“Do at least once what others say you can’t do. After that, you will never pay attention to their rules and restrictions.
James Cook, English navyman, cartographer and discoverer
Everyone approaches the choice of an e-book in their own way. Some think for a long time and read thematic forums, others are guided by the rule “if you don’t try, you won’t know”, they buy from ONYX BOOX, and all doubts about buying a reader disappear, after which the device wins its well-deserved place in a separate compartment of the backpack. After all, it is worth buying an e-book only because it is the only gadget of its kind with which you can travel around the world on a single charge (but only on a more modern mode of transport than Fedor Konyukhov).
Debt calls to tell about another reader, which primarily attracts with its price (7 rubles) and the presence of an E Ink Carta screen with MOON Light + backlight. Our guest today is James Cook, or rather, his second iteration.
No, we did not create a hologram of the famous explorer and discoverer who will read books aloud (although the idea has a place to be) - the ONYX BOOX brand just released the second generation of its James Cook reader. I remember that in 2017 I really liked the first version, even then the manufacturer installed E Ink Carta screens, which had no worthy analogues. It is more interesting to see what is (spoiler - it's like "Terminator", where the second part was even more fancy than the first).
Where does the reader get such a name from, where are the designations traditional for many manufacturers like “MVF413FX” or at least “5s”? ONYX BOOX approaches the “names” of its books no less responsibly than the stuffing and features (Apple names its operating systems after geographical landmarks, so why not?), so you can easily recognize its readers by the name Robinson Crusoe, Chronos, Darwin , Cleopatra, Monte Cristo, etc. So James Cook wormed his way into this ranks with a new 6-inch E Ink Carta screen, MOON Light + backlight and battery life, which is enough for at least one expedition of the great navigator. The device is built on the basis of a new quad-core processor with a clock frequency of 1,2 GHz, which ensured the speed of the operating system and reduced the speed of opening books. Thanks to the new hardware platform, the battery life of the battery (3000 mAh capacity) has increased significantly to 1 month with an average load.
In general, for a reader of this segment, color temperature adjustment is a real luxury: only in January last year, ONYX BOOX showed the first reader in Russia with this feature (it is called after the queen of Egypt), and now we meet MOON Light + in a budget device. The necessary addition to this is expressed in the face of 512 MB of RAM, which add speed to the e-book, as well as 8 GB of internal memory.
3 mAh is a decent figure for modern smartphones, which really reveals itself when used in an e-reader. Due to the use of an energy-efficient processor and screen, the reader can work without recharging for up to one month in medium use mode.
First Expedition: ONYX BOOX James Cook 2 Specs and Package Contents
| Display | 6″, E Ink Carta, 600 × 800 dots, 16 gray levels, 14:1 contrast ratio, SNOW Field |
| backlight | MOON Light + |
| Operating system | Android 4.4 |
| Battery | Lithium-ion, capacity 3000 mAh |
| Processor | Quad-core 4GHz |
| RAM | 512 MB |
| Built-in Memory | 8 GB |
| Memory card | MicroSD/MicroSDHC |
| Supported Formats | TXT, HTML, RTF, FB3, FB2, FB2.zip, MOBI, CHM, PDB, DOC, DOCX, PRC, EPUB, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PDF, DjVu, CBR, CBZ |
| Interface | microUSB |
| Dimensions | 170 × 117 × 8.7 mm |
| The weight | 182 g |
The book comes in a beautiful package with a photo of (well, almost) James Cook, it briefly tells about the discoverer and his achievements. The kit is modest and of significant elements is a microUSB cable for charging and the reader itself, they did not put a case on them. However, let's not forget that we have a device from the budget segment.
The second expedition: appearance and screen features
The case of an e-book is traditionally made of matte plastic with a soft-touch coating. Its advantages are that it causes very pleasant tactile sensations, besides it is less sensitive to fingerprints than glossy surfaces. True, it will be difficult to remove the imprint imperceptibly, if it has already appeared. But without a cover to wear - a pleasure.
Compared to other e-readers, James Cook 2 weighs a little - only 182 g. Dimensions are used almost as efficiently as possible, so with a screen diagonal of 6 inches, the reader remains very compact. You can easily take the book with you on a trip on a ship, and on a hot air balloon - that's enough fantasy.
