Kit of the Year E-book viewers prompted plenty of Register Hardware reader interest during 2009, a year in which market stalwarts Sony and Amazon finally saw some notable rivals, iRiver in particular. In response, perhaps, Amazon started offering the US-centric Kindle to overseas buyers – will ours arrive in time to change the selection here? But Brits will have to wait longer for Sony’s US-only wireless Reader Daily Edition.
iRiver Story
With its speedy menus, decent built-in music player, strong battery life and handy ancillary features, the Story looks a winner – provided you’re running the latest firmware. If you want Santa to stick an e-book reader under the Christmas tree this year, then the iRiver Story is a sound choice – literally.
Review It’s often useful to be able to connect your PC to an HDTV, perhaps to play the latest Call of Duty epic on a large screen or give a presentation at work. It’s not that difficult either, as long as you’ve got a suitable cable or adaptor. But if you’re the sort of leading-edge gadget fiend who prefers to do away with wires altogether, then you might want to look at Q-Waves’ new Wireless USB AV Kit.
Broadcast views: Q-Waves’ Wireless USB AV Kit
The Wireless Kit uses DisplayLink technology, which allows your PC to output a video signal to an external monitor using USB, rather than relying on the video interface of the PC’s graphics card. However, it’s given DisplayLink a wireless twist by also including a pair of UWB (ultra-wideband, aka Wireless USB) adaptors that allow the video signal to be transmitted wirelessly from the PC to an external display.
The final piece of the kit is a small dock unit that has HDMI, VGA and Stereo outputs so that you can use the Wireless USB AV Kit with either a conventional computer monitor or an HDTV.
Q-Waves says that the adaptors provide a data transfer speed of 480Mbps for a distance of up to three metres, or 110Mbps up to 10m. We had no problems using the kit over a distance of around 5m, although the main limitation is more likely to be the fact that you need a clear line of sight connection between the two adaptors. This means that you’re most likely to use the kit with a laptop that you can easily carry into the same room as the TV or monitor that you want to use. Read the rest of this entry »
Review While the price and diversity of e-book readers is still some way off achieving the sort of critical mass that put an MP3 player in nearly pocket, the number of devices appearing on the market is increasing at a healthy rate.
A good read? iRiver’s Story
While not exactly a household name here in the UK, iRiver can usually be relied upon to cook up a quality product that’s a little different from the norm. Entering the e-book reader market with the Story, this all-white device looks a lot like Amazon’s Kindle. On more careful inspection its obvious the similarities are simply down to the colour and the presence of a full Qwerty keyboard below the 6in electronic paper screen, rather than any shared heritage.
At 127 x 203.5 x 9.4mm and weighing 284g the Story is par for the e-book reader course. Even if the white plastic case lacks the cool, machined finesse of Sony’s aluminium Readers, it still has a solid and substantial feel to it and will only flex or groan when subjected to some pretty severe torque. Read the rest of this entry »
Review With the price of the Reader PRS-600 Touch Edition having been hiked up by 25 per cent over the original PRS-505, Sony clearly thinks there’s room for a cheaper alternative. Hence the launch of the Reader PRS-300 Pocket Edition which does without a touchscreen and has a 5in rather than 6in screen.
Sony’s Reader Pocket Edition:
In the UK, the Pocket sells for £180. While that’s a hefty £70 cheaper than the Touch, it’s worth remembering that it’s only 20 quid less than the old 505 sold for.
Physically, the Pocket resembles a shrunken and tidied up version of the 505. At 107 x 158 x 10mm, it’s the same thickness as the Touch, but 14mm narrower and 17mm shorter. At 220g, it weighs a noticeable 66g less.
Without a touchscreen, the controls are once again placed on the device’s face, but there are only ten rather than the 17 the 505 had, and the layout is far neater. Read the rest of this entry »
Review At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking we were re-running a review from last year – we originally put the Archos 5 through its paces in October 2008. The addition of two extra words to the end of the name may not sound that exciting initially, but while the Archos 5 Internet Tablet may look very similar to its predecessor there is one very significant change: it now runs Google Android.
Archos’ 5: homegrown OS out, Google Android in
Gone is Archos’ own – not exactly super swish – Linux-based OS and in its place sits Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system, the first time that it’s been seen in an official capacity on a shipping product that’s not a phone.
However, it’s probably worth getting this out of the way early on: not all Android devices are created equal. Yes, Android is an open source operating system that any manufacturer can download and install onto its hardware without paying a fee. However, don’t expect it come with all the applications you’re accustomed to seeing on phones from the likes of HTC, for example. Specifically, you won’t find Google’s suit of apps on there by default since Google doesn’t give those away for free. Read the rest of this entry »
