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Review: Pocketbook 650 Ultra

620_pocketbook-ultra[1] The Pocketbook Ultra is one of those devices that looks better on the drawing board than in real life.

It combines an innovative design (rear page turn buttons and a 5MP camera) with poor and buggy software and a disappointing screen, resulting in an ereader which is easily the worst model released in 2014.

I bought my unit  in early September, and between the shipping cost and retail I paid $240. It was not worth it.

Table of Contents
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Pro & Con

Pro

  • If you have too much money on your hands, the Pocketbook Ultra is one way to fix the issue.
  • The parts of the Pocketbook software and bonus apps that weren’t completely buggy were nice, yes.

Con (Pretty much everything)

  • Screen
  • Frontlight
  • Nonfunctional OCR software
  • Page turn buttons
  • Buggy reading software

Hardware

At 7.9mm thin, the Ultra is one of the thinner ereaders on the market, rivaling even the Kindle Voyage. It has a 6″ Carta E-ink screen with frontlight and touchscreen, and it runs Pocketbook’s proprietary OS on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage.

The Ultra is available in 3 colors (white, green, brown), and in the absence of a black model you will want to get the brown one. (I’ll explain this later.) My unit was white.

It had a smooth white back with a black front inset in a white frame. There are two page turn buttons in the center of the left and right edge on the back, and on the front you’ll find four mystery buttons  below the screen. The power button, headphone jack, microSD card slot , and microUSB port can be found on the lower edge (the last two are hidden under a flap.)

All in all, this is a solidly built ereader, but it has many problems. The mystery buttons below the screen add confusion, and the stiff page turn buttons add frustration. Between those buttons and the general poor screen quality this is one design that should never have been released to the public.

Screen

The Ultra supposedly has a Carta E-ink screen, but you would not be able to tell that from looking. This ereader has a fuzzy and gray screen which is noticeably inferior to the E-ink screen on pretty much any other ereader.

In part this is due to the white shell making the screen look gray, but it is also the fact that the frontlight and capacitive touchscreen layer degrade the screen quality. (This is why you should get the brown unit, and not white).

pocketbook ultra 640 screen 1

Speaking of the frontlight, I think it is the worst one I have seen this year – and that includes the splotchy frontlight on the Boyue T61. I’m not sure how Pocketbook did it, but the frontlight on my Ultra actually makes the screen look more gray and fuzzier when it as turned up to full power.

I don’t know how they did it, but part of the reason I noted this issue is that the frontlights on the Aura H2O and on the Boox T68 Lynx tended to make the screen look whiter and clearer as the brightness increased.

pocketbook ultra 640 frontlight 2

With those other ereaders, I liked to have the frontlight (even when I don’t need it) set to the lowest setting so that the screen would look whiter. But when I used the Ultra I kept the frontlight off most of the time; it was that unpleasant to use.

Battery Life

As I sit here writing this review on Saturday, my Ultra is sitting on my desk charging. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks as my main ebook reader, and today is the second time that I needed to charge it.

Based on my experience I would estimate the battery life to be about 6 or 7 days, with the frontlight off. That’s not amazing but it is in line with many other ereaders.

Camera

The Pocketbook Ultra ships with a 5MP camera, with flash.  Even though it was difficult to see what you were photographing on the E-ink screen, the camera still worked well at capturing utility quality photos.  The flash didn’t prove useful when I was taking pictures of text, or when I took a picture of my dog, Archie (aka Destructor).

The camera worked okay, yes, but now that I’ve had it for a week I’m not sure that it was a good idea to put one on an ebook reader.

The Ultra was slow to take photos, and slow to show them on the screen. That made it hard to make sure that that I was taking a usable photo. And let’s be honest: the image quality was marginal at best, so you’re not going to be using the Ultra as your main camera. (And then there’s the OCR software.)

Software

Pocketbook is well-known for offering very adequate software and the option to expand existing features by installing apps. The Ultra also has a camera and a text conversion feature which I will cover at the end of this section.

In terms of reading features, the Ultra offers a several formatting options, notes, highlights, bookmarks, a bevy of dictionary options (including translation dictionaries), and text to speech.

pocketbook ultra 5As far as apps go, the Ultra ships with a web browser, file manager, calculator, several games (klondike, chess, sudoku), notpad, sketchpad, Dropbox, RSS feed reader, mp3 player, Pocketbook sync (integration with Bookland, Pocketbook’s ebookstore), and Send to Pocketbook. That last feature is similar in function to Amazon’s Kindle email conversion service, albeit without the conversion.

