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Icarus eXceL review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £277
inc VAT

This huge eReader has some great features, but they aren't all easy to use and it's very expensive

There are two striking things about the eXceL, which tops Icarus’ range of eBook readers. The first is its huge 9.7″ E Ink screen, and the second is its eye-watering price; it’s four times as expensive as Icarus’ own Pocket model.

Icarus eXceL

It’s certainly a fully-featured eBook reader. The vast screen has twice the area of a typical six-inch display, and its 825×1,200 resolution gives it twice as many pixels, resulting in huge, crisp documents. The screen helps in the menu system, too, which has room for plenty of icons, a progress display for the most recently read title and even an analogue clockface. While not a touchscreen as such, a stylus system lets you select, navigate and make on-screen annotations. There’s also Wi-Fi, and support for a wide range of file formats including Microsoft Office documents.

The eXceL’s screen may be large, but it’s quite a slim device and its slim bezel means it’s not too huge. This contributes to a smart look that continues with its controls. On the left of the screen are home and back buttons together with left and right navigation, while on the right is a joystick with a centre push for selecting. Their positioning means it’s easy to navigate and read one-handed, but the reader’s half-kilogram weight means you’re better off using both hands.

Icarus eXceL

On the base is a headphone output, a dedicated volume rocker and an SD card slot, but these are all slightly recessed, making it tricky to insert and remove memory cards and some headphone plugs. Disappointingly Icarus hasn’t designed in somewhere to stow the stylus. The screen doesn’t respond to finger presses like a Kindle Touch, and only works with the special stylus.

The eXceL opened all our test files including Doc and Docx Word documents, although we found that page turning was inconsistent in both types, meaning we sometimes had to hunt backwards for skipped parts of the document. Our test HTML file opened in a browser and caused the wireless interface to switch on unnecessarily.

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Details

Price£277)
Details
Rating***

Hardware

Viewable size9.7in
Native resolution1,200×825
Touchscreen y/nno
Capacity4,096MB
Memory card supportSD
Size179x12x243mm
Weight520g
Battery and charge optionsLithium ion, included USB cable
eReader Battery life8,000
Wireless networking support802.11b/g/n
3G?no
PortsMini USB, 3.5mm headphone

Format Support

eReader TXT supportyes
eReader HTML supportno
eReader RTF supportyes
eReader PDF supportyes
eReader ePub supportyes
eReader MOBI supportyes
eReader Amazon AZW supportno
eReader Microsoft Word supportyes
Audio MP3 playbackYes
Audio WMA playbackNo
Audio WMA-DRM playbackNo
Audio AAC playbackNo
Audio Protected AAC playbackNo
Audio OGG playbackNo
Audio WAV playbackYes
Audio Audible playbackNo
Image BMP supportYes
Image JPEG supportYes
Image TIFF supportNo

Buying Information

Price£277)
Warrantyone year RTB
Supplier
Details

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