Viewsonic VEB620 e-Book reader [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/23/review_e_book_reader_viewsonic_veb620/

Viewsonic VEB620 e-Book reader

Monitor maker's word view

23rd June 2010 07:02 GMT

Review Given ViewSonic’s penchant for monitors it might at first sight seem a little odd that its e-reader debut is to launch a pair of standard, 16 greyscale E-Ink devices, the VEB620 and VEB625, rather than going for colour. But E-Ink’s displays are easy on the eye, deliver excellent battery life, and are less expensive to build than colour displays. So it is probably a sensible choice.

Brought to book: Viewsonic's VEB620

What is perhaps more interesting than the greyscale/colour debate is the fact that ViewSonic announced two products. They look almost identical, yet the more advanced model, the VEB625, incorporates Wi-Fi and a touch screen and won’t be around until some time in July. Its price is not yet fixed either.

So what we have here is the VEB620. Neither the hardware design nor the innards match up to the last e-reader we reviewed, Bookeen’s 2010 edition Cybook Opus [1]. Yet the VEB620 is more expensive. OK, does have the additional feature over the Cybook of playing music, but frankly I’d use a separate player every time, so that’s no real plus point in my book.

Coming in a choice of black or white, the chassis design is uninspiring, some would say dull. The plastic bodywork lacks panache, though it is very solid and I reckon it will absorb more knocks and drops without scratching than the aforementioned Cybook Opus would. It comes with a faux leather case which should help further with protection.

Weighing 220g without the cover you’ll barely notice the ViewSonic VEB620 in your bag, though at 188mm x 126mm x 9.9mm it isn’t going to fit into the average pocket. The 6in screen offers considerably less viewing area than paperback book. There are five font sizes available, though. A dedicated button pages through them in sequence or you can use the menu system to choose one in particular.

Slim, but not pocket-sized

I found a comfortable compromise between readability and the amount of text on a screen when reading e-books, but PDFs are a different story. At full page view PDF, text is generally too small to read comfortably. Increase the text size and you have to scroll around a page from left to right to see a full row of words. It is painstaking but, to be fair, no worse than I’ve experienced on a host of other e-readers.

The tiresome part here is that the processor is slow. It really is tedious waiting for pages to roll forwards or backwards, and PDF reading is nigh-on impossible; being halted by waiting.

The VEB625 Wi-Fi version is due out in July

The irritation of the slow processor is matched by the fact that the many buttons on the front facia didn’t always respond to my presses. Maybe I’m just too delicate, but I’m not used to having to press twice or three times to get a reaction. There are no fewer than seven buttons on the front fascia plus a navpad, making the ViewSonic VEB620 somewhat over-endowed. There are back and forwards buttons on the left and right sides, and then Back, Menu, Home, Bookmark and Text Size buttons in a row beneath the screen.

There is a G sensor too, which allows the screen to swivel in your hands as you turn the ViewSonic VEB620 but it was very unresponsive even when recalibrated. You can also do a shake-to-page-turn action, but I had to be so vigorous with this that it felt extremely unnatural. The good news is that the screen rotates into all four viewing angles, and you can reverse the forward and back page buttons so both right and left handed users should be able to find a comfortable orientation.

In addition to PDFs the ViewSonic VEB620 can read ePub, fb2, HTML, txt and rtf formats. You are informed of the format in an icon beside each book title as well as being shown how much of the title you have read as a percentage. When in any one book you can jump to the first or last page, see its table of contents, insert a bookmark, search for text and change font size. Searching for text is a tedious process involving using the navpad to pick out letters on a keyboard.

There is 2GB of internal storage of which 1.5GB is accessible and you can use an SD card to add more. The reader finds compatible files even if they are in folders on a card, so that this is by far the easiest way to get new data onto the device. You can connect to a PC with the provided USB cable if you prefer, though.

USB connectivity allows use of internal storage and there's an SD card option too

Most unusually there is a loudspeaker which means those around you can hear the music you’ve chosen to accompany a reading session in a rather tinny rendition. Plug a set of headphones in and you can listen in private, yet the output remains tinny, alas.

When music is playing the navpad offers playback controls, with left and right giving you volume control, up and down moving between tracks and the centre button stopping and starting playback. There’s no pause feature. If you stop a track it starts again at the beginning, which I found very, very annoying.

Plays music, displays text, but a bit on the pricey side

The 3.5mm headset connector is on what is by default the bottom edge of the device (next to mains power and SD card slot). If you like to prop your ereader up on a table while using it you will have to use the G-sensor to turn the text ‘upside down’.

The battery is rated as good for 6,500 page turns. That’s less than the norm, but still plenty of books-worth from a single charge. Using the music player will deplete the battery quicker, of course, and you can’t get to the battery to replace it if it pegs out.

In the end, while the ViewSonic’s VEB620 works, yet I can’t really recommend it. It is too expensive for what’s on offer in terms of features. ViewSonic could implement an immediate price drop to a sub-£100 for this model and start to make some hay at the lower end of the market. But as it stands, you might want to look at alternatives. ®

More e-Book Reader Reviews
Bookeen Cybook Opus 2010 edition [2]	Applie iPad [3]	Amazon Kindle DX [4]	iRiver Story [5]

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