Ectaco jetBook – eBook reader – ROM: 128 MB – monochrome 5″ TFT
Posted by admin in e-book reader Saturday, 30 January 2010 22:32 5 Comments
- 5 VGA Screen
- Support for e-Book contents in Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French and other international languages
- Bookmarks and auto page turn functionality
- Adjustable font type and size
- Screen rotation support for both portrait & landscape modes
Product Description
Lightweight and super-portable, Ectaco jetBook is the ultimate pocket library. Capable of storing thousands of books in the world’s most popular languages, plus music and picture files, it is a universal mobile library for professional, business and leisure reading. With an easy to scan high-resolution 5-inch display and a viewing angle close to 180?, it is fully customizable. Even readers who have difficulty seeing print books will benefit from its adjustable text … More >>
Ectaco jetBook – eBook reader – ROM: 128 MB – monochrome 5″ TFT
The Jetbook ECTACO is a great product, one that’s high on my wishlist (even if it has a very strange name and comes in one rather odd case color).
Nevertheless, this listing doesn’t make sense to me…I can buy the non-backordered product directly from the manufacturer’s web site for $350 + free shipping within the US, so why would I want to pay $400 plus?
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this thing for my girlfriend about a year ago, and though it does TECHNICALLY work, I wouldn’t recommend it for anybody for a number of reasons:
- The only file type it can read is TXT, which means everything you read will have to be converted. It claims to read Acrobat files too, but it sees all the text as an IMAGE, so you can’t comfortably scroll up and down, which makes it unusable.
- Tons of memory issues, both with the onboard memory and the SD card, I’ll copy a file and it won’t be on the device, another file I delete, and for 2 months it was still saying it’s there
- NON EXISTENT SUPPORT – the company that makes this thing is russian or something, and you can forget about them returning your emails or answering the phone
- MP3 Player is unusable, very slow to work and has interferences in audio (beeps and gaps)
- Don’t even think about pictures, they look horrible on this monochrome screen
Rating: 1 / 5
For the most part the Ectaco jetBook works OK on paper, but once you start using it on a day-to-day basis like I do, then it starts to show its weakness. Here are the biggest weaknesses, in no particular order:
1. No serif font for text files. To truly emulate the experience of reading a printed book, I feel every ebook reader should provide a serif font such as Georgia or Palatino. I have a modest printed book library and most of the classics are printed in a serif font. I’m used to reading books in serif font — it just feels “warmer” than Arial or Verdana to me (you can only choose between Arial or Verdana in the jetBook). A sans serif font like Arial or Verdana is OK for technical documents, but not classic literature IMHO.
2. The built-in English dictionary is sorely lacking, which is the greatest euphemism I can think of. Compared to the dictionary in my Sharp PW-E550, this dictionary becomes a bit of a joke. Unless you’re reading 6th grade books, you’ll likely get annoyed that many of the words you want to look up aren’t in the jetBook’s built-in dictionary. My reading experience is almost a ritual — to settle into a novel I usually have three other things by my side: my trusty dog-eared 1080-page Oxford pocket dictionary (before upgrading to the electronic dictionary mentioned above), a notepad or yellow sticky notes, and a pen or pencil to jot things down as I read (e.g., page number of first introduction of a character). My OCB requires that I look up every single word I don’t understand and write down that word. Having an ebook reader reduces all the things that I’d have to carry to just one item (the ebook reader) instead of four, but this requires that the ebook reader can search within books (checked) and comes with a built-in dictionary at least as good as my Oxford pocket dictionary (so far unchecked). If I keep having to carry my Oxford or electronic dictionaries around, then this defeats the purpose of me getting an ebook reader. In all fairness, I don’t think any ebook reader’s built-in dictionary would satisfy me, so I’ll end up dragging along my external dictionaries no matter which device I purchase.
3. To make the word lookup experience even worse, every time you look up a word you have to re-select the English dictionary. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but my dictionary selection setting isn’t saved across sessions. This adds too many keystrokes to look up a word when you’re reading in the jetBook. You might as well carry along an electronic dictionary to do your word lookups.
