The Pocketbook Verse Professional Shade is a brand new e-reader that has solely been accessible to buy for the previous few weeks. The commercial design and software program expertise is equivalent to the Pocketbook Verse Professional black and white mannequin, besides the Verse Professional Shade has an E INK Kaleido 3 e-paper show. That is excellent for viewing book cowl artwork, PDF recordsdata, comics, and magazines. The large promoting factors are the bodily page-turn buttons, IPX8 water safety, audiobook help with Bluetooth, Textual content-toÂ-Speech perform, adaptive SMARTlight characteristic, and Quad-Core processor.
{Hardware}
The Verse Professional Color contains a 6-inch E INK Kaleido 3 color e-paper show with a black-and-white decision of 1448×1072 and 300 PPI and a color decision of 536×724 and 150 PPI. Verse Professional Shade delivers beautiful readability and element. Reproducing 4096 colors and shades, PocketBook Verse Professional Shade supplies an eye-safe, glare-free, and comfy e-reading expertise, as its optical traits are as near peculiar printed pages as potential.
The e-reader’s Shade scheme is piano black on the back and front platting, and there’s a strip of gunmetal gray alongside the facet of the bezel; Pocketbook has named this color Stormy. The entrance of the e-reader has a slight dip and a recessed display with no glass; that is nice because the display received’t replicate gentle from overhead lighting or when studying outdoor within the solar.
SMARTlight enhances the studying expertise by providing a customizable frontlight. Customers can tailor their lighting preferences from a peaceful, bluish tone for daylight studying to a heat, soothing yellow hue for bedtime tales. With guide mode, modify brightness and select between heat or cool tones, saving personalised settings for easy switching. In automated mode, SMARTlight intelligently adapts brightness and color temperature based mostly on the time of day, making certain optimum studying situations.
Beneath the hood is a quad-core 1.8ghz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of inside storage. There’s a g-sensor for automated display rotation and Bluetooth 5.4 to pair wi-fi headphones and earbuds to hearken to audiobooks sideloaded to the e-reader or bought from the Pocketbook Bookstore. Twin-band WIFi will enable customers to connect with the web and use the browser to surf the online or hook up with stated bookstore. Licensed to face up to immersion in contemporary water as much as 2 meters deep for 60 minutes, PocketBook Verse Shade Professional lets customers dive into their favorite ebook, whether or not taking a shower or lounging by the pool. Designed for an lively way of life, Verse Shade Professional combines compactness and performance with sturdy water resistance, permitting customers to learn with out worrying about water publicity. With IPX8 safety, customers can really feel assured studying in any surroundings, whether or not caught within the rain or having fun with a soothing soak with their favorite ebook. It’s powered by a 2100 mAh battery with dimensions of 108 × 156 × 7,6 mm and weighs 182g.
Software program
Pocketbook has all the time run Linux on all of its e-readers, the identical OS that the Amazon Kindle and Kobo e-readers make use of. This OS helps protect battery life as a result of no background processes are working. Additionally it is rock-stable and rarely crashes. It’s tremendous powerful, though this prevents customers from putting in any apps on the system. Pocketbook is utilizing Linux 3.10.65 on the Verse Professional Shade.
The primary house display includes a widget on the high, showcasing the books you’re studying or have downloaded from the shop and haven’t began but. If there are a number of books you’re within the strategy of studying, there’s a multi-page format, which you’ll be able to swipe on to see the following couple of books on the carousel. Round 9 bestselling titles are beneath some really useful books from the Pocketbook Retailer. The primary navigation has icons with textual content beneath them. They supply shortcuts to your library, audiobook participant, retailer, be aware taking and apps.
Your library is the place your whole content material is housed, and you may separate it by codecs, creator, date and type by checklist view or cowl artwork view. If a few of your books nonetheless have to cowl artwork photographs since you downloaded them on-line, a metadata system will have a look at the ebook’s title and creator and fetch metadata. You’ll doubtless be on this display since you purchase and cargo lots of of books. You may as well hit switches on a specific ebook to flag it as completed, making it disappear from the house display. Since this can be a color e-reader, all cowl artwork will seem in vibrant, full color.
The Retailer is one thing that Pocketbook has been engaged on for a very long time. They’ve been ironing out offers with publishers to inventory bestsellers and books you wish to learn, not open-source royalty-free textbooks. If you purchase a Pocketbook, some titles are solely European, or your value is perhaps in Euros. All you must do is contact the corporate and provides them your serial quantity; they’ll change the area the place you’re based mostly. We all the time do that with our evaluation items, so it solely exhibits English books and Canadian {dollars}. There’s a starred ranking system, a pattern obtain is accessible, and you may learn the outline and commonplace fare. Nevertheless, Kindle and Kobo have extra complete content material choices since they each have self-publishing platforms, comparable to KDP and KWL. Additionally they inventory thousands and thousands of books in several markets all around the world. Pocketbook may need a number of thousand, however not less than they’re engaged on increasing it. Additionally they launched an audiobook part, so that you don’t need to sideload every thing; you’ll be able to obtain and hearken to them on the audiobook participant.
The Apps part primarily includes all of the completely different Pocketbook apps like Sending to Pocketbook, Pocketbook Cloud, Dropbox, and some video games like chess. Pocketbook does have a number of apps that reap the benefits of the color display. The primary is primarily aimed toward children; it’s a colouring ebook. You might have eight major colors you could select from. Faucet on varied photographs, they usually fill the thing. There’s a sketch app, too. Draw, take notes or develop studying or to-do- lists.
