Sunday, August 10, 2008

More About That ECTACO jetBook eBook Reader



David Rothman at Teleread cites my prior post in For some E Ink haters: The ECTACO jetBook reader, which also points to an actual Ectaco Jetbook review that's brand new. It mentions this odd fact:
I also noticed that Ectaco has a English/Chinese reader (M218B) in white. The M218B has the extra bonus of HTML format support.

They should have put that in the one I saw! Who wants unformatted text?!

I also went to that list of reviews ECTACO touts on their site. Two links were dead (no loss, as they seemed to be reprinting a press release), most of the rest were press-release regurgitations. Only this one from mobileread was a real review. It mentions the screen looks like a calculator! That wasn't my own experience, but he's got photos at Flickr that offer some convincing proof!

What I wasn't able to see earlier is a Flash animation ECTACO has on its site. Do eBooks work differently in Russia?! I'd like to have a magical device I can point at a library and suck up its content in e format!

On YouTube are two videos, both in Russian:

ECTACO jetBook Reader first look rus



This one looks like an outright infomercial (which you can stop watching after three minutes because the rest is all talk, no more demo):

ECTACO jetBook



As you can see in those, the angle of the light does make the screen look like a calculator sometimes.

This should conclude my posts about this. While it offers features neither the Kindle nor Sony Reader have, the lack of formatted files is just suicidal.

Besides that, the price should be far lower. Try US$199.

No comments: