità