Head to Head: iRex DR800S vs iRiver Story

Both iRiver and iRex have a similar take on the electronic book (ebook) market; we’ll provide the device and you buy the books.

With no stain of DRM about either the iRiver Story (£195 from Advanced MP3 Players) or the iRex DR800S (£449 from Libresco), there’s more freedom to the experience – up to a point.

With similar philosophies, the South Korean-made Story and the Dutch-manufactured DR800S are quite different devices; the former is primarily for books and entertainment while the latter takes us beyond books and addresses the business market more overtly. But that’s on the face of it, so we decided to dig a little deeper to see what both have to offer. Does the cut-price iRiver Story have some features that might just give it the upper hand for demanding users?

Size and screen

Measuring 127mmx9.4mmx203.5mm (WDH) and weighing 284g, the super-slim Story is highly portable though its QWERTY keyboard and controls do bulk it up somewhat. Its 6in, eight-shade greyscale 800x600 pixel resolution E-Ink screen is utterly glare-free and very comfortable to read.

The 149mmx10.7mmx193 (WDH), 360g DR800S adds a couple of inches to the diameter of its 16-shade greyscale 768x1024 pixel E-Ink screen. That’s crucial because it has almost twice the screen real estate than the Story can offer. With a slightly higher resolution the DR800S’ screen lends a modicum more comfort to reading, but it’s a tight call; both are easy to read in poor light or direct sunlight.

A QWERTY keyboard for use with the stylus pops-up if the search function is used.

The DR800S also has a touch screen. At the moment it’s not a big deal; it only works with a stylus, which although included in the package doesn’t prove integral to operating the device. Not yet, anyhow – plans are afoot to release a software upgrade (2.0) at the end of April that will see the DR800S host annotations to PDFs and other notes scribbled by the stylus. Handwriting recognition software could be part of the mix, though it’s unlikely that the resulting text files will be exportable.