As part of my never-ending quest to find a ebook reader for comic books, I stumbled upon the PocketBook Color, made by, I believe, a Russian-Swiss company and featuring a color e-ink display.
The colors are really crips and convincing, the home menu is nicely presented and easy to use. This is better than my Kindle. Just like all e-ink devices display refreshes are very slow, and I think they are even slower than on my Kindle. You don’t want to turn a page on this device.
I don’t know why the colours are completely different on the screenshots than seen on the device. I could try to change this in the settings, perhaps, but the pages in the settings are painfully slow as well.
The display is really too small for a comic page and while there is a theoretical landscape mode to present the upper and lower half of a page bigger, the e-ink display cannot scroll and always cuts through a row of pictures, as seen in this lower half of a page.
The settings menus remind me of a tablet computer rather than an ebook reader device but the actual hardware is not so impressive.
1 GB of RAM and (nominaly) 16 GB of internal storage are not very impressive. The storage is certainly not sufficient for a comic book collection (or any ebooks that contain lots of colored pictures). According to the manual the device supports SD cards only up to 32 GB. My SD card is full already.
The device has some built-in apps rather than booting directly into a reader app and even offers some games which are actually not bad. I think it is possible to add more games and I also found instructions somewhere for download of a Linux-based SDK that allows creation of custom apps.
The web browser app was a nice surprise and works really (if slowly).
But the device really shines if used for ebooks with color pictures. It comes with a built-in library of out-of-copyright books in multiple languages.
And that’s the thing, while the device’s screen is too small for pre-formatted comic book and PDF files, it is large enough for ebooks since it can format them itself and present them in a readable format.
It is a great device to read comic books if you can read small fonts.
All-in-all this is not a bad device and if you have money to waste on something, this could be an option.