When U.S commented on PocketBook Color Last year, we loved the device and the fact that true e-readers could finally display color, but its six-inch screen made it difficult to read comics and magazines that work much better on tablets. The new PocketBook InkPad Color tries to remedy this with a larger 7.8-inch screen that uses E-Ink’s state-of-the-art color electronic paper technology.
The larger screen of the InkPad, which makes it more like an iPad Mini and less like an Amazon Kindle, is what will attract more people to color E-Ink devices because it allows documents that cannot be easily resized (change the size of text and can flow back to fit a screen, but this is not an option with illustrations) to be enjoyed without having to constantly zoom in and out to make the text readable. On a device that is powered by a 1 GHz process and only 1 GB of RAM, zooming and panning large documents is not the smoothest experience, so while the InkPad is not as portable as the original PocketBook Color, the experience reading is much improved.
PocketBook is the first company to introduce an e-reader using E Ink’s new Kaleido 2 screen technology, but it is not a quantum leap for colored electronic paper. In black and white mode, the InkPad screen offers a resolution of 1872 × 1404 pixels at 300 PPI. But in color mode, it still manages to gather only a third of that resolution, just 624 × 468 pixels at 100 PP. Color reproduction is still limited to just 4,096 different shades, compared to the more than 16 million colors that an LCD can reproduce. But according to those who passed an eye with the new InkPad, with Kaleido 2 E Ink improved the color accuracy and saturation of the screen, while also improving the performance of the black and white mode. The changes under the hood may be minimal, but apparently they make a big difference to the eyes.
Other improvements made to the new PocketBook InkPad include an updated color filter set (the technology that makes colored electronic paper possible) that is optimized for the device’s white LED side lights so that colors still bounce when reading in the dark and a USB-C port for charging and syncing, although documents can also be loaded using a microSD card, allowing the 16 GB of internal tablet storage to be expanded infinitely.
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In North America, at least, PocketBook is not a brand as well known as Kindle or Kobo, but if you don’t buy your e-books from online stores like Amazon or Rakuten, or use mainly these types of devices to read work or documents academics, is a brand that is potentially worth considering because it supports almost every imaginable digital document format: including EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, CBR and PDFs. The InkPad also includes Bluetooth for streaming audiobooks or really any digital audio file for a pair of wireless headphones, as well as a text-to-speech function that works in 16 different languages.
The original PocketBook Color cost $ 230, but because of the larger size and screen, the new PocketBook InkPad is slightly more expensive, costing $ 329, now available at online stores like NewEgg. We’ll be working with the tablet next week to see if the InkPad is the perfect e-reader for comics and magazines, so stay tuned for our full review.