As we noted earlier this month the first color eReaders are coming to market, but the $299 price tag of Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader may have some people thinking twice before purchasing this type of device.
The good news is there’s now a cheap alternative with PocketBook Color available on Newegg for $229 with the exact same E-ink Kaleido 4096-color display.
PocketBook Color (PB633-N-WW) hardware specifications:
- SoC – Allwinner B288 dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1 GHz
- System Memory – 1GB RAM
- Storage – 16GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card slot up to 32GB
- Display – 6-inch 4096-color 16-greyscale E-Ink Kaleido touchscreen display with 1448 x 1072 (greyscale) resolution; 300 DPI for greyscale, 100 DPI for color; built-in frontlight for comfortable reading in darker places
- Audio – Via headphone connected to micro USB adapter or Bluetooth only
- Wireless Connectivity – Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
- USB – 1x Micro USB port
- Sensors – G-sensor, cover sensor
- Battery – 1,900 mAh Li-Ion Polymer battery good for about one month of battery life depending on usage
- Dimensions – 161.3 × 108 × 8 mm
- Weight – 160 g
The color eReader ships with a micro USB cable, a Micro USB audio adapter, a quick start guide, and a warranty card. You do get lower specs than with the Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader since the octa-core processor with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage in the latter, makes place for a dual-core processor with 1GB RAM and 16GB storage. One advantage is the presence of a MicroSD card slot.
Another notable difference is that PocketBook Color does not run Android (so no access to Google Play), but instead it runs a custom operating systems based on Linux 3.10.65. The firmware supports English by default with 15 additional languages available for free download, text-to-speech, and includes ABBYY Lingvo dictionaries (24 languages), Webster English <-> German dictionary, and various other applications, as well as cloud services compatibility.
The eReader supports the following file types:
- E-book (no conversion needed) – ACSM, CBR, CBZ, CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, EPUB(DRM), FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTM, HTML, MOBI, PDF, PDF (DRM), PRC, RTF, TXT
- Image – JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF
- Audio – MP3, OGG
- Audiobook – M4A, M4B, OGG, OGG.ZIP, MP3, MP3.ZIP
More details may be found on the product page.
Via Liliputing and The eBook Reader
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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This is how the PocketBook publishes specifications even on their website:
Wi-Fi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
…
!
What are the versions implemented? Is this how a company advertizes products?
I suspected the company did not share details, else, Jean would have mentioned here. Onyx is costlier, but they have been quite transparent with details.
More details are here: https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/pocketbook-color-e-reader-hands-on-review