With reader ONYX BOOX Bering 3 to read endlessly

13

E-books with electrophoretic screens are widely known for its ability to operate without recharging for not just long, but obscenely long due to the small power consumption. But sooner or later the charge runs out, and if you do not have at least a data cable to connect to USB port of your computer or an external battery, then things are bad. But with the electronic book ONYX BOOX Bering 3, recently appeared on open spaces of our country, this is definitely not going to happen, because from all its competitors and even other modern books from the ONYX it is a fantastic battery capacity of 3000 mAh. This battery will surely provide a few months of comfortable reading and will allow to forget about recharging.

Today ONYX BOOX Bering 3 came to us to test. After a thorough study of the books we will count how many pages is enough battery charge, and make a conclusion about the necessity of his presence in this kind of device.

 

The first acquaintance

Bering ONYX BOOX 3 is ebook sample of 2016 with all the ensuing consequences in the form of a very thin enclosure, reduced weight, modern and somewhat universal. This is all included in the list of the main advantages of the model over its competitors and characterizes the model as very interesting in terms of its acquisition as a first reader, or replace the current reader, especially when you consider price and performance.

 

Packaging

The book ONYX BOOX Bering 3 Packed in a box made of very sturdy cardboard with magnetic snaps. The performance of the traditional packaging for devices from Onyx: minimalistic design, the predominance of bright colors and marginal information content. For those of you not familiar with the life of the traveler, in whose honor is named the model on the cover given his short biography, which will slightly broaden my horizons.

From the bottom on the box the manufacturer in small print listed literally all specifications are stored inside the gadget and also told about its main advantages. In this case, the ONYX is a very modest estimate, writing that the battery will be enough on average for a month of work – in fact, everything is much better, but that we will consider in detail in the respective paragraph.

 

Equipment

Reader ONYX BOOX Bering 3 though is a device with advanced features, but still refers to the budget segment, with a recommended price at the time of writing, it amounted to 6500 rubles, according to “Yandex.Market” information.

For this reason, in the box with the book will not be a scattering of additional accessories manufacturer needed to stay in a certain price range, and therefore included with the device are supplied only data cable, warranty card and very, note, detailed instruction manual. The instruction will be absolutely not necessary for those who have already dealt with e-books, but novice users, on the contrary, you will find there lots of useful things for them. In fact, this category of people it is intended – in this respect, the ONYX well done, all taken care of.

 

Hardware specifications

Features ONYX BOOX Bering 3 free, and they don’t have to search for hours racking up Google – you can find them directly on the packaging or in the complete instructions and the “inhabitants” of the world wide Web can refer to the official website of the manufacturer.

– screen: 6 inch e-ink Pearl HD, 16 grayscale, contrast, 12:1, 1024х758 pixels;
– backlight: Moon Light, brightness;
– RAM: 512 MB;
– built-in memory: 8 GB;
– processor: ARM, 2 cores, 1 GHz;
– battery: lithium-ion, built-in 3000 mAh;
– support file formats: Text: TXT, HTML, RTF, FB2, FB2.zip, MOBI, CHM, PDB, DOC, DOCX, PRC, EPUB; Graphic: JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP; other: PDF, DjVu;
– operating system: Google Android 4.2;
– interfaces: microSDHC, microUSB 2.0;
– dimensions: millimetres 170х17х9;
– weight: 182 grams;
– case color: black.

As can be seen, the presence of the battery enhanced capacity did not affect the weight e-books: she, like other modern readers from ONYX with a screen 6 inches, weighs in the range of 185 grams. Also, we should note the presence of the signature of the backlight Moon Light, and this at a price of around 100 U.S. dollars, taking into account current at the time of writing the exchange rate.

 

The screen

The display of this book is based on e-ink Pearl HD generation is almost the most modern solution from the company E-Ink, guaranteeing decent contrast, and traditionally, 100 percent readability in bright sunlight. Screen resolution Bering 3″ allows to choose the minimum font size – the letters will not merge into a single line. The matrix in this case has no touch layer, that is, does not respond to touch, and to navigate through menus and flip through the pages of a book uses two hardware keys and five-way navigation button.

The screen is characterized by a wide, almost 180-degree viewing angles, moreover, does not necessarily constant use of backlight, which has a positive impact on battery life. Subjectively it seems that here panel Pearl HD has higher contrast compared to most modern generation of E-Ink screens, known as Carta. In bright light, whether sunlight or artificial overhead lighting, reading ONYX BOOX Bering 3 can be completely without light. It will also be unnecessary when you use a nightlight or something like a floor lamp, of course, if their light is not quite subdued.

The display is quite readable and in motion, for example, in the subway or any other public transport. High resolution allows you to fit it a significant amount of text and thereby to reduce the number of page turns, during which takes place the screen consumption battery power. If you are a fan of reading in almost complete darkness, without light Moon Light you can not do.

 

The screen backlight

Moon Light is somewhat bright-white LEDs, located at the bottom end of the screen and flood it smooth milky-white light, reminiscent of moonlight do.

In our instance ONYX BOOX Bering 3 backlighting was slightly uneven: the top corners of the screen slightly darker than the rest of its area, but not if you look closely, the difference will not be noticeable. Shadows from the LEDs, which are often found in the reader entry-level, here, which is nice, not.

The backlight brightness is easily adjustable in a fairly wide range, so everyone can choose the most comfortable level of illumination. Reminder: Shine brighter than the diodes, the faster you consume battery charge. In our case the most comfort was achieved at about 30% brightness, and when reading in the twilight or in complete darkness. In the pictures attached to this section, the book depicted first without illumination, then illuminated with artificial light, then in complete darkness, and then at twilight. Brightness set at maximum, and especially the photos have not been processed in a graphics editor.

