Bookeen Cybook Orizon: Touchscreen Ebook Reader Needs Better Web Access   by Bestbatteryshops

The Bookeen Cybook Orizon joins a growing group of ebook readers with
built-in Wi-Fi, which allows you to download material without having to
hook the device up to a PC. The $240 (as of August 5, 2011) Orizon also
has a 6-inch touchscreen electronic-paper display, which makes for easy
and intuitive menu navigation, text selections, and page turns using
your fingertip.

Wi-Fi and touchscreen are great technologies, but on the Orizon
they don’t always work well in tandem, which I discovered when I tried
to shop for books using the Orizon’s built-in browser. Because pages
loaded slowly on the Wi-Fi connection, tapping a book from a search
results list (for example) often produced unintended selections, making
the whole experience painfully time-consuming and frustrating.

In most other respects, the Orizon was much more satisfactory. Like its pocket-size sibling, the Cybook Opus,
the Orizon–available with a black or white plastic case–is thin for
its 6-inch screen size and 7.5-by-4.9-inch footprint: It’s not quite
three-tenths of an inch thick. That’s about the same thickness as the
current 3G/Wi-Fi Amazon Kindle,
but the Kindle doesn’t have a touchscreen. The Orizon weighs about the
same as that third-generation Kindle, 8.6 ounces to the Kindle’s 8.7
ounces.

While most of the dedicated e-readers we’ve seen use E Ink’s
electrophoretic displays, the Orizon uses a touchscreen from E Ink
competitor Sipix. Like the E Ink Pearl panel on the Kindle and other
competitors, it boasts 16 shades of gray and a screen resolution of 800
by 600 pixels (167 dpi). The display supports multitouch, so you can
make fonts larger or smaller and zoom in on websites by pinching and
zooming with your fingertips.

In my tests, I found the screen quite responsive to page turns,
accomplished with fingertip swipes from right to left or left to right.
But pinching and zooming sometimes required two or three attempts.

Tapping on the lower left of the screen (most of the time the
corner is marked with several translucent concentric quarter circles)
produces context-sensitive pop-up menus that you can also summon and
navigate using a hardware button embedded in the bezel. When you’re
reading, for example, the menu allows you to choose from among seven
font families and 12 gradually increasing font sizes; you may also
customize the page layout via options for justifying text, toggling the
boldface version of your font, and hiding or showing the header and the
so-called pageometer (which shows how many pages you’ve read out of the
total number in the book).

A responsive built-in accelerometer lets you switch orientation
from portrait to landscape format in an instant, and the touch-based
page turns adjust accordingly. In short, Bookeen gives you far more
appearance options than you typically get from an ebook reader.

Other options while reading include the ability to create
bookmarks, highlight passages, and insert notes by typing on a software
keyboard. Although the keyboard is responsive, it isn’t user-friendly:
Text appears in a small field directly on top of the keyboard, as
opposed to the field you’re trying to fill in, and you must tap a
checkmark on the keyboard to transfer what you’ve typed from the
text-entry field to the document or window. The Orizon also lacks social
networking hooks, such as those found on the Kobo eReader Touch Edition, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Amazon Kindle.

When you first power on the Orizon, you see a home screen divided
by horizontal bars into several sections. The Library area displays
thumbnails for covers of some preinstalled books (the Orizon comes with
150 preinstalled public-domain titles in several languages). Under the
Internet heading, you get thumbnails of bookmarked websites, including a
couple of bookstores, Google, and Wikipedia. The Settings heading links
to a menu for setting up the 802.11b/g/n (2.4GHz) Wi-Fi, language
preference, and slideshow options (for browsing images in the Orizon’s
supported .jpg, .gif, or .png file formats).

Once you select and start reading a book, the home screen adds a
Currently Reading header at the top of the page along with the thumbnail
for the title’s cover. You can always return to the home screen from
any pop-up menu (while reading, for example).

Pop-up menu options in the Library view allow you to vary the
number of books shown on a page (5, 10 or 20), show or hide their file
formats, and change the way they are sorted (by title, author, or file
size, for example).

Tapping the Internet heading on the home screen launches the
built-in browser, which can navigate to any site you choose (the
context-sensitive menu includes a ‘Go to’ option, which brings up the
software keyboard for typing in URLs). You can use it to read headlines,
but it’s not a full-blown desktop browser–it doesn’t support Flash,
for example. Plus, it’s really, really slow.

The first bookmark in the row of Internet thumbnails is marked
simply Ebook Store; when I tapped on it, I realized that it was a French
bookstore with French-only titles and prices in euros. The Orizon lacks
integration with a bookstore, though Bookeen is hoping to add one. For
now, you have to browse to a U.S. bookstore that supports Adobe ePub
with Cs4 DRM for paid content. Orizon does include the mobile version of
one English-language bookstore, Feedbooks, in its bookmarks, and that
store has an assortment of paid, public-domain, and original books, but
it’s no Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And as mentioned earlier, trying
to shop via the browser was extremely frustrating due to the slow page
loads. If you were to buy an Orizon, you’d do better sideloading books.

Ultimately the lack of a good integrated bookstore and a
reasonably speedy browser made the Bookeen Cybook Orizon a nonstarter
for me. If you’re going to invest in a Wi-Fi-equipped e-reader, the
shopping procedure shouldn’t send you scurrying for a USB cable to
acquire paid content through Adobe Digital Editions desktop software. As
good as the touchscreen technology and layout options are, the Orizon
needs a great wireless book-acquisition experience to justify its price
premium over capable competitors from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Tagcloud: Bookeen Cybook Orizon, Touchscreen Ebook Reader  , Dell Inspiron 1525 akku ,  Dell Inspiron 1720 akku , Dell vostro 1510 akku

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