The Digital Reader

 There’s a quite a few generic Android tablet makers out there, and Idolian is one of the better ones. They lent me their new 8″ Mini Studio tablet a couple weeks ago, and I must say that I like what I have seen.

The tl;dr Verdict

This budget tablet is comparable in price to the Kindle Fire 2 and is a decent alternative to that older tablet. It has a good quality screen, decent battery life, and is more open than the KF2.

BTW, there are a number of older 8″ budget tablets that were released last year. The Mini Studio bests most of the 8″ tablets in its price range byhaving a better CPU and Google Play.

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The txtr beagle is getting a lot of attention lately as supposedly being the world’s smallest ereader, even though it isn’t a real ereader, but that no longer matters now that I have my hands on an even smaller device.

Meet the Trekstor Pyrus Mini. There are no English language reviews of this ereader yet, so I am going to post a rare first impressions post in order to give my readers at least some info.

Update: Rather than write a separate review, I’m adding more detail to this post.

This beauty is shorter, narrower, and thinner than the beagle, and it weighs in at only 111 grams, beating the txtr beagle by 17g and the K4 by 59g. The Pyrus Mini is being sold by trekstor, and it has a 4.3″ E-ink screen, 1.6GB of accessible storage, and a microSD card slot.

Yes, this ereader has a screen smaller than on a lot of smartphones. But what’s even better is that it has the same screen resolution as on the Kindle and the txtr beagle, and that lets the Pyrus Mini pack the pixels tighter than even the Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Glo, and other 6″ ereaders ( 232 ppi vs 212 ppi).
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What is an ebook blog without ereader reviews? I don’t know, but that’s what this blog has been for quite some time. Today that changes.

Several weeks ago I got a new ereader shipped to me from Europe. It’s the Boox i62HD Firefly, and it’s Onyx’s latest and greatest 6″ ereader with the new HD E-ink screen, frontlight, and pretty much all the same great hardware as  the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Glo as well as a couple things the other ereaders lack, namely a microSD card slot and page turn buttons.

Opinion

I generally found this to be a run of the mill ereader, and given that it costs 30 euros more that the European price for the Kobo Glo I’m not sure I see the point. Also, given the poor quality of the frontlight I feel I must discourage anyone from buying this ereader.
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When Kobo unveiled their new 5″ ereader a couple months back, I was intrigued. It had been a while since I had seen a new ereader with the smaller E-ink screen and I was curious to see what Kobo had done with the more compact screen.

I have to hand it to the designers at Ideo; this is a pretty little ereader. But it is also more or less just a pint-sized Kobo Touch. It has much the same performance as the older ereader, same screen resolution, same IR touchscreen tech, but no card slot. Really the only difference is that it has a smaller screen and costs $20 less than the current price of the Kobo Touch.

Now that I have had it for just under a month (and I’ve gotten over the cuteness factor) I’m not sure that I see the value of the smaller screen.
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My Kindle Fire HD arrived yesterday and now that I’ve played with it for a few hours I wanted to post a word of warning. There’s at least one detail about the KFHD (and the 2nd-gen KF) which should give you pause.

Do you know how the KF is described as Amazon’s portal, and how they want to use it to sell you stuff? This was well known even before the original Kindle fire launched, and Amazon’s intention to sell stuff was confirmed by subtle details like the fact they blocked competitor’s reading apps from being installed from the Amazon Appstore.

All this is well known, but it’s not completely true.
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So Amazon lent out a bunch of  7″ Kindle Fire HD tablets last Thursday and last night the embargo was lifted on the reviews.  This morning I thought it would be useful to round up the reviews so they’re easier to find.

The results are mixed, but I’m going to take the review by Harry McCracken to heart and ignore them all. Harry thinks the software feels  incomplete, and based on Walt Mossberg’s review for All Things D I would tend to think he’s right.  And in that case all of these reviews are based on bad data, and that includes the positive reviews.

But I will also note that Mashable revealed that the new Kindle Fire HD actually costs $25 more than the original Kindle Fire. The KFHD doesn’t include a charger; it’s $10 extra. Add in the $15 to remove ads and the jumps to $224.

That’s a fascinating sleight of hand Amazon pulled, isn’t it?
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Sony officially unveiled their new ereader on Thursday, and according to a report from one of my readers it showed up in Sony stores that same day. I couldn’t make time to go get one until Saturday, but I have followed through on my promise to get one and see what changed.

I’ve known the general details on the T2 since it leaked over a week ago, so I won’t repeat them here.

I’ve now been playing with the T2 since yesterday morning. The new ereader has a matte shell, and Sony replaced the buttons with less obvious (but still physical) buttons. And of course the sound option is gone. But aside from those few details this device is functionally identical to the T1.

That’s pretty much what I expected when I got it, but I still have to wonder what the hell Sony was doing for the past year?
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