When we reviewed the PocketBook Color Last year we loved the device and the fact that real e-readers could finally display color, but the 6-inch screen made it difficult to read comic books and magazines that work much better on tablets. The new PocketBook InkPad Color tries to overcome that with a larger 7.8-inch screen that uses E-Ink’s next generation of electronic color paper technology.
The InkPad’s larger screen, making it more like an iPad Mini and less like an Amazon Kindle, will push more people to color E-Ink devices as it allows documents that cannot be easily resized (change size of text and it can be repositioned to fit a screen, but that’s not an option with artwork) to enjoy it without constantly zooming in and out to make text readable. On a device powered by a 1 GHz process and only 1 GB of RAM, zooming in and panning large documents isn’t the smoothest experience, so while the InkPad isn’t quite as pocket-sized as the original PocketBook Color, the actual reading experience should are much improved.
PocketBook is the first company to introduce an e-reader that uses E Ink’s new Kaleido 2 screen technology, but it’s not a huge leap forward for color electronic paper. In black and white mode, the InkPad’s screen offers a resolution of 1872 × 1404 pixels at 300 PPI. But in color mode, it can still only deliver a third of that resolution, just 624 × 468 pixels at 100 PP. Color rendering is also still limited to only 4,096 different shades, compared to the more than 16 million colors that an LCD can reproduce. But according to those who have lost eyes with the new InkPad, with Kaleido 2, E Ink has 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 minor, but they apparently make a big difference to the eyes.
Other improvements made to the new PocketBook InkPad include an improved color filter array (the technology that enables electronic color paper) that is optimized for the white LED side lighting of the device, so that colors still stand out when reading in the dark, and a USB-C port for charging and synchronization, although documents can also be loaded using a microSD card, allowing for infinite expansion of the tablet’s 16GB internal storage.
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At least in North America, PocketBook is not a brand as well known as Kindle or Kobo, but if you don’t get your ebooks through online stores like Amazon or Rakuten, or usually use these types of devices to read through your work or academic documents , it’s a brand that may be worth considering because it supports almost every digital document format imaginable – including EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, CBR and PDFs. The InkPad also includes Bluetooth for streaming audiobooks or really any digital audio file to wireless headphones, as well as a text-to-speech feature that works in 16 different languages.
The original PocketBook Color was $ 230, but due to its larger size and screen, the new PocketBook InkPad is slightly more expensive at $ 329, now available at online stores such as NewEggWe’re going to be hands-on with the tablet next week to see if the InkPad is the perfect e-reader for comic books and magazines, so stay tuned for our full review.