Astak eBook readers are among the latest line of eBook readers that are becoming more and more popular in the US market, which is currently dominated by eBook readers from Sony and its PRS series, and Amazon with its Kindle series. Like these two giants, Astak aims to introduce eBook readers to a wider domain of bookworms. According to these companies, eBook readers are the future of reading. Someday, paper books will become obsolete because of their environment-harmful byproducts.
FEATURES
eBook readers are environment-friendly because of what you’re not having to do while using these products. With eBook readers, you don’t have to deal with paper waste by throwing old books. These paper wastes can poison our water. The use of trees to produce paper will also be reduced significantly. Furthermore, with eBook readers, you can store thousands of books, recycle through your oldest archives and knowing where to find your old books.
The Astak EZ Reader uses e-ink technology like other eBook readers. No paper is used, but the page that appears on the eBook screen looks exactly like paper. It also has paper-like properties, including no backlight, anti-glare and high contrast, which allows you to read for countless of hours without straining your eyes. Because of the anti-glare, you can even read under sunlight. In fact, the text looks good under the sun. In addition, because of this e-Ink technology, the device doesn’t use up energy when you don’t turn to another page or view the menu. On average, you can do up to 8,000 page without charging your battery before it runs out.
From the outside
The entire device looks very sleek. The screen is a 6-inch diagonal screen which has 4 shades of gray. With this limited amount of colors, it is amazing how the text looks crisp. The screen is surrounded by several buttons, jacks, switches, and slots on a black matte finish which is nice to hold. The grip is slip-free, and the device feels very solid and durable. It also comes with a book leather case with a viewing window. Compared to Sony Reader and Kindle, however, the Astak device is not as sleek as the Kindle 2 and not as classy as the Sony series, but it’s not ugly either. It’s somewhere in between, a rectangular shaped electronic device with curved, but not beveled, edges. For an electronic device, it is very light. This is because you obviously want to hold it up while reading it. It is much lighter than the Kindle 2 or DX, but the COOL-ER, another eBook reader is much lighter than the EZ Reader.
Buttons
The buttons are navigation buttons and shortcut keys for menu options. At the left side of the screen, there are page turn buttons left and right, to go to the previous or next page, respectively. At the bottom of the screen, there are numbered keys 1 to 9, including 0, and the numbers 0 and 6 to 9 are shortcut keys to such features as zooming and bookmarking. 0 and 9 are also page turn keys, which means that whether you’re holding up the reader from the side or holding at the bottom, you can easily extend your thumb to turn the pages with both styles. This is also useful for both portrait or landscape, since the Astak EZ Reader allows screen rotation for both orientations. The page turn keys are also small enough to be convenient and reduce chances of accidentally pressing them to go to the next or previous page unwanted. Overall, the buttons are very easy to use and they are large enough, though it wouldn’t hurt if the page turn buttons were even larger.
Downloading ebooks
Before reading with an eBook reader, you need to acquire e-books. With Sony and Kindle, you can download books through their corresponding bookstores. Astak has a different approach. You get your own e-books from various sources, supporting a huge number of e-book formats. The large number of formats means you can enjoy a wide range of books, publications, comics, documents and others. To get these e-books, you load them with an SD card, or you can use the supplied USB cable to drag and drop e-books from your PC or Mac to your Astak EZ Reader. This device allows you to use e-books which are DRM-free. DRM means Digital Rights Management, or a way to restrict users from getting free copies of commercial e-books.
On-screen features
While reading, you will enjoy on-screen features. This includes being able to zoom the text with 3-5 levels depending on the e-book format. This allows users who have eyesight problems to adjust the font size until they are comfortable with it. In addition, you can customize your fonts by choosing from the onboard set list, or downloading new fonts. The menu is quite convenient. One part of the menu worth noting is it’s book listing options. You can sort books by title, type or date. You can also view system information.
Other features include the ability to play music. The sound is quite good as well because it is stereo sound. With this feature, you can also listen to audio books. Buying the Astak EZ Reader comes with the device and a charger, USB cable, leather book-style cover, and an earphone. Another feature is the ability to replace the Lithium Ion battery. This is an uncommon feature among e-book readers. It’s very convenient to be able to replace battery when you have no time to charge.
STAND-OUT FEATURES
The inability to download from a bookstore like you do with Kindle or Sony is a stand-out feature, in the sense that this allows you freedom from being linked to the bookstore website for your books forever. You can download e-books from all kinds of sources and with various formats, and most of the time, you don’t have to worry about compatibility with your device. Not all formats work well, though. PDF and EPUB works best, but TXT can have awkward line breaks.
According to the developers, the Astak EZ Reader is the smallest, thinnest, lightest e-book reader to date, although the COOL-ER can make a case against that. It’s important that an e-book reader be light because you want to be able to hold it up for 3 or 4 hours while reading, and put it inside your suit or jacket pocket, or purse.
Another uncommon feature is the ability to choose from 20 different languages!
GEEK ALERT
The entire device weighs only 7.8 ounces, and it’s physical dimensions are 7.2×4.7×0.4 inches. Inside the Astak EZ reader is a NOR flash ROM and a Linux Operating System. The device can store books which fit in an internal memory of 512 MB. You can extend this by inserting an SD card which can carry up to 4 GB of storage. The books will then be shown in a screen with a 600×800 resolution. The device can show e-books and other documents which have various formats, including JPG, PNG, TIF, GIF, MP3, ZIP, RAR, DJVU, PPT, FB2, PDB, PRC, LIT, CHM, WOL, TXT, HTML, RTF, DOC, EPUB, and PDF.
DRAWBACKS
There are several drawbacks to this device. For one, its not easy to buy commercial books and store them to your reader, at least in comparison to the more popular e-book readers. There is no bookstore, and you can’t download books just anywhere through wireless means. You have to go to a computer and bring your USB cable with you. Like other devices, Astak also doesn’t have instant access to updated bestsellers, blogs and periodicals. The Astak company is indeed planning to make wireless downloading their next innovation.
When you do have the books, the page turns load relatively slow compared to other e-books. In rare occasions, the device even reboots. If you are reading and want to know the meaning of a word, there is no built-in dictionary. Another drawback is that it should be supporting SDHC cards which can store more than 4 GB of memory so that the music playing capabilities of Astak can be fully used.
CONCLUSION
The Astak EZ Reader is a cheap alternative to the Sony PRS series and the Amazon Kindle series, and other popular brands. It may have some drawbacks which are not a problem with the other brands, but it also has features which level with the opposition, and some others which surpass them. In terms of its primary purpose, which is to allow bookworms to enjoy reading e-books like never before, this device certainly deserves high merits.
