Review of the Icarus Excel eBook Reader

Icarus is bringing about a silent revolution with its new range of solid e-ink devices and the 9.7 inch Icarus Excel at the top of its collection. This impressive sized 9.7 inch e-ink screen ebook reader provides an over the top PDF experience, among other attractive features. But the big question is: what is its ranking among top names like Kindle DX, PocketBook and other 9.7 inch reader devices?

Hardware Features:

The Icarus Excel offers a 9.7 inch e-ink Pearl screen with a resolution of 1280×825 pixels with 167 DPI. The display is a full touch screen which works only with the given stylus. The device is powered by 800MHz Freescale CPU processor and 256MB of RAM, with a memory capacity 4GB which can be expanded to 32 GB via microSD card.

The hardware looks strikingly similar to 9.7 inch devices already on the market. The screen works very well without any lagging which is common in large screen devices. Screen touch response is quite quick and menus load easily.

This Icarus Excel comes with Wi-Fi, making it one of the few 9.7 devices to provide this superb facility. Along with a fair ease of downloading ebooks directly onto the device, the internet browsing experience is also speedy but without much options to customize the web surfing.

The device provides an extra option to be operated, through manual keys on top of stylus use, with the manual control keys present on the left and right sides of device for convenient performance. Icarus Excel is provided with a 3.5mm headphone jack, LED indicator, Mini USB and SD card slot. There is a single speaker located on the back side which provides good quality sound for both Music and audio books.

The battery life is up to 10 hours of continuous use of the Wi-Fi. Without Wi-Fi use, it can serve up to a month. The weight is around 530 grams with 240x180x11mm dimensions making it quite a light device to hold for long period of time.

Software:

The ebook reader runs on Linux providing a variety of options, apps, games and puzzles. There are loads of custom options like Dictionary, Notes, Calendar, sketch and internal storage many of which are depended upon stylus for their use.

The device supports 12 languages, giving it a true international status; and with a basic software system, it does meet demands of most of the readers.

Reading Experience:

For PDF reading, this device is unmatchable to any reader ever produced. Note taking and highlighting to transform into TXT files for PC are amongst the best new features of this Icarus ebook reader. Other supported formats include EPUB, PRC, TXT and lots more but unfortunately there aren’t many font customizing options available. There are 17 levels of font size changes and a number of margin change options instead.

Although people are still spellbound by major names in the ebook reader market, Icarus has done a brilliant work with this 9.7 inch device, loaded with quality features at a good price: $400. It is the best device for its PDF functionality and is highly recommended to students or readers having a large collection of PDFs.

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