In the world of the ebook readers, the iRex iLiad is one of the most expensive offerings on the market. The $500+ price tag may leave readers asking exactly what the iLiad has that makes it worth all that money.
To look at the iRex iLiad is not quite as sleek and attractive as the Kindle or the Sony but it is far from ugly. It has a screen that is just over 8 inches in diameter and uses the same EInk technology as the Kindle which means that the text displayed is crisp, clear and incredibly paper like.
The basic reading experience with the iLiad is very similar to that with the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Readers. If you have not seen an E Ink screen in person you really should make the effort to do so, the effect is so much like real paper it’s nothing short of uncanny.
All 3 models have about the same power capabilities and you can get a great many hours reading under your belt before needing to charge an iLiad e book reader.
One of the nicer features that the iLiad has is the page turn feature is controlled by a “flipbar” that is set on the side of the screen rather than by back and forward buttons like the Sony E Reader features. The flip bar requires almost no force to operate at all, something you might appreciate during a long reading session.
Getting content onto the iLiad is where it does win over the other E book readers. You can use a USB flash drive, a Compact Flash card, an SD card, standard USB or WIFI. When expanded the iLiad is able to store up to 8GB of content at any given time.
The other big difference that the iLiad has over the competition is the ability to use a stylus to make annotations and handwritten notes onto the page of an ebook or PDF document. This is a great feature for students and academics although it is hard to export a copy of your altered pages out of the iLiad without a $70 software upgrade. On the iLiad screen however the feature looks very neat, but whether it worth the $200 upgrade on the price of even the Amazon Kindle DX is debatable. Be very careful with that little stylus as well, it costs around $25 to replace it if lost.
It is very nice to have a great spec sheet such as the iLiad has, but of course content is king. The iLiad comes with 50 “classic” titles pre loaded out of the box. Most of the most popular e book readers are linked to a certain site for the DRM content which encompasses the latest bestsellers and beach blockbusters many of us want to read at some point. The Ilaiad supports only mobipockety files. Not an immediate drawback as the main content site has a library of 40,000 titles. That sounds like a lot but it really isn’t. Many of the titles that are most popular are missing and the selection is not comparable with that found on Amazon or at Sony Connect.
You must log in to post a comment.