iRiver has been around for about a year with its iRiver Story E-Reader and they are hoping to capitalize on the recent resurgence of electronic readers popularity by ushering in a new version of the Story that has WI-FI.
The new version of the iRiver Story is dubbed the EB03 and has a 6-inch e-ink screen whose native resolution is of 600 x 800 and which has 16 levels of gray. Mostly it should be used for viewing a variety of e-book formats, such as EPub, PDF, TXT, FBU and DJVU, and other types of documents, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Image files, such as JPEG, GIF and BMP are also supported, and the Flow UI of the Linux-based OS is quite adept at displaying each and every one of these file types. Furthermore, iRiver threw in support for audio files, such as MP3, OGG and WMP, which means that it can double as a music player.
You can read ebooks on this device both in horizontal and vertical mode, it is packaged with around 2 GB of internal flash storage. The Battery life is sweet as well, good for around 9,000 page turns.
The price point on this device is quite daunting. The normal version of the device is around $220.00 and the WI-FI version costs near $375.00. With the Kindle 2 dropping in price to $189.00 in recent weeks, which also has WI-FI and 3G, this product may not catch on, as consumers are clambering for more cost effective e-readers.
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.
