This new mini ebook reader is quite an anomaly. In a world of high spec readers with tons of storage, an outrageous processor and plenty of features, the Y-Ben is basic. It does not have a touchscreen, front-light, WIFI, Bluetooth or anything else. Instead, this is a pocket friendly book reader. You control the page turns with the buttons on the side and navigate around using the directional D-Pad. There is also an OK, Menu and back button.
The Yiben p47L features a 4.7 inch E INK Carta display with a resolution of 960×540 and 234 PPI. It does not have a touchscreen display, but does have two manual page turn buttons on either side of the screen and a series of buttons on the bottom, which assist in navigation and accessing various menus and functionality. There is no front-lit display.
Underneath the hood is a RK2818 – ARM + DSP 600MHz single core processor, 128MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. It does not have WIFI, Bluetooth, but does have a Micro-USB port for transferring data. It is powered by a 800 mAh battery. Basically, you will have to sideload your own books on this device, luckily it has support for PDF, EPUB, TXT, DJVU, HTML, RTF, FB2, DOC, MOBI, CHM and PRC. The dimensions are the dimension is 137*75.5*7.9mm
This device has an English option for languages. It is not running Android or Linux, but an operating system called Ucos. There is a bright and bubbly UI, which makes selecting various UI elements super easy. I would recommend this for luddites, people who don’t want all sorts of connected features or superfluous functionality. The lack of touchscreen harkens back into another era, where the Kindle DX reigned supreme.
The Y-Ben retails for $149.99 and is exclusively available form the Good e-Reader Store.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.