14 DAY TRIAL // As one would have expected, this year's IFA show in Berlin, Germany, was where a bunch of e-reader were demonstrated, and iriver definitely didn't let the opportunity slip by and showed off the Cover Story, otherwise known as the 6-inch iriver Story Touch Edition.
iriver brought out the Cover Story, a device that, like many others of its ilk, has apparently equal dosages of upsides and downsides.
The electronic is equipped with a grayscale E Ink display of 6 inches which supports touch input and has a native resolution of 600 x 800 pixels.
Coming in white or blue silver colors, the Cover Story is also quite light (282 grams) and thin (9.5 mm) and boasts several features in addition to all the basic e-book reading capabilities.
For instance, it supports 17 different languages and has 2GB of internal storage, plus a SD card slot, for up to an additional 32GB.
The device also comes with voice recording capabilities and, thus, MP3 support, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity and the ability to handle a wide range of file formats.
The list includes PDF, EPUB, TXT, FB2 and DJVU, as far as e-book files are concerned, plus MP3, WMA and OGG audio.
What's more, Story is built with an accelerometer, which rotates the pages, and runs a note-taking app that relies on the pull-out stylus and the four-way navigation control.
According to Slashgear, the major disadvantage of the product is that, even though it lack 3G and WiFi, it costs 200 Euro ($285), quite a bit more than Amazon's Kindle, whose tags are of $139 and $189 for the non-3G and 3G versions, respectively (both feature WiFi).
A WiFi Story model is, of course, supposedly on the way, with basic browsing capabilities, but its price is still undisclosed. What remains to be seen is how these two fare against Sony's PRS-650 (229 Euro).