Energy™ Multimedia Color Book IV

Previous blog entries:
Energy™ Multimedia Color Book I
Energy™ Multimedia Color Book II
Energy™ Multimedia Color Book III

OK, plug into your USB and you can can access the filesystem, transfer files, etc. The EnergySistem does not have wireless connectivity or depend on accompanying reader software. This blogger prefers it this way, others may not...

The accompanying CD-ROM comes with a number of e-books in Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese... First impressions - although made of plastic, and therefore fairly light (weighing in at 181 grams - 6 ounces), the reader feels very nice and "solid" in your hand. Liked the size and 5-inch, 800 x 480, TFT, color LCD screen. However, this promising start is badly let down by the buttons, which feel very cheap and also make a cheap clicking sound when pressed. All of the expected 'normal' functionality is present i.e. various zoom levels; the ability to switch between portrait and landscape (though it would have been nice if the orientation change cycled through the entire 360-degrees, so that the reader could be used equally well by the left- and right-handed); the ability to bookmark pages; etc., etc. The menus, navigation, controls, etc. are all pretty intuitive, and it was easy enough to use all the features without having to consult the instruction booklet provided.

The 'Picture" and 'Video' functionality works reasonably well, albeit that the pictures don't look that 'crisp.' 'Music" quality was not bad, but not particularly outstanding either. The external speaker also was adequate.

Cycling through the zoom levels:

The bottom line? A nice, middle-end e-reader which performs as advertised.... This blogger hasn't used it long enough to comment yet on battery life, but the built-in 1,800 mAh lithium polymer battery is rated at 7-9 hours for e-book mode, or 7 hours in audio mode when using the earphones, or 4 hours in video mode.

The specifications:

• 5" (12.7cm) TFT LCD screen, 800 x 480 resolution
• 1800mAh rechargeable Lithium battery.
• Supported formats: TXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, MOBI, CHM, DOC, WMA, MP3, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, MP4, WMV, AVI, RMVB, FLV, ASF, 3GP, MOV
• Functions: page-marking, zoom level adjusting, 5 different types of fonts, text margin adjustable, screen rotation, image viewer, etc.
• Charge through USB connection or DC jack. USB and USB-DC cables included
• Internal memory: 8GB (Dark Iron)