Bookeen Cybook OPUS
Ebook readers have come a long way since their inception, the market being pushed along by the likes of Sony and Amazon. Sony in particular has set the bar high in terms of physical design, and the several companies currently active in the market and producing devices for the UK are playing catchup.
Bookeen has taken the bull by the horns with the Cybook OPUS which is a lovely piece of kit.
Small at 151mm x 108mm x 10mm thick and light at 150g it is pocketable. Made from white plastic it feels solid and looks trendy. It has 1GB of storage on board and supports microSD cards. Getting books into it is a simple matter of connecting to a PC then doing a drag and drop.
The screen isn’t huge at 5-inches across the diagonal, but it’s 600 x 800 pixels, 200dpi, 4 greyscale level E-Ink display is fine to read. And there’s a built in accelerometer which turns the screen into wide format if you want it that way.
Supported data formats include HTML, TXT, JLG, GIF, PNG, ePUB and PDF. The battery is good for about 8,000 page turns and you can replace the 1000mAh cell thanks to the removable cover. There isn’t actually room for anything much larger, but 8,000 page turns before you get to a power source should be enough for most of us.
The on-device controls run to four front buttons, a five way navigation key and side mounted on/off switch and, under the battery cover, a reset pin. It’s minimal and you probably won’t need the manual to get started.
At €250 it costs more than a whole stack of paper books, but that’s the way with ebook readers.
Sandra Vogel