Cruz Reader Test

charles

Member
Aug 18, 2010
20
0
For what it's worth. While visiting a local Borders Book Store, I saw that they had a fully functional "Cruz Reader" on display and available to try out. Try before buying, a great idea. So head over to your local Borders and see if they have one available to play with.
Base on about 30 minutes of fooling around with it, my thoughts:

Display, 7 inches not bad as a size. ample room on the screen and surprisingly receptive to touch. Screen was not as bright as the Ipad. But $300 less. An acceptable trade off in my opinion.

Apps. I downloaded the Android Market app and then installed a few apps from there. They installed with no difficulty. I know that this probably doesn't apply to all apps but is still promising. The Cruz market is still a work in progress but so is the Android Market. so as long as we can get to the Android Market I don't see that as a major problem.

The one area I was surprised at is that Borders is marketing this as an e-reader and yet did not have a book on the device so as to show how capable it is in this area. For crying out loud, download one of the free books from Borders.com. Are you listening Borders employees?

My overall impression of the device is: A good unit, however Cruz has a better unit coming out soon, not to mention all the other tablets that will soon be here. At $199 I think that it is a bit expensive considering what we already know about the pricing of many of the others coming soon.

Anyway that's my opinion and I'm sticking by it.
 

gurgle

Super Moderator
Staff member
Aug 6, 2010
1,463
131
Agree Totally Charles.

I went there over the lunch hour and to just look today. This site still has the Coming soon ads stating October. So thought I would look and check up. They had the same thing. A display unit.

It did have an E-Book loaded. Funny thing, it was not from their site, but a Gutenberg Text download. I read the first few pages of Dracula. It reads well but is a bit dim.
What I noticed was it was:
Reasonable performance
A good feel
Too pricey

I mentioned that to the guy there who was more tech inclined. He said they will likely drop in price once some of the other units come out. He said most look at it and then go buy one of the Sony E-Books on close out. They were down to just one of the first gen Sony E-Readers on sale. Not a tablet, but a good Media player.
 

czahrt

Member
Sep 8, 2010
4
0
I just don't understand why the reader is 800x600 and the tablet is 800x480. It's $100 more with less res.
 

gadgetrants

Moderator
Staff member
Sep 22, 2010
1,256
81
I just don't understand why the reader is 800x600 and the tablet is 800x480. It's $100 more with less res.
An educated guess: Android has been a bit tablet-unfriendly, if you follow some recent press comments. (Hopefully Gingerbread will fix that.) Perhaps the assumption is that with 800x480, the tablet will be able to handle many/most of the same apps that were designed for phone screens. Counterpoint: in the time I owned the Pandigital Novel, with 800x600, I really didn't spot any scaling issues with Android apps designed for the smaller resolution.

-Matt
 

tlspencer

Member
Dec 30, 2010
26
0
I realize this is a slightly older post but... Android Market? It doesn't work on this reader with the 2.0 OS.
 
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