ECO Reader

The Eco Reader is an eBook reader similar to the Amazon Kindle, but without as many features.

It lacks the white finish of the Kindle; instead, it looks like a leather-bound personal organiser. As far as looks are concerned, the Eco Reader has side-stepped the whole 'young and cool' thing and opted for 'conservative and smart'. And what could be smarter than a book with no pages? Home-delivered hot dogs? Perhaps. It's pretty obvious why eBooks are a great invention: you can carry around your entire library on one single device (assuming all your favourite books are available in electronic format), no crumpled pages and you’re sort of saving the planet. Well, sort of.

The Eco Reader has a 15cm screen with a 600x800-pixel resolution and uses e-ink technology to display the text. It can display four shades of grey. No matter what angle you look at the screen from you can see the text clearly.

The screen isn’t backlit, so just like a real book you can’t read it in the dark. This is because the ECO Reader employs the microencapsulated ink imaging film. This means screen requires no front- or back-lighting to display texts and pictures, and because of this the display uses no power to maintain an image.

Although the ECO Reader is rather pricey ($449), the number of books and music tracks it can store is very impressive. The ECO Reader comes with 21 books preinstalled, featuring classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The device comes with 512MB of internal memory and its storage can be expanded via its SD card slot — it will accept SD cards up to 4GB (equating to roughly 1000 books). Fancy that, you can carry a thousand books around with you and it weighs only 220grams!

The ECO Reader runs on a Linux platform and it's incredibly easy to navigate its menu interface. Transferring downloaded files via USB to the reader is as simple as dragging and dropping. You can even keep music (or audio books) on the ECO Reader and listen to it with the headphones that come included in the package. However battery life decreases faster when music is being played.

The ECO supports a multitude of file types, but most eBook downloads will probably be in PDF format or plain text.

Probably the most annoying thing about the ECO Reader how long it takes to load content. But if you’re patient enough to sit and read a book then we’re sure you’ll be patient enough to handle loading times.

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