Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 28 January 2008 18:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
There you can see how the RSS reader, the e-book reader, the e-mail reader, the audio player and the telephone applications work. You’ll notice that these are read only applications – there is no ability to enter in information, you can read emails and see some attachments, but you can’t reply to any, you can read RSS feeds but you can’t do a search on Google for something you want to find out about.
Because the Readius is connected to a 3.5G network, updates to news, info and email are virtually instant. But instead of giving you the freedom of the open web to search, as with the web browser on the iPhone or any smart phone, your selection is much more limited.
The payoff is content properly formatted to fit your screen, on a device that has ‘up to’ six times the battery life of most mobile phones, with a screen that actually makes text much more pleasurable to read compared with most other phones on the market, excluding, I’d have to say, the iPhone.
Even though the iPhone’s screen is only 3.5-inch compared with the Readius’ 5-inches, the iPhone still sports one of the brightest, sharpest and most colourful screens ever seen on a phone, and from that point of view, clearly outclasses the Readius – but naturally, it can’t roll up.
So, what about making phone calls? This you can do - and receive them. But unless I’m mistaken, it doesn’t look like you can dial a new phone number that isn’t already in your contact list. All numbers you want to call seem to need synching to the Readius’ address book first, through which phone calls are made.
This would appear to mean that any new number you want to call must be done on a different phone, unless you happen to have your computer nearby so you can sync that new number to the Readius. By the same token you can’t add any new contacts to your address book when out and about, this has to be done later on the PC.
Given the phone has 8 buttons, it’s a shame that slide-out keypad or a few more buttons weren’t hidden somewhere to allow users to at least dial any number they wished.
There also doesn’t appear to be a calendar, nor of course any way to enter in appointments, making a smartphone, PDA or paper diary a necessity if you want to make use of a calendar to organise your time.
So, who is the Readius aimed at then? Please read onto page 4.
