14 DAY TRIAL // Like many other companies, iRiver aims to take advantage of the nascent e-reader market and, thus, has put together its own e-book reading device known as the Story EB03. This gadget isn't exactly a new one, as it has been around since late last year, but it did have the drawback of lacking WiFi connectivity. Now, the company has gone ahead and finally implemented this last feature, hoping that the added price premium will be offset by the functionality and the overall feature set.
The Story EB03 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.
To allow end-users to carry along their favorite books and audio tracks, the company provided 2GB of internal flash storage. This capacity can be expanded by means of a SD memory card. As for battery life, iRiver claims that consumers should be able to turn about 9,000 pages before having to plug in the recharger.
Unfortunately, the manufacturer did not exactly manage to achieve its goal of creating a dream electronic, because it didn't really attain a very enthralling price point. The non-WiFi model costs about £149 in the UK, but the new one is priced at £250, no less than twice as much as the Amazon Kindle, which recently saw its price cut down to £125.