In our opinion, the maximum brightness of Moon Light here is redundant: quite enough, and 50 percent to avoid squinting and to read in comfort, even in the open field under the dark night sky without the moon.

 

Appearance and ergonomics

Exterior ONYX BOOX Bering 3 is no different from the appearance of other modern e-readers ONYX with 6-inch non-touch screen. This is because to experiment with design elements no longer: the manufacturer has done all in advance, adjusted the location of each element down to such details as the thickness of the side part of the screen.


The housing of this reader is plastic and has pleasant to the touch coating that feels reminiscent of the notorious Soft Touch. The model is available exclusively in black, and the brand name it is, surprisingly is not – it is very hard to leave on the body fingerprint. They mostly focus on the rear, but removed extremely simply.

The book is very thin – the thickness does not exceed 9 millimetres, although it feels even thinner. As for weight, it is not felt, and no matter how you hold the device with one or two hands. By the way, one hand ONYX BOOX Bering 3 also you can keep using for controlling only the navigation button – she gently rests directly under your thumb, and you can use it to activate the backlight, to scroll the pages and adjust font size.

On the front panel of the e-book there is nothing, except the navigation buttons and screen. The top end is placed under the power button that is easy to find by touch, but which has seen very elastic stroke, which eliminates accidental pressing. Next to the power button you can see a small hole under a needle or a paper clip: inside of it at shallow depth placed button for a forced reboot, which you are unlikely to be needed in view of the stability of the software.

On the sides of the screen are two buttons – the right allows flipping the book back and forth, left and causes an additional menu, or just returns to the home screen. Button values can be changed to more convenient for you personally – this is done in two accounts from the settings menu.

Back at the ONYX BOOX Bering 3 no nothing except a useless user information and unique serial numbers. Below we can see the panel design: it is here focused for microSD memory card and microUSB 2.0 for charging and connecting to computer. This connector was specifically chosen because is the most common in the world, so if you will not complete a data cable, you can use any modern smartphone, except, of course, the iPhone.

 

Software

Bering ONYX BOOX 3 operate at substantially redesigned Google’s Android operating system, the existence of which in the book you can not learn if you do not look at the list of characteristics and settings. It was removed all unnecessary software, thus solving the problem of free megabytes of RAM, which is not always enough. In addition, wasps are endowed with a proprietary user-friendly interface from ONYX and is supplied with the basic kit, which includes: calculator, reader OReader, the dictionary and the gallery is exactly the same as in stock Android.

The dictionary, in our opinion, is completely useless because of the inconvenience of entering letters with the onscreen keyboard and navigation buttons. If no dictionary is not enough, it is possible to use a selection of words from the text when reading in the app OReader. This program, on the contrary, very pleased with the simplicity of its interface and usability. However, you can always manually using the distro apk to install any other reader that you like: we tried to install AlReader, pre-downloaded on the laptop from Google Play, and it wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. In the absence of 90% of apps present in Android usual, the book is loaded very quickly: from power on until you are ready to work in our case takes around 16 seconds.

 

Working with files

By virtue of the presence in Bering ONYX BOOX ebook reader oReader 3 galleries and a book can run almost all of todays popular file formats. You don’t have to choose the file type when downloading ebooks from Internet: 99% probability that the device recognizes it, even if it is an archive. Open books pretty quickly, but it all depends on their volume and filling: common polutoraterabaytny FB2 reader clicks as seeds, starting them in 3-5 seconds. Over DJVU and PDF device thinks a little longer: our test document with a weight of 400 MB, which is made up of scanned photos, graphs, and formulas, which was opened around 50 seconds.

 

Work offline

Finally reached the most interesting. ONYX put a lot of effort to increase the time of Autonomous work: added adjustable brightness of backlight, removed unneeded software, installed the EPD and, finally, put the high-capacity battery. The result of all these tweaks is that to defuse the book for a month even with daily reading you definitely will not succeed. Take a look at the results of our test of autonomy:

– without backlight: 34,000 pages;

– with backlight on 50%: 20000 pages;

– with backlight at 100%: 18000 pages.

 

For comparison, similar on a complete set of the book ONYX BOOX Amundsen, which we recently tested, is equipped with a battery capacity of 1700 mAh can display 19000 pages of text (without backlight) before fully discharged. In other words, increasing the capacity of the battery case ONYX BOOX Bering 3 really brought very positive results. But, if it is ONYX BOOX Bering 3 dead, then charging it will have to spend quite a long time: without pre-calibration and when connected to a 1-Amarna charger reader was filled with energy for a little more than six hours in an off state. Save the situation with the charger amperage 1.5 amps – in this case, the recharging time is reduced to approximately three hours.

 

Conclusion

At this price the book ONYX BOOX Bering 3 has no equal: the nearest competitors can’t offer such a solid battery capacity, or they have no backlight. This unique combination of features, as it turned out, it is possible to obtain even in the budget decision, so why pay more? Reader ONYX BOOX Bering 3 was a success on all sides, although for some the lack of a touch screen is a significant disadvantage. We disagree, because the navigation button is copes with his replacement.

The only thing I would like is a little more extensive standard equipment, at least a charger with a larger amperage: accessory, in essence, a cheap, and it is unlikely he would have strongly influenced the final cost of the device, but it, alas, no. The rest of the person we claim to Bering ONYX BOOX 3 during testing have arisen: the book definitely is worth the money they ask for it.

 

Pros Bering ONYX BOOX 3

– the screen backlight;

– increased battery capacity;

– easy to use interface, full OS;

– supports all modern file formats;

– well thought-out ergonomics.

 

Cons ONYX BOOX Bering 3

– no additional accessories in the delivery set.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here