If some readers are controlled only by buttons, while others are controlled only by joysticks, then ONYX BOOX offers both. The buttons are located on the sides: they are responsible for turning pages while reading, and the left one by default gives access to the "Menu" (long press) and "Back" (short press) sections. Considering that the reader's screen is not touch-sensitive, the buttons should be responsive and tactilely pleasant, which is not a problem here. You can also read and hold an e-book in one hand without any problems.
A five-way joystick, located under the screen, allows you to move between menu items. It also serves as the main navigation tool when reading in embedded applications.
Well, at the bottom everything is as we are used to - a micro-USB port for charging, a slot for a memory card and a power button. On a trip around the world, of course, moisture protection would be useful (suddenly you have to shout “Polundra!”), But then you can hold the steering wheel with one hand and the book with the other, since there are no elements on the other ends so that the buttons protruding from the side do not interfere with comfortable reading.
For convenience, the buttons can be swapped so that, for example, the previous page opens by pressing the right button. It is also possible to completely change the purpose of the buttons - you can do this in the settings.
Let's leave the odes to the controls, because we are most interested in the screen - it should work well during a night trip, and during the day under the scorching sun somewhere around the island of Hawaii (for Cook, however, this was the last stop, but we are in 2019 year, and the natives are no longer so scary). James Cook 2 is suitable for both: the 6-inch screen has a good resolution, the ONYX BOOX E Ink Carta, already familiar from other readers, is used as the screen type. The display, although not the largest, can still be used both for reading fiction and for documents (suddenly you want to load a map there).
MOON Light+ will become an indispensable assistant on the expedition. This is a specially designed type of backlight, with which you can not only adjust the brightness, as in other readers, but also change the backlight temperature. For warm and cold light, there are 16 "saturation" divisions that adjust the backlight hue. With active backlighting, the maximum brightness of the white field is approximately 215 cd/m².
Let's analyze the differences between MOON Light + and the backlight used in other readers, using a specific example. In e-books with normal backlighting, the screen simply glows either with white light or white with some kind of tint, which does not change the essence. By adjusting the color temperature, the light changes a lot, so if you want to read about the adventures of Captain Nemo during twilight, it is better to adjust the more yellow tint with the blue part of the spectrum filtered out. Such a backlight makes it possible to read in low light conditions: this is especially noticeable before going to bed, when a warm shade is much more pleasant for the eye to perceive than a cold one (it’s not for nothing that Apple has a similar Night Shift function; and the f.lux application has millions of users). With such a backlight, you can sit at your favorite work before going to bed for several hours, and your eyes will not get tired. Well, it will turn out to fall asleep faster, since it is cold light that negatively affects the production of the sleep hormone - melatonin.
But isn't it on regular tablets?
Many tablets and smartphones do now offer backlight hue adjustment. The difference between the e-book in this case lies in the type of screen: in the case of OLED and IPS, the light is directed directly into the eyes, so if you read for a long time before going to bed on the same iPhone, your eyes may start to water or other discomfort will occur. If we talk about E Ink, here the backlight illuminates the screen from the side and does not hit directly into the eyes, which ensures comfortable reading for several hours. In case the expedition does not go according to plan, and you have to be in the role of Robinson Crusoe - not an extra feature.
Why SNOW Field is needed
This is a special screen mode that has become the hallmark of ONYX BOOX readers. Thanks to it, a reduction in the number of artifacts on the E Ink screen with partial redrawing is achieved, and this is what often repels the purchase of an e-book. When the mode is activated, you can disable full redrawing in the settings while reading simple text documents.
Everything is fine with E Ink, but there is still a fly in the ointment: its responsiveness leaves much to be desired. For an e-reader, the screen is good, also thanks to the fine temperature setting, but if you start using the reader for the first time, you will have to get used to it.
Third Expedition: Reading and Interface
The screen resolution of this reader is 800×600 pixels: you can forgive if you take into account the price, but и I was already ready to wince, observing the pixels. Nevertheless, due to well-chosen fonts, pixelation is invisible, although a picky reader with an "eagle eye" can find points where the pixel density is 300-400 per inch.