4. If you search or rely on the built-in dictionary a lot, or do any kind of text entry at all, you will quickly become frustrated with the jetBook’s text input system. T9 doesn’t work the same as it does on a mobile phone. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: when I tried to search for the word “robber” by using the T9 input method (7-6-2-2-3-7), I ended up with only the word “soccer” in the list of potential matches even though “robber” is defined in the built-in dictionary (maybe it’s not in the T9 dictionary?). If T9 is a trademarked name, I wonder if Ectaco should even be marketing their input method as T9 because it’s obviously not true T9. In fact, it is giving T9 a bad name because their implementation is much more user-UNfriendly than the T9 used on mobile phones. Even if you choose the regular text input method, you won’t be too happy because its behavior is also not the one you’re used to on your mobile phone. For example, instead of pressing 7 three times to input “r”, you have to press 7 once and then press the number 3 (this requires looking at the screen to see what number “r” is mapped to). This makes text entry a chore no matter which text input method you choose.
5. The jetBook has a nice screen with good contrast and clarity that I found easier to read than some other ebook readers based on e-ink technology (e.g., Astak EZReader) when I put the two side by side. HOWEVER, there is still a perceivable .5- to 1-second lag whenever I turn pages, especially in large books and when panning in PDF documents. Many people have praised the jetBook’s LCD screen latency as compared to an e-ink screen, and they would be correct, but the page turns and PDF panning are still a bit too slow for me. Am I expecting too much when I want near instantaneous page turns? I’d like to be able to hold down the next/previous page buttons and have the pages turn as fast as I could flip through a physical book.
If the five issues above aren’t a bother for you, then you may enjoy using the jetBook. My jetBook is now back at Frys, or in the hands of someone who I hope is enjoying it more than I did. Just because I returned it doesn’t mean it should be avoided like the plague — it just didn’t didn’t meet MY needs, that’s all. All in all, the jetBook is a good first try from Ectaco, an authority on language translators, and it’s slowly improving as they release updated firmwares for it. The jetBook is definitely a decent ebook reader for the price, but keep in mind that you can also get a Kindle1 for about the same price on eBay. If you want to save money and don’t mind lugging around something a bit heftier, the cheapest ebook readers on the market are the GEB-1150′s. You can upgrade these to be equivalent to an EBookwise-1150 by updating the firmware, which would allow you to use this reader with Fictionwise ebooks.
Happy e-reading!
Rating: 3 / 5
I bought it in June 2008.
The good: it’s very small, so you would take it where only the smallest printed book would go. Stylish. Plain text works very good.
The bad: it’s not e-ink technology, so it uses up the battery in a couple days of active reading. No formats for advanced text supported (except for PDF, which is mostly unusable on a small screen anyway).
The bottom line: a nice companion you can take anywhere, as long as you are comfortable with plain-text-only limitation.
Rating: 4 / 5
I previously had jetBook Lite. As great as that was, i immediately exchanged with the ‘regular’ edition, because of the battery bulk was getting quite annoying when I needed to put my JBL in my messenger bag along with my textbooks and laptop. Now that i have the thin jetBook, I couldn’t be any happier.
jetBook is a great eBook reader. Why?
Low Price – $180 is a great price for a 5″ compact reader.
LCD Screen – Instead of using traditional E-ink Screens, they use reflective LCD screens. That allows the device to turn pages in fraction of a second (near instant), and it doesn’t ‘flash’ like the traditional E-ink devices. that means you won’t ever have to stare at Etch-a-Sketch device being erased.
MP3 Player – You can listen to music in the background with your headphones.
SD card – more storage! yay! Supports up to 32GB, they say.
Multiple readable Formats – ePub, Mobi, PRC, RTF, .txt, .pdf, .fb2, .jpg, .gif, .png, and .bmp. jetBook did have a issue of not being able to read DRM protected contents, but It now reads Barnes & Noble protected contents. And most importantly, it’ll read .PRC files, meaning that you can use Mobipocket Reader to convert whatever format of files you got, and transfer them to the device.
Durability – I dropped this baby a few times on the concrete floor (6 or 7), and it’s still working great. I’m 6’1″. Although, I don’t suggest you try that…
JetBook has flaws too.
Dark Screen – Different Screen means different shade of background color. It’s a bit darker than E-ink devices. It’s slightly green-ish brown. The contrast, however, is very nice. Darker background, but texts are crisp. I guess this isn’t a ‘flaw’, but more of a difference in preference.
Lack of Wireless Capability – You can’t download books on your device via 3G or Wi-Fi. Only way to get the books on your device is through USB cable or SD card. There aren’t dedicated bookstore.
And…I can’t think of more flaws, Honestly.
Overall, jetBook was a great buy for me. I bought it immediately after trying it out at CES 2010.
After viewing all the eBook reader at the show, and I found jetBook most impressive. The way screen changes almost instantly, without flashing was the main reason I bought it.
Hope my review helped you on your decision for a eBook reader.
Rating: 5 / 5