There are a number of settings and choices that I wish to draw consideration to. System-wide darkish mode inverts the color of your show. The background will be black, and all textual content is white. Wish to know the way a lot you’re utilizing the sunshine? A brand new graph breaks down your entire day and exhibits whether or not you employ the front-lit show or color temperature system. The bodily buttons, comparable to house, settings and the page-turn buttons, will be keyed to do various things.
Studying
This e-reader is designed for studying books, and customers can entry the Pocketbook Retailer to obtain hundreds of books. Nevertheless, the actual energy is sideloading in your content material; it helps DRM EPUB and PDF recordsdata and books you obtain on-line. It has intensive help for ACSM, AZW, AZW3, CBR, CBZ, CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB(DRM), EPUB, FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTM, HTML, MOBI, PDF (DRM), PDF, PRC, RTF, and TXT.
With DRM EPUB and PDF, customers should buy ebooks from different shops like Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Google. You may as well obtain books from the general public library, comparable to Overdrive. You should copy the ebook you purchased to your laptop or MAC and obtain Adobe Digital Editions. Create an account or log in to an present one. Choose the ebook you downloaded to the pc, plug in your Pocketbook Shade 2 to your PC and switch the ebook. It might be finest to make use of this software program as a result of Adobe should confirm you personal the ebook.
Talking of the library, Pocketbook has been supported by hundreds of European and North American public libraries within the apps part. You’ll be able to enter your native department or search by nation and choose the department you do enterprise with. Enter your library card quantity, and you may borrow and browse books in your e-reader without having a PC or MAC. This can be a very underrated characteristic that almost all reviewers ignore.
The bodily web page flip buttons are on the underside of the display, which is much less intuitive than having them on the perimeters of the display. With that out of the way in which, Pocketbook has one of the best page-turn buttons within the enterprise; they’re simple to press down and have good construct high quality. Unintentional miss clicks are uncommon. When you maintain down on the web page ahead or again, you’ll be able to quickly flip pages in any path. That is much like the system the Kobo Aura One Restricted Version and Kindle Manga Reader used.
The inventory book reader is what you’ll use every day to learn ebooks since there aren’t any different choices. That is because of the incapacity to obtain apps since that is working Linux and never Google Android. You’ll be able to faucet or gesture to show the pages of the ebook. One of the vital glorious new software program options is the flexibility to pinch and zoom to vary how massive you need the fonts to be as a substitute of going to the book settings menu. This makes it extra intuitive for brand spanking new customers of e-readers. You may as well improve the dimensions of the fonts with a slider bar. Round 50 completely different fonts are pre-loaded, however you’ll be able to set up your personal. After all, like every e-reader, you’ll be able to modify the margins and fonts.
One in all my favorite settings on the Verse Professional Shade is the visible settings. You’ll be able to change the distinction, saturation and brightness. That is helpful if you happen to learn a scanned doc or the textual content is simply too gentle and wish to make it darker. A latest firmware replace launched darkish mode. Utilizing Darkish mode in your PocketBook can present extra consolation in studying in low-light environments and at nighttime. This characteristic alters the show settings, presenting white textual content on a darkish background, which doesn’t distinction with the darkish environment and doesn’t intervene with the eyes. You may as well change the inversion of ebook illustrations whereas studying in Darkish mode.
Many avid readers have found that using Darkish mode on their units helps to ease fatigue of their eyes from a vibrant display. Furthermore, Darkish mode proves extremely helpful for nighttime studying, because it reduces the quantity of blue gentle emitted by the display, which may contribute to eyestrain and fatigue.
Pocketbook is a uncommon model with native help for CBR and CBZ, two of the world’s finest manga codecs. Discovering these on-line or shopping for from different shops and loading them in your PB is simple. You’ll be able to deal with these two codecs as file containers which have a bunch of images inside them. Essentially the most accessible reference is to think about a ZIP file full of images, however you don’t have to unzip the file to view them. It’s simple to search out these CBR/CBZ codecs on-line.
Wrap Up
Pocketbook has been making e-readers for over a decade, they usually have a storied profession in making glorious e-book readers with little to no bloatware. Most of their e-readers look alike, so there may be consistency of their model however little to separate them from each other. You set 4-5 Pocketbook e-readers facet by facet; visually, there may be little distinction.
The Verse Professional Shade is sensible if you’d like a platform-agnostic e-reading expertise. In contrast to Amazon, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble, pocketbooks don’t lock you right into a walled backyard. Positive, you should purchase books from the Pocketbook Retailer, however the actual energy is sideloading your assortment or downloading free audiobooks or ebooks from the Web.
I like to recommend the Verse Professional Shade if you’d like a superb e-reader with no additional frills like note-taking or drawing. All of your color content material will look implausible, and ditto with internet searching. Magazines, comics, newspapers, and PDF recordsdata will all look good, however the colored manga is the place it’s at.
Pocketbook Verse Professional Shade
$199.99
Execs
- Kaleido 3 coloration e-paper
- Good e-reader
- Audio capabilities with Bluetooth and Textual content-to-Speech
- SMARTligt and Darkish mode
- IPX8 waterproof
Cons
- Battery could possibly be higher
- Not a lot coloration content material on bookstore
- Need to sideload in every thing
- No Audio system
- Can’t set up apps
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the previous fifteen years. Newspapers and web sites such because the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Submit and the New York Occasions have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.