Few of the apps interested me, but even so this is one area where Pocketbook excels. While I don’t recommend buying this ereader, I do think that the option to add features by installing apps is one reason to consider Pocketbook hardware.

Camera + OCR

One of the hotter selling points for the Pocketbook Ultra is the 5MP camera and option to take a photo of text and convert it to a note which can be edited. Alas, this does not work – not at all.

As I reported last weekend in my first impressions post, this feature simply doesn’t work. The camera is very good and can take legible photos of single pages of notes. Unfortunately, the OCR software is simply unable to process those images and convert them to text.

I’ve tried on multiple occasions, and the best result was incomplete and terribly inaccurate. And that is a shame because this was the one feature which I was most looking forward to.

But on the plus side the camera app does include the option to take photos and assemble the images into a PDF.  That could prove useful.

Reading Experience

pocketbook ultra 2In the past three months I have reviewed four ereaders, including the T68 Lynx, the Aura H2O, the Boyue T61, and the Ultra. Of the 4 devices, the Ultra is the only one that I actually hate to read on.

The Pocketbook Ultra offers an unpleasant reading experience which is marred by a  bad screen and frontlight, stiff and inconveniently placed page turn buttons, a slow page turn speed, and buggy software. I’ve covered the screen in an earlier section of this review, so let me discuss the other issues.

The rear facing page turn buttons on the Ultra are one of those ideas that look great in concept but don’t work out in practice. They’re small and placed near the edge of the rear of the Ultra. That makes them hard for me to press; I basically have to pinch them with the side of my finger, an awkward move.

And thanks to the slow page turn speed, I have plenty of time to focus with my frustration over the buttons. The Ultra is noticeably slower to turn the page than the Kindle Paperwhite, Aura HD, or any other current ereader.

What’s more, the software is unusually buggy. It’s not just that the Ultra crashed or dropped out of an ebook; instead it kept half turning the page, turning several pages at once, freezing, and at times the touchscreen would stop working.

On at least a half dozen occasions the Ultra would refresh only half of the screen. The left half of the screen would show words from the new page, while the right half of the screen would show words from the old page. And sometimes it was the other way around.

Between the refresh issue, the time the touchscreen stopped responding, and the other issues, I had a very frustrating reading experience on the Pocketbook Ultra.

Verdict

The Pocketbook Ultra reminds me of something Dorothy Parker once said: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force."

I think that is an excellent recommendation for the Ultra. This ereader is a disappointment in every way, including price, hardware design, software, screen quality, and reading experience.

I had high hopes for the Ultra when I first saw it earlier this year; it has a number of innovative design ideas including a camera, OCR software, and page turn buttons moved to the back. But none of those ideas worked out in practice.

Where to Buy

The Pocketbook Ultra is readily available in Europe but is difficult to buy outside of the region. If you’re in Europe I would suggest checking Amazon’s websites and Pocketbook’s local sites. You should be able to find a retailer who will ship.

I know that the Pocketbook site in France will ship to the US (it’s where I bought a different Pocketbook device).

Specs

  • CPU: 1GHz
  • RAM: 256MB
  • Screen: 6″ Carta E-ink (1024 x 758 resolution)
  • Capacitive Touchscreen, Frontlight
  • Storage: 4GB Internal, microSD card slot
  • Wifi
  • Camera: 5MP, with flash
  • Weight:175 grams
  • Dimensions: 162.7 by 106.7 by 7.9 mm

 

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Comments


Name (required) October 5, 2014 um 5:00 am

It is not easy to read this review for a hard-core PocketBook fan like me.
Yet, there are very few points that can be argued … sigh … they did screw the software in terms of features and configurability and OCR is not usable under any real-world conditions.
One nitpick anyway ;-): it has 512MB RAM, not 256MB.
See company web page at: http://www.pocketbook-int.com/us/products/pocketbook-ultra#specifications

You haven’t mentioned the magnets on the back that I personally consider a big deal, because I will be able to make a decent cover.
You haven’t mentioned magnets at the front that hold the front cover closed and a sensor for the "sleep cover". The sensor can be tested with any magnet that you place below the PocketBook label on the front frame.

