iRiver Story HD Review

PC World - Google is everywhere right now. The company has made a strong push with its Google Books project, but until now it hasn't had a tie-in to a stand-alone e-reader. That changes with the iRiver Story HD, which goes on sale this weekend at Target for $140. The Story HD makes getting Google ebooks onto an E Ink-based reader reasonably easy; in my trials with the device, however, I found myself frustrated by the Story HD's cheap design, poky performance, and Google Books interface.

The Story HD does a great job of distinguishing itself in display quality. As its HD moniker implies, the 6-inch display carries a 768-by-1024-pixel resolution, the result of an improved electronics backplane. That higher-res backplane in turn helps the E Ink technology--which already uses dozens of microcapsules per pixel to form letters and images on the screen--look better. IRiver is the first manufacturer to ship this technology in the United States; Hanvon currently uses it in China.

The result: Text looks sharp and clear, with smooth rendering and no pixelation or artifacts. The display supports 16-level grayscale. Text appears finer on the Story HD than on the third-generation Amazon Kindle, but its black tones lack the contrast and punch of the Kindle (and the Barnes & Noble Nook, for that matter). The lower contrast may be, in part, an optical illusion caused by the Story HD's beige bezel; the Kindle and Nook each use a dark gray, borderline black bezel. Personally, I prefer the dark bezel to the cream-colored texture of the Story HD.

I routinely found the light text to be an issue while reading. Although the sans serif font--the Story HD offers only one font choice--rendered smoothly and lacked pixelation, the weak contrast meant that my eyes had to work harder to read. Contrast improved dramatically when I bumped up the font size from the default third option to the larger sixth option (you get eight in total).

Changing fonts is simple, at least: You press the dedicated font button (two buttons over from the spacebar), and then you use the navigation bar and enter key to preview and select a font size. The maximum font size should be big enough to accommodate anyone whose eyesight requires large print, but Barnes & Noble's Nook offers even larger text.

The font size is fixed, however, on the home screen. The text is adequate for book titles, but associated information at the right is surprisingly small, and could be a challenge for some users to read. The advantage is that you have a lot of information available in one screen--the source of the book, the file type, and the author name--and the information is pleasingly presented in a consistent layout.