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Review: eGlide Reader2 Android Tablet

The Reader2 tablet is the second of  recent tablets launched by eMatic, a small gadget company. It looks to have been originally designed by another company (Rockchips would be my guess), with eMatic importing it into the US.

This is a cheap 7″ Android tablet, and it’s running v2.1 Froyo on a 1GHz CPU. As you can see it has a basic tablet shape with slots and ports on the lower edge, a speaker on the back, power button in the bottom left corner and the 4 buttons to the right of the screen.

 

Pros

  • cheap ($99 retail)

Cons

  • marginal build quality
  • buggy software
  • poor battery life
  • poor touchscreen

 Hardware

The eGlide Reader2 is one of those crossover tablet designs. For the most part it is a tablet, but it also has some details of an ebook reader. That’s where the 4 buttons to the right of the screen came from. Two are page turn buttons and the other 2 are the standard Android back and home buttons.

The overall feel of the tablet is about what I expected for a cheap tablet. That’s not a criticism; the tablet feels fine. But there are a couple of hardware details that are disappointing. For example, the microSD card slot is poorly mounted. Somehow I managed to insert my card into the case while completely missing the slot (that’s something I’ve never seen before). Luckily I was able to get a pair of tweezers and pull it out again before it was permanently lost inside the case.

And then there is the touchscreen. This is a truly junky touchscreen. It does not like fingertips nor does it work well with a stylus.  I’ve used a lot of touchscreens, and no matter what I did to change how I pressed the screen I still could not get it to work consistently. Even after I calibrated the touchscreen I still saw a high number of mis-hit keys. And they’re not my fault; the issue persisted after I switched to a stylus.

Battery Life

The Reader2 is specced at 22 hours music or 9 hours of reading.  Unfortunately, I never got to use it that long. There have been several mornings that I picked up the Reader2 and found the battery almost drained overnight.

This tablet looks to have the same battery life issue as the eGlide Reader Pro that I reviewed a couple weeks back. It looks to me like neither tablet has an actual sleep mode; when you press the power button you merely turn off the screen. The tablet is still running down the battery.

Video & Audio

The Reader2 comes with a fairly good audio video players. It can play background music while you are using other apps.  The sound quality was acceptable, considering that it had just the one cheap speaker on the back. But the one speaker also wasn’t very loud, not even when I cupped my hand. This is definitely a tablet that needs headphones.

The tablet came with a number of sample videos (480×854). They played fine without dropped frames or visual artifacts. The image quality was decent for cheap Android tablets (an IPS screen this is not). I don’t have anything with a higher resolution at the moment so I couldn’t push the abilities. Unfortunately I could not play my usual test video on Youtube; the Reader2 won’t play the video in the browser (and the Youtube app wouldn’t install).

Apps

I covered the stock apps in my first impressions post, so here I’ll just discuss trying to install apps. I got the Amazon Apstore to install okay, but I’ve had to repeatedly go back and reenter my log in info in the Appstore app.  I also got some unexplained errors when trying to install  the Youtube app. Angry birds eventually managed to install, and it runs slowly.

I also had a mysterious error while trying to read ebooks in the Kindle app. It told me to delete the ebook and download it again. I did, and the problem persisted. BTW, I’ve seen a similar problem on other tablets with a Rockchip CPU (including the eGlide Reader Pro). I generally take this as a sign that there is a problem in the original firmware that some single developer is using on multiple devices.

Reading Experience

Given the numerous other issues with this tablet I’m not sure that this section is worth writing. But for the sake of completeness-

The eGlide Reader2 comes with both the Kobo app and a stock reading app. The stock app supports Adobe DE DRM, and it reads Epub, PDF, and an number of other formats. It’s workable, and it has a nice minimum set of features ( 5 font sizes, TOC support, bookmarks). But it also a faux page curl, and I hate that. PDF support is okay, but the app only supports 5 zoom levels and does not reflow the PDF. A standard 8.5×11 PDF is readable on the 1.25 zoom setting. You can also zoom in closer and then swipe your way around the screen. The zoom will persist after you turn the page.

The Kobo app is their usual Android app. It had a lot of features, including a night reading mode, both serif and san-serif fonts, a slider bar of font sizes annotation, and a special menu just for the highlights and notes. BTW, the page turn buttons don’t work with the Kobo app; that’s a limitation of the app.

The stock reading app was actually nicer to use than the Kobo app because of the page turn buttons. It was easy to keep my thumb wedged below the next page button and then shift it up ever so sightly to tun the page. The stock app will also accept screen taps ans swipes for age turns, which is nice.

Expectations

I was expecting a cheap Android tablet that would be underpowered for most activities but still work okay for use as an ebook reader and for light web browsing.

Opinion

The low price of this Android tablet is reflected in its poor build quality.The builders scrimped on everything from the touchscreen to how much they paid the programmers. I believe there are better options out there.

Specs

I have the spec sheet here.

  • 1GHz CPU
  • Android v2.1
  • 7″ (800×480) LCD screen
  • resistive touchscreen
  • Wifi
  • g-sensor
  • 4GB Flash
  • microSD card slot
  • speaker/mike
  • ebook format support: ePub, TXT, PDF, MOBI, LRC-FB2, RTF, HTML, PDB
  • audio/video support: MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, OGG, MPG, RMVB, WMV, WAV, MP4, AVI, FLV, ASF, 3GP, RM, DAT

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Comments


Henry J April 9, 2012 um 10:38 am

Do not buy this junk! Unless you need a door stop or drink coaster, cause thats about all its
good for! Have sent back twice to company! Customer service sucks and the tablet itself
should be sold as a 2 year olds play toy! Very slow, bad touch screen, horriable battery life
My mother purchased witout me present and now shes upset, guess i have to go buy her a
REAL TABLET!!! Apple store here I come! 🙂 YOU WILL BE SORRY IF YOU BUY THIS!

Misty April 10, 2012 um 8:05 pm

Wish I had seen these feed backs BEFORE I allowed my daughter to talk me into this junk.


Misty April 10, 2012 um 8:04 pm

TERRIBLE! Then to top it all off, the company contacted me in reference to my BAD Feedback on Amazon.com, told me that I HAD to remove my feedback in order for them to help me resolve my issues. Gave me a bogus phone number to call them and get the information so that I could return it for a full refund. NOW my feedback is gone, I have no way to reach anyone about a refund and still have a peace of junk for my child to TRY to use as her reader! Very UNHAPPY with this company for putting high standards on a piece of JUNK!


Craig August 2, 2012 um 10:38 am

Misty – I had a similiar expereince with an Amazon Vender. I appealed to Amazon with basically the question, "Do you (Amazon) agree with vendor and only want positive feedback?" Amazon moved in quickly and agressively to resolve the issue. I give Amazon high marks for that.


Natalie December 17, 2012 um 3:52 am

I got one as a gift from my dad and it is the biggest piece of shit ever. I have never seen such a low quality product. Right out of the box the touch screen fucked up on me & not even a week later the charger stopped working. & now it won’t even turn on.,how could u even sell that?

Ronnie December 12, 2013 um 5:53 pm

Thank you! It won’t even turn on now and I had to reset it how many darn times!

I really wish I’d seen this before my purchase.


Ethan Schoenheit December 25, 2013 um 12:11 am

My screen is so messed that you can’t even see what you are doing on the stupid thing!


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