Did you update the firmware to the latest Beta? My review model did not have problems with stability, skipping pages, slow pageturns after the update.

Nate Hoffelder October 5, 2014 um 7:18 am

I updated to the latest official release, yes.

Name (required) October 5, 2014 um 7:27 am

Official release from their page is 5.1
The latest Beta that I was able to get is 5.2.189
Not that it matters that much, but I think your reader might crash less with the beta firmware.

Nate Hoffelder October 5, 2014 um 9:47 am

If Pocketbook had made an effort to give me the beta firmwares, I would try them. But since they have ignored a number of emails I don’t feel compelled to go out of my way to install untested and unsupported firmwares.

Sorry, but the silence from Pocketbook basically means the beta firmwares have no warranty. They’re just not worth the risk.

trekk October 5, 2014 um 11:36 am

"They’re just not worth the risk."

If this reader is such a mess, you are not risking anything using an untested beta firmware, Nate 😉 Things can only get better.

Nate Hoffelder October 5, 2014 um 12:16 pm

They’re also not worth the hassle.

And in any case, I’m planning to go annoy Pocketbook until they give me my money back.


Marie October 5, 2014 um 9:40 am

Did you figure out what the "mystery buttons" are for?

Name (required) October 5, 2014 um 10:33 am

Home, Page Back, Page Forward, Menu – just like on previous models. They are just not labelled on this device.
User manual tells you what they are and it is not difficult to find out on your own.

Nate Hoffelder October 5, 2014 um 11:26 am

(Sorry, I missed this comment before.)

Yes, I know what the mystery buttons do. I just dislike that they are unlabeled, and that the only page back button on the Ultra is unlabeled.

Marie October 5, 2014 um 9:39 pm

I just loved that you called them "mystery buttons." 😀

Nate Hoffelder October 5, 2014 um 10:15 pm

Thank you.

Part of my frustration comes from the fact that the buttons are not just unlabeled, they’re non-obvious. If you didn’t know they are there you might miss them.


Boyue T62+ Android eReader Has a Carta E-ink Screen, Costs $118 ⋆ Ink, Bits, & Pixels March 28, 2015 um 1:27 pm

[…] the quality of the screens can vary a lot. The Carta screen can be better, but as we saw with the Pocketbook Ultra it is possible for a device maker to screw things up and produce a Carta E-ink screen which is […]


Gerard Bohte October 24, 2015 um 10:23 am

I bought more than 1 reader but Pocketbook Ultra 650 was the most expensive ( except Irex the first ) and also the most worthless. This reader will soon
away from the market.


Nuha January 6, 2016 um 1:49 am

Hi, you are really help me i cancelled my order i hope amazon excerpt that
So what the best reader i am tired i search alot about the best i have onyx M96 but i don’t love it so much i don’t know why i can’t update it
If can help me again about what the best e Reader support arabic language please tell me..
Thank you.


Sanshii February 10, 2016 um 11:15 am

Hmm… I just bought this really good looking eBook reader about 2 month ago, and I simply love it. I have Kindle Paperwhite too, and yes, that’s faster and whiter, still, reading with this small beautiful eBook reader is so much better. I love how it looks, I love the lots of fonts I can use, and you can put many option on those 'mystery buttons', that’s why it has no label, I reassigned them, and love to use it. The Kindle built in fonts looks ugly to me.

The PocketBook Ultra feels good to hold, it’s good to read, and actually better to turn page with than the Kindle Paperwhite, you have 3 kind of way to turn page (the mystery buttons, the back buttons, and the screen, like with the kindle, but you can turn forward and back with left hand too with PocketBook).

I never run into any bug, it works good, and I really like that I can use the book cover as turn off page gaphics, I always missed this option from the Kindle. It worth the money I spent on it. 🙂

So just because someone tested an old, buggy firmware don’t throw out this beauty, give it a chance. I’m really happy I didn’t read this review before buying my favorite eBook reader. 🙂 Oh, and my PocketBook Ultra (I have the green version) don’t look gray when I turn on the light. Not as white ad the Kindle Paperwhite, but not bad at all.


nel January 7, 2020 um 12:26 am

"If Pocketbook had made an effort to give me the beta firmwares, I would try them. But since they have ignored a number of emails "

Disappointed by the fairness of the test. If don’t make effort, it’s not a good test. I will search in another place a fair test to decide which one I’ll buy.


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