View Quest BookBox eBook

The first comment has to be that this is more than just an eBook with both music video and pictures also supported.

I could tell I have got very used to touch screens when I first got this device I kept wanting to touch the screen!

It is not touch screen!

The first thing to look at is the size of this device it is just a perfect size to hold in your hand when reading with your finger on the next page button. Also it would fit a handbag without the need to carry a separate bag. I think it would fit a chaps inside pocket quite easily…so a very practical size.

The screen quality was superbly demonstrated by the sample video and photographs. There is no inbuilt speaker so you will need to plug in headphones or a speaker. The volume button in handily on the side but I have to say on the device I had pressing this up and down made no difference to the volume. I plugged in a speaker and found this a bit quiet but it may well be fine through headphones.

Synching and adding music, video and photos was very simple with it just appearing as an extra hard drive so copy and paste worked fine but it did not play protected files as you would expect.

The ebook has the ability to change the colour of the background, text and brightness but curiously this changed the text except the heading! It will only change the colours of non pdf books. The colour change facility is in settings but it can be a little hard to spot the white as it is shown as white on white with no box around it. You can use the following formats on the device EPUB, PDF, TXT

When I first had this I kept finding that this had turned on in my bag and was getting warm…but following some advice from the manufacturers to hold the off button for 4 seconds turns it off completely and this resolved the problem fine. The quick turn off just places it in standby and where the power button is not recessed it easily switched itself on. However the test device I used for this review did not come with the case and the case may protect against this problem. This initially gave me the impression that the battery life was short but when turning off fully this seemed to resolve this problem and I was whipping through a book over several days without having to recharge the device

In the books I did find that some of the titles do not automatically format to the screen size…I got to the end of a book called Hungry Ghosts and found the Acknowledgements was falling off either side of the screen.

The screen can rotate for book reading but I found this could be a little insensitive…it would decide I had held it sideways and rotate the book and trying to persuade it back the right way could take a few moments.

Music-This proved a bit of a challenge once I had more than one album on here. Using the back button did not take me back to the list of albums so I could select the next one to play. It took me back to the book reader screen. So I passed it to a techie and he was puzzled too. So I resorted to fiddling and realised I could get there by jumping side to side using the button at the bottom of the screen. I however think there should be an option in the menus to select between albums. There are options to pick between artists and albums at one point on the menu but at the other when I was playing an album I could not seem to find that menu? I’m not sure if that is a bug in the program. It uses the following formats WMA, MP3,WAV, OGG and AAC

Video is smoothly playing and really makes the best of what can only be described as a top quality screen. Formats supported are WMV,FLV, RM/RMVB, MOV, AVI, MPEG1, 2 and 4, XvID, DIVX, h.263, h.264 and up to 1080 resolution

If you put the device down and walk away it does not enter into a standby mode… it stays on at full brightness so this is an issue I’d like to see upgraded in the next version.

Now what about the price?  A mere £79.99 makes this the perfect entry level device. Just think on your commute you can watch video, listen to music or read a book… so how long is that commute? For me it felt like seconds with my head in a good book on this device.