iriver Story HD

Google has been an ebook retailer for a while now, but without a dedicated ebook reader, entering the Google Books ecosystem wasn't as compelling to consumers as the offerings from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The iriver Story HD is the first dedicated device with Google eBooks inside, and at $139, it's priced to compete with Amazon's Kindle ($139-$189, 4 stars) and the latest Barnes & Noble Nook ($139, 4.5 stars). It offers some superior specs too, like a Cortex A8 processor and a higher-resolution screen. It's a good product, but both the hardware and software fall short of the Kindle and the Nook. Also, Google eBooks isn't as strong an ecosystem as what you'll get from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, nor is it as tightly integrated with the device. If you're a Google fanatic, the Story HD could your ebook reader, but otherwise it's not good enough to unthrone our reigning king, the Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader.

The Hardware
To the untrained eye, the Story HD looks an awful lot like a Kindle. Both have 6-inch, E Ink screens, with a full QWERTY keyboard below, and the Story HD is mostly white, like earlier-generation Kindles. Emulating the Kindle is mostly a good thing, even though the Story HD feels a bit dated considering all the touch-screen ebook readers we've seen lately: the new Nook, the Kobo eReader Touch Edition ($129, 3.5 stars), and the Sony Reader Touch Edition ($229, 3 stars). At 7.5 by 5.0 by 0.4 inches (HWD), it's almost exactly the same size as the Kindle, but at 7.3 ounces, it's 1.4 ounces lighter. The Story HD comes with a white front and a drab brownish back panel. The keyboard is brown as well, which mars an otherwise sleek and attractive face. Otherwise, there's not much else to discuss except an SD card slot on the right side, a mini-USB port on the bottom, and a power slider cleverly positioned on the back, right where your fingers land when you pick up the device.

The keyboard feels like a relic of ebook readers of yore. The Nook and Kobo Touch Edition both have on-screen E Ink keyboards that work remarkably well, and they make the extra size and bulk that comes with the Story HD seem like an unnecessary trade-off. It's not a great keyboard, either: The keys are too small (even smaller than on the Kindle), and feel stuck, as if you spilled something sticky that has made them difficult to press. In general, the Story HD looks fine, but feels a little flimsy and toy-like when you get it in your hands.

Above the keyboard are four buttons?Home, Back, Enter, and Option?and a long metallic bar that is used for scrolling and for turning pages. You can press on the right side to turn pages forward, or simply press the whole bar downward. I prefer either the swipe-on-screen, or buttons on either side of the screen method, but this layout worked fine, and the Story HD can fortunately be used with a single hand. Frustratingly, though, you can't click the middle of the bar to select; you have to jump back and forth to the adjacent Enter button, which I never really got used to.

The screen is one of the best selling points for the Story HD. It's beautiful, and after reading on it for a few hours the Nook and Kindle seem blurry and low-resolution by comparison. It's a 1,024 by 768 XGA E Ink display, much higher than the 800-by-600 screens on the Kindle and Nook. Since it's E Ink, everything comes in shades of gray, but its clarity and sharpness are a world apart. No matter how small you make the text, it's still sharp, unlike the Nook and Kindle, which tend to get much softer, and drop parts of letters when they get too small. Image-heavy books look far better, though without color much is still lost.

The Story HD comes with 2GB of storage built in (you can add up to 32GB more via the SD slot), along with Wi-Fi and a zippy Cortex A8 processor. The CPU makes most operations fast and responsive, though the overall speed is hindered a bit by E Ink, which can only refresh but so fast. Generally, it's a faster device than either Kindle or Nook, but not significantly so. The 2GB of internal storage is equal to the Nook's storage and half of the Kindle's 4GB, but it's good for about 1,500 books?you won't run into storage issues here, especially without periodicals or magazines available. The battery, iriver claims, will last up to 10 weeks, but with heavy use should land somewhere around half that figure.

Google eBooks
Featured prominently on the home screen is a link to the Google ebookstore, which opens a Webkit browser. (You can't use the browser for anything else, though, so it's no different than having a built-in store.) There, you can browse all of Google's 3 million ebooks, the vast majority of which are free, public domain classics. The bookstore is much the same as the Amazon or Barnes & Noble stores, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in the way of popular content. The Google store has a clean and simple interface that helps you find books; it's not as helpful in recommending things to read as other platforms, but it offers some bestseller lists and a powerful search feature that you'd expect from Google. There are no newspapers or magazines in the store, though. Once you find a book you want, one tap lets you purchase it via a Google Checkout account. (If you haven't set up a Google Checkout account before, do it on a computer rather than on the Story HD, it's much faster that way.) You can also buy books from a computer, which I found myself doing more often than not.

Paying for a book doesn't put it on your device, though. Once you buy a book, it lives in your online Google Library, and the Story HD syncs periodically with that library. It's a fairly standard setup, but I found that more than a couple of times I had to manually refresh the Story HD to get it to notice the new book in my library. It's not a hard process, typically involving just going to the home screen or going into the Options menu, but it's not as nice as the Kindle's Whispernet, which magically whisks new books and today's paper to your Kindle, and when you pick it up new content is usually already there. The Story HD is Wi-Fi only, and lack of 3G means you'll need a hotspot to download or sync books.

The upside to Google eBooks, of course, is that everything you own lives online, where you can access your library on any device with a Web browser. Google's Web reader is clean and simple, and a surprisingly functional way to read a book. There are Android and iOS apps, too, which stay in sync with your books and your place in them. Google's ebooks are all PDFs or ePubs, formats that are easily exportable to a large number of other gadgets, so you'll never be locked in to a single device ecosystem like Kindle owners are.

The Reading Experience
Reading on the Story HD is a mixed bag. The Home screen has a prominent link to your last-read item and to the bookstore, as well as ways to sort your library by author or title, or see what you've read recently. It's clean, simple, and text-based, but better looking than the Kindle's too-simple, text-based home screen.

The high-res screen makes just about everything more pleasant to look at, but it can't solve every problem. For instance, many of the free Google ebooks are simply scanned paper books. Google handles and re-flows text properly, but pages like the cover and the Table of Contents often appeared to be poorly scanned, off-center, or tilted. Once you get to the text, though, that's not really an issue.

Other than a several-second lag when you first open the book, reading is very fast and fluid. Pages turned very quickly, and very reliably?in all my tests, I never had a single press go unnoticed. The screen does flash with each and every page turn, much like the Kindle, but since the Kobo Touch Edition and the Nook only flash every five or so pages, it feels outdated. As you're reading, you can easily look up a word in the built-in dictionary, or jump to a page or chapter.

My biggest issues while reading books were the things I couldn't do. I couldn't change the margins, which are too wide and bump up against the edge of the device. I couldn't change the font type or the line spacing. I couldn't, for some reason that's totally inexplicable on a Google-friendly device, search within a book. I couldn't make annotations, except to bookmark a page. You can choose among eight text sizes, and that's as far as it goes for customizing the reading experience.

Two years ago, the iriver Story HD would likely have been a serious contender. But in 2011, where the Nook and Kobo readers have received major upgrades, and the Kindle remains an excellent device, using the Story HD feels like reading in a time machine. It works fine, and the Google integration is nice, but it just might be too late for the iriver Story HD. For now, the Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader remains the best ebook reader on the market, and the Kindle is a close second.

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