Reading impressions are mostly only positive: it is pleasant to look at the letters, they are smooth and clear. SNOW Field removes small artefacts, and the "electronic paper" screen gives the maximum feeling of reading a regular book (but what book can you read without a lamp under the covers? But this one can!). The reader supports all major book formats without conversion, so you can open PDF and read Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite work in FB2. Where to get books for such readers is a purely individual question, but it is better to give preference to official sources. Especially now there are many stores on the Web that sell electronic versions of books.
For fiction, it's best to use one of the two built-in reading apps, OReader. Most of the screen is occupied by text, and if you need to adjust some settings, just go to the menu where you can select options - from orientation and font size to line spacing and page margins. Although I am not an adept of e-books, I found paging with physical buttons convenient for myself, although after an iPhone it’s a little unusual.
If during reading you need to go to the table of contents or save a quote, this can be done in a couple of clicks.
Access to increase / decrease the font and its quick settings is implemented using the central button on the joystick - press it once and select the desired item.
To fine-tune (line spacing, font type, margins), you must hold the left paging button, then select the desired item using the buttons on the joystick - press the left button. Accordingly, if you press another button, the backlight settings menu, etc. is activated. Due to the lack of a touch screen, the controls are not the most intuitive, but you can quickly get used to it.
Those who like to read books in English may need to translate a particular word, and here it is done as natively as possible (yes, they have already built dictionaries here). Press the central button of the joystick and select "Dictionary" in the pop-up menu, then select the desired word with the up / down, left / right buttons near the joystick. After that, the Dictionary application will open, where the translation of the word will appear.
And to make working with formats like PDF and DjVu even more convenient, there is an additional built-in ONYX Neo Reader application. The interface is almost the same, plus this program looks more minimalistic and somewhat reminiscent of a browser. There are useful features like automatic flipping (for example, if you are rewriting notes). At the same time, this is clearly not a device that is convenient to work with with a lot of documentation, for this it is better to take something like .
As for the main technical characteristics, in James Cook 2 they are represented by a quad-core processor with a clock speed of 1.2 GHz and 512 MB of RAM. When current smartphones already have 8 GB of RAM, it sounds frivolous at first glance, but in fact it is enough for the reader to quickly open a book and scroll through the pages, and also quickly perform operations like smooth flipping. Moreover, during the test, the reader never asked for a forced reboot.
The reader was not surprised by the interface - it's still the same Android that uses ONYX BOOX in its readers, but with its own shell. The desktop includes several items: "Library", "File Manager", "Applications", "MOON Light" and "Settings". At the top, the battery level is displayed, a little lower - the last open book, after it - recently added.
The library stores all the books available on the device, which can be viewed both as a list and as a table or icons (an alternative to it is the file manager), in the "Applications" section you can find a clock, a calculator and a dictionary. In the system settings, you can change the date, see the free space, configure buttons, and so on. There is also a setting for the last documents field, automatic opening of the last book after turning on the device, and other useful gadgets. For example, you can set the e-reader's shutdown time so that it does not run out of power in the background.
Waving around the world?
If you remember, for James Cook the third expedition did not end very well, but this has nothing to do with the reader, which bears the name of the great discoverer. It will easily survive the fourth, fifth, and 25th expeditions, the main thing is not to forget to charge it at least occasionally (we understand that the battery charge is enough for about a month of average reading activity, but still).
During various interviews, they like to ask tricky questions like “what item would you take with you to a desert island”, etc. If I had the choice to take a box of matches with me, I would definitely prefer James Cook 2 (well, a survival kit). Of course, now few people go on round-the-world expeditions, we mostly prefer winged multi-ton cars, but there is also a place for an e-book, especially if you have two long flights with a night change.
I liked that ONYX BOOX was added to backlight (and not ordinary, but advanced MOON Light +), in the first iteration of the reader, this was really not enough. This is what can become a fundamental factor when choosing this e-book, and the price of 7 rubles, of course. This is a good option for the first reader with an E Ink screen, with which you can take your favorite works of art with you, read a bedtime story to your child (even if there are ), and the enthusiast will go to repeat all three expeditions of James Cook.
Just don't go to Hawaii. Well, just in case.
Source: habr.com