Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD Frontlight eReader - Review

The Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD Frontlight is a state-of-the-art e-Reader that comes with an integrated light. It has a powerful accelerometer that automatically detects the point of orientation of the neighboring device. You can flip through the pages effortlessly using the capacitive touchscreen or use the buttons located on either side of the device to swipe the pages. The dual-feature gives you a flexible option to operate the device your preferred way, which could prove to be handy especially when you are at work wearing gloves.

The other nifty additions to the e-Reader include:

• A MicroSD card slot – which lets you add up to 32GB extra data
• A Menu button
• A Power button

The Integrated light

Now… let’s talk about the special feature – that is, the integrated light. The manufacturer says that it is primarily designed to provide light support in the dark, so it is not to be used frequently. The light’s default brightness level is at 50% which is not essentially good for the eyes. The screen turns a bit yellowish and looks dull when the light is turned off. However, it provides great illumination in the dark and in dim-lighted areas. This makes it a perfect eReader for people who like to read when they are travelling or those who like to read in bed light. As we were using it, we felt that the brightness was okay on the eyes when it was set at a low intensity level. The 758x1024 pixel resolution on the screen is sharp – we found it very effective when drawing in dim light.

Accelerometer

Similar to what was present in the previous Odyssey versions, this one too is comprised of an accelerometer which automatically oriented itself when the eReader is rotated in various directions. However, we found the accelerometer point to wrong directions a couple of times when rotated swiftly. It also remained stuck temporarily when kept in landscape mode. We just changed the pointer manually and made sure it came back to the right point of orientation again.

The essential inclusions

The Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD Frontlight eReader comes with an all-encompassing web browser and a built-in WiFi. So it’s easy to create an account from the eReader and access the branded eBook store. Also, there is a capacitive touchscreen and a nice on-screen keyboard that makes operations smoother and easier.

User-friendly features

Most of the Bookeen ebooks are in French and are priced in Euros, so you will need to do most of your shopping from some other medium and later transfer it to your eReader. This isn’t really difficult though. When connected to the computer, the eReader looks like a bulk storage device on which you can easily drag-drop DRM-free eBooks. The eReader is capable of handling multiple formats such as PDFs, TXT, FB2 and HTML. We tried loading heavy PDF files and were pleased to see that the file loaded much quicker than we imagined.

Apart from the orientation issue, we didn’t really find anything annoying about the Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD Frontlight eReader. Our ratings for the first-of-its-kind eReader would be a 4 on 5!

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