One of the things an eBook reader should be able to do is to return to the page of the book you were on when you switched it off. The Cool-er doesn’t do this. When you start it up, it takes you to the top-level menu and you have to drill down to the book you were reading and re-open it. It does then remember the page, but the whole process takes the best part of a minute, rather than being instant.
Wonka-bar colours should fit most tastes
Interead advises disabling the auto-shutdown, in effect, leaving the reader running all the time. While its E-Ink display may only take power on a page turn, there’s a processor running OS and reader software and that takes juice all the time. Even so, you should measure the battery life in weeks rather than days – it recharges automatically using its USB connection.
Verdict
The Cool-er has all the hallmarks of a product in Version 1. The interface needs to be a lot more intuitive and the reader needs to handle supported document formats more accurately. With recent news of Asus intending to release an eReader for under £100 by Christmas, the Cool-er and others are also looking too expensive. ®
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Interead Cool-er
COMMENTS
bought one, gave it away.
it was a good device and i had turned off the autoshutdown so that the book was left on screen so i didn't need to find and open it again.
the thing that i missed most was the lack of find. i've been reading etexts since i had a psion. on using palm, nokias and now stanza on an iphone. it needs a find. that drove me nuts so i gave it to my brother who just wants to read a few books. will have to see how he gets on with it.
Second Cool-er.....
The replacement Cool-er, just over two days old went grey screen last night and gave up the ghost. It's gonig back today for a refund and I'll look at a different make of reader.
Re: davebalme
I have found out that their support staff are based in Miami. So even though you are calling a UK number, no-one will pickup or answer your voicemail, or emails for that matter until around 2pm GMT. Not brilliant.
Second Cool-er
I bought my Cool-er back at the beginning of September, and as noted elsewhere found glitches with the pre-loaded firmware, primarily the lack of bookmark facility (it didn't create a list) and the need to re-open the last document read, even though the user guide stated that these should be present. But other than that I was quite happy with the product. Two weeks ago I downloaded and installed the firmware update. And that's when things started to go wrong. Fine it opened at the last page read, but it started to have the annoying habit of getting stuck in the start up cycle. The re-set button wouldn't stop this, the only thing to do so was to hook it up to my computer and put it in charge/USB mode. I contacted technical by email who queried whether I had installed the firmware update correctly. I answered their response but over a week later I've heard nothing back from them. The thing is it didn't start instantly after the installation, it took a few days for it to occur. I've since re-downloaded and re-installed the firmware. Five days later I've again got a Cool-er stuck in start up.
I took it back to Argos who offered a replacement. That was yesterday. Now i'm not able to register my new Cool-er because my email address is registered to the first one. And I've tried ringing customer support since early this morning but other than an automated answer there is no response there.
I was really impressed with the product but things of late are beginning to tarnish it's sheen. I don't want to download the latest firmware just in case that was the problem rather than the first unit itself. I'm also beginning to wish I had waited a bit longer until it had proven itself in the reliability stakes.
Decent Little Device
I got my Cool-ER back in July and thought it was a great little device for what I wanted it to do - mainly, read books! That's what it's designed for and that's what I've used it for since and it does it well, whether the book's in epub or pdf format (the only one's I've tried). The only issue I've had in this respect is when a pdf's had an image in the center of the page, the reader tends to decrease the font size so you can view the full image. You can't really fault the device for this though as all e-readers have issues with pdf's since they are a page based format.
Anyway, I was happy until about a month ago when I started the device and got what I have dubbed the greyscale rainbow of death.
http://i37.tinypic.com/2h3mqfs.jpg
It would not boot, even after an attempted firmware upgrade.
Anyway, it's been with the manufacturer since, who have informed me that they've sorted it and it's now on it's way back.
So, to sumarise, I was happy with the Cool-ER, and will be happy with the Cool-ER when it comes back to me because I don't expect it to do everything for £185. If I'd bought the iRex at £500 and it pulled this shit I'd have been going crazy, but for what it does and the document formats it supports, this little thing is all I need right now... just don't expect it to do much more than let you read a novel.
