iRex iLiad

Manufacturers have been striving to produce the perfect electronic book, or ‘e-book’, reader for years now, but it’s only recently that display technology has reached the point where it can provide a reasonable facsimile of the printed page. At the moment, the solution seems to lie in e-ink displays and the latest e-book reader to use one is the iRex iLiad.

Although still in its relative infancy, electrophoretic — ‘ e-ink’ — display technology, is already well-advanced when it comes to legibility. When turned off, the e-ink display on the iLiad looks less like a screen and more like a mere plastic slate for use with a dry-wipe marker.

Slide the tiny power switch on the iLiad’s base though, and that pale grey plastic panel fills with text that looks like it’s the product of a laser printer. Wonderfully crisp and apparently indelible, the image has no flicker and is crystal clear from any angle. The print-like illusion is helped by the fact that the image is illuminated by reflected light rather than a backlight, and while this means you can’t read e-books in the dark, that’s no different to the real thing.

There are several e-ink e-book readers available, but the iLiad’s screen is both the largest and the highest resolution (though it’s a smidgen lower than the competitions’ in terms of actual dpi). It’s also the only e-ink screen that can be written on, which means that the iLiad can also double up as an electronic notepad. The screen uses electromagnetic induction rather than a touch-sensitive layer, and while you must use the supplied stylus for scribbling, you can rest your hand on the screen with impunity while doing so.

The A5 format does make the iLiad best-suited for carrying in a bag rather than a pocket, but at a mere 390g and just 16mm thick, it’s no more of a chore to carry around than a typical paperback. And, of course, it can carry the equivalent of tens of thousands of titles — the 64Mb of internal memory is sufficient for a hundred or so e-books (most are only a few hundred Kb), plus there are both CompactFlash and SD Card slots for additional storage, and a USB port for reading files stored on USB flash drive.

Using the iLiad is simple enough — a long rocker switch on the left of the case turns an e-book’s pages (with longer presses jumping five pages at a time), and both it and the buttons above and below it are used to navigate the simple menu system. Despite packing a reasonably powerful processor, the iLiad is very slow to operate — it takes some 45 seconds to boot and a second to turn each page. This isn’t much of a problem in actual use, but it takes a little getting used to.

The iLiad can read a variety of text and image file formats, but on-screen formatting is largely dictated by that of the original document, and you can’t change either the font or the paragraph alignment. The former is a particular problem as the most legible of the two supplied fonts, Vera Sans, isn’t ideal for e-book reading and doesn’t render at all well below relatively large point sizes. The iLiad’s software is updated on a regular basis though, and if messages in the iRex user forums are anything to go by, the developers are very receptive to suggestions for improvements.

As a demonstration of e-ink technology, the iLiad is undeniably impressive and we have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who prefers e-books to the real thing. It’s still in need of several software improvements and there’s no getting around that sky-high price, but if you’ve got a surfeit of money and a shortage of shelf space, the iLiad is the best e-book reader we’ve seen to date.