French e-Reader company Bookeen has just released one of the biggest upgrade package for their entire line of Cybook Odyssey devices. Not only has the entire UI been cleaned up, but there is also a new dictionary manager.
The firmware 6.2 updates is applicable to all five Odyssey models from 2011, 2012, 2013. You simply have to connect it up to your local WIFI network and it should prompt you to install it. It is important to note that once you start updating your device, make sure its fully charged. If the battery dies while you are in the middle of upgrading… Well, maybe its better off you didn’t know!
Here is a few of the things that are in the new update; New Annotations menu: notes and highlights have their own menu for simpler access. (Note export is planned for a future update.) Tip: to add a note or highlight, touch the beginning and end of the text you want to select, and hold until you see the text highlighted. A dialogue box with the options « Add highlight » and « Add note » will appear. You can also store and organize your books by collection with numerous sorting features in addition to using our traditional folder view.
The overall interface is more clean and intuitive. Bookeen has removed superfluous frames, lines, and shaded zones to improve visibility and simplify navigation.They have also included a huge number of e-book reading enhancements, starting with the overall PDF experience. When it comes to reading all of the different menus to change the text size, fonts, linespacing and margins have been condensed to one single page. Speaking of fonts, the one thing people love about the Kindle is the stock font Caecilia, the Odyssey now has that too!
Finally you can now search for occurrences of a key word in the text of your book by selecting the word, the same way you consult the dictionary. Just press your finger on the word you want until you see it highlighted to bring up the search options. You can also search for any word in your book or in the dictionary, by simply typing it into the on-screen keyboard.
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.