Irex iLiad Book Edition review

The iLiad eBook reader is about the size of a large paperback book, but thinner.

It has a silver-plastic case and simple controls under the screen and down the left side. It takes a foot-tapping 40 seconds to start up, which is a lot slower than Sony's Reader. You can navigate through the menu system by using the Up, Down and Enter keys or by using the stylus. The iLiad uses technology from Wacom to control the screen using the stylus. You can't use your fingers, but the advantage of the stylus is that writing on the screen is accurate.

The screen, like the Sony Reader's (above), has amazingly high contrast and, while it's slightly grainy, it makes even small text supremely easy to read. There's no glare, as there isn't a backlight, which contributes to the long battery life. The iLiad's large screen is great for sketching on or taking notes using the stylus, but text on the Sony Reader's smaller screen is still perfectly legible at the smallest font setting.

The iLiad has short-cut keys for Books, News, Docs and Notes, which point to pre-defined folders on the device. Library software didn't always put files in the appropriate folder, though, so news items downloaded from mobipocket.com, for example, ended up in the books section. The Docs short cut is misleading as the iLiad doesn't support Word documents. The short-cut keys save you from navigating the Iliad's seemingly endless maze of menus, however. The Settings menu, for example, leads to 10 pages of options.

New books can be downloaded to the iLiad through any eBook library software, although iRex recommends mobipocket.com, which is one of the few eBook sellers to offer free samples. Once you navigate to a book, it takes more than ten seconds to open even if you've opened it before. The Sony Reader can jump straight to the last page you were reading just a few seconds after you switch it back on.

While you're reading a book, the iLiad displays a menu along the bottom that can be controlled only using the stylus. These include short cuts to the contents page and start page, and allow you to use the stylus to annotate some books. However, some of these short cuts are greyed out and seem to function only in books that support them. Other icons give you information about battery life but aren't interactive. There's considerable lag when you select a function, which is frustrating. A huge omission is the lack of a bookmarking system.

The iLiad feels fragile, and the large ports at the top for USB, Compact Flash and SD/MMC cards look ugly. It's heavy enough to feel uncomfortable to hold upright for long periods, and the controls are ungainly and rely too heavily on the stylus. The ability to annotate and make sketches is unique, but it isn't useful enough to justify the high price, which is almost twice as much as the Sony Reader's.