Iliad
From GWiki
Contents |
Introduction
The iLiad from iRex Technologies is an e-book reader roughly the size of an A5 notebook (217mm x 155mm x 16mm - 8.5" x 6.1" x 0.63"), weighing 389g (13.7oz) which uses electronic paper instead of an LCD as its display.
Electronic paper is made from an array of tiny spheres, which are easily readable in full sunlight and indoor lighting; the sort of lighting conditions under which you would normally read. A more detailed description of the technology is here on the iRex website.
The display on the iLiad is approximately 160dpi of 16 grey levels. The result is very easy to read with no strain on the eyes (at least, no more strain than reading a paper book), making it ideal for reading books and other documents.
Connectivity
The iLiad comes has a number of ways to get documents into it:
- USB connection to your PC, which can be used to upload into its inbuilt memory.
- Ethernet
- WiFi
- USB flash drive connection
- Compact Flash socket
- MMC/SD socket
The iLiad does seem to have some problems with the external memory devices. It took a while to get an SD card that it was happy with, but once it is happy, there are no problems at all. I'm using a 1GB Kingmax Platinum SD card. I have a 1GB PQI USB pen drive, which it totally fails to recognise, but it's OK with a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB. I haven't used it in earnest with the USB stick, but I imagine that having a pen drive sticking out of the top of the book would probably be annoying (and possibly a good way to break some connectors).
Before splashing out on some new SD cards, it's worth visiting the support forum on the iRex website to check what people have found to work.
There is a big socket on the bottom of the iLiad which plugs into a rather large and oddly shaped piece of plastic which has the power socket, USB-PC and an ethernet socket on it. Unfortunately, there is no way to simply plug the power cable into the iLiad without using this box.
When connected to the PC via the USB interface, the iLiad appears as a mass storage device called "iLiad".
The WiFi and ethernet interface is a nice way of updating the software in the device. Just hold the button at the top right down for a few seconds, and it connects to iRex via your home network, checks if there is an update available, downloads one if required and installs it. Easy! You can also use the WiFi and ethernet interfaces to synchronise content with a folder on your PC in the same way.
Power
One of the great things about electronic paper is that it only requires power when the display is being changed. Once the image is displayed, then no power is required to keep it there. Obviously, though, the electronics which connects to the display do require power all of the time.
The iLiad is advertised as lasting a full day between charges. When I first got my iLiad, the power consumption was terrible; I would get about 5 hours of use before it needed to be charged, which made its use quite limited. A recent software update has increased this to about 12 hours, which is much more acceptable, but still not the amount that was advertised when I bought mine. The website now says the correct 12 hours. A full charge takes about 3 hours.
The need to carry the interface box as well as a power supply to charge the iLiad is a bit of a pain, too. There is a new, smaller, interface box available for purchase and this is the one being supplied with current units.
Features
As well as being able to display documents, the iLiad has a Wacom stylus which is used for setting the thing up and also for writing. You can scribble on anything that you can display. The iLiad also has a notebook facility with blank, lined and squared paper, which works quite well. It can also be used with handwriting recognition software (a demo version comes with it) which does a very good job of converting handwriting to text(it actually does a better job at reading my handwriting than I do, honestly!). This is something that the Sony Libre (a similar device) is lacking.
The iLiad can display a number of different document formats - PDF, Mobipocket, HTML, ASCII text. Most of the content that I view is either PDF or books bought from MobiPocket. The document text can be resized as required. The only thing that's missing is a text search facility, but I think that they do plan on adding this at some point.
As I said at the start, the clarity of the display is exceptional. I read quite a lot, and I now look to buy books in electronic format before I look for them on paper. There is a long bar which runs almost the full length to the left of the display which is used to turn pages. Swipe it to the left to turn to the next page and swipe it to the right to go back a page (this can be reversed if you want to). Hold it for a short time, and you move several pages at once. It does take a second to update the display when you turn a page, which is not what we're used to on an LCD, but it isn't really any longer than it would take you to turn the page in a paper book.
The stylus can be used to move within a book by tapping the scrollbar at the bottom of the screen. And, as already mentioned, you can use the stylus to annotate books as well.
The iLiad is not meant to be a PDA, so there is no PDA type calendar/diary/email functionality built in. There is the possibility that these may get added at a later date, of course. It is possible to download software development tools for the device and there is an active development community, so I suspect that more features will start appearing soon.
In Use
The iLiad takes about 45 seconds to power up, which is one of the reasons why the battery life is important; you won't want to turn it off unless you're finished using it.
You are then presented with a list of recently opened documents. You can either select a document to open using the up/down/select buttons below the page turn bar or tap a document with the stylus.
Opening a document which is not on the list is easy. There are four buttons (news, books, docs and notes) below the display which can be mapped to folders either on the iLiad's internal memory or on a storage device. Press one of these and that folder opens up, and you can select a document as before.
To open up any other folder, a button at the top left of the display is used to open the external storage devices, recent documents and iLiad settings.
Documents are opened up in seconds, and they automatically open at the last page that you viewed. Once opened, you can adjust the text size (not for PDFs, but PDF pages can be zoomed) if necessary, magnify, annotate, whatever you want using the stylus to touch icons at the bottom of the display.
A scrollbar displays the current and maximum page numbers and again, you can touch this with the stylus to go straight to a page. The touch screen is not the pressure sensitive type that can be found on most PDAs, but it only responds to the stylus, so you can comfortably rest your hand on the display whilst you are writing. The stylus itself is stowed at the back of the iLiad.
It is easy to create content for any of the supported formats on a PC. I've found that good results are achieved by setting a custom page size (13x17cm, left & right margins 0.2cm, top & bottom 0.5cm) in Open Office or Microsoft Work with a 10pt font for the normal text and then print the document to a PDF printer. Copy the file to the iLiad via USB or SD card, and that's it. Easy.
Making notes is simply a case of pressing the notes button, selecting the paper type (blank, lined or squared) and drawing on the screen with the stylus. You can set the name of the file and add a summary to it when you've finished.
Summary
Now that the battery life has been improved, the iLiad is great to use, despite the problems connecting some external memory. I've got about a year's worth of reading on my SD card, and it's nowhere near full. If you travel a lot and like to read, then it will save you a lot of luggage space. As well as reading books, I keep quite a few datasheets on mine, which are often a few hundred pages of A4 each.
The stylus is a feature which is lacking on some similar devices and makes it very useful for taking notes at meetings, which can then be imported straight into your word processor without needing any re-typing (but you do need to proof read it).
