Icarus eXceL review

When viewing a document the stylus lets you select hyperlinked chapter headings if present, or you can gesture up and down with it to turn the page. We found that screen updates were leisurely compared to a Kindle, even when we turned off the default full refresh with each page turn. With full refresh disabled we could see ghosting from previous pages after a couple of turns.

There’s a huge range of options when viewing a document, ranging through comprehensive annotation and highlighting features, bookmarking, searching and dictionary lookups. Notes can be tapped out using the on-screen keyboard or even using handwriting recognition, although we found the recognition system unreliable. It’s possible to zoom in up to 500 per cent, potentially making this a great reader for anyone with impaired vision, but we found it hard to get the text-to-speech feature working, and when we did it pronounced contractions such as ‘won’t’ incorrectly.

Given the sophistication elsewhere it’s a shame that you can only browse content on the eXceL through a folder structure; there’s no library listing books by title, author or genre. Fortunately there is a search function which matches within author, title or filename, so it’s not the hindrance it could be.

This is a good reader, but its size means it won’t appeal to all users. More importantly it isn’t as slick or impressive as it needs to be to justify its premium price. If you have this much money to spend on something that isn’t pocket-sized, an iPad or Android tablet is a more flexible choice.