Review Date: March 2021 – Review unit purchased from Amazon
Overview
The Pocketbook InkPad Color was released in March 2021. It has a 7.8-inch color E Ink screen and is the second ereader from Pocketbook to use a color Kaleido screen, the first being the 6-inch Pocketbook Color that was released in 2020.
The Pocketbook InkPad Color has the same design as other Pocketbooks, with physical page buttons below the screen, along with a menu button and home button. On the bottom edge it has a USB-C port and a microSD card slot, plus a power button.
The device comes with 16GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, and it’s powered by a dual-core 1GHz CPU. Other specs include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth for audio and text-to-speech, and it has a rotation sensor and a frontlight with an auto-adjusting sensor.
Like other color models, the frontlight color is not adjustable with a warm setting—it has a cool frontlight only.
Pocketbook InkPad Color Review
Pros
- The 2nd gen color E Ink screen, Kaleido Plus, has improved noticeably over last year’s version.
- Nice design that’s comfortable to hold from the sides or bottom, and it has physical page buttons below the screen.
- MicroSD card slot and USB-C port (it even comes with a 3.5mm adapter for headphones).
- $90 cheaper than Onyx’s 7.8-inch color model.
Cons
- Sluggish performance—slow to turn pages and open files, especially comics.
- Text contrast with color E Ink isn’t as good as regular E Ink.
Verdict
Like other Pocketbooks, I really like the design of the InkPad Color, and the improved Kaleido Plus screen looks surprisingly good as long as you keep the frontlight turned on, but ultimately it’s hard to recommend the InkPad Color because of the slow performance—it’s quite possibly the slowest ereader on the current market.
The Pocketbook InkPad Color is a nice device if you don’t mind slower page turns and having less contrast than a regular E Ink screen, but if you value performance look elsewhere. The Onyx Nova3 Color is a lot faster and more advanced with the Android operating system that can install apps, but the Nova3 Color costs nearly $100 more than the Pocketbook so that doesn’t help make the choice any easier. I’ll post a comparison between the two soon.
Pocketbook InkPad Color Review
Color E Ink Screen
See my color E Ink comparison review for a closer look at E Ink’s new Kaleido Plus screen technology, with a comparison between the older color screens and a regular black and white screen on a Kindle.
Software
Pocketbooks support common formats like ePub and PDF, including books with Adobe DRM, and comic formats like CBR and CBZ.
The software is fairly customizable. You can change and rearrange the icons that appear on the homescreen, and the hardware buttons support key mapping so you can change how they react with long presses and short presses. Pocketbook’s software also supports user profiles if more than one person is using the device.
Pocketbook’s software is Linux-based so you cannot install Android apps like you can on the Nova3 Color. When it comes to color content, this is a fairly big limitation. Being able to use apps for color content is a lot easier than trying to find color content in ebook formats, especially when most newer comics have DRM and cannot be downloaded to use on a device like a Pocketbook. I was able to download a few DRM-free CBZ files to test, but those are few and far between.
While you can’t install Android apps, there are a few other apps that can be installed, such as this pbimageviewer and perhaps KOReader for some added features the default reading app lacks, although I’m not sure if the latter works well on Pocketbook’s color models.
Pocketbook InkPad Color Specs
- 7.8-inch E Ink Kaleido Plus screen.
- 1404 x 1872 resolution (300ppi for black and white/100ppi for color).
- Capacitive touchscreen.
- Frontlight with cool color only.
- Linux-based operating system.
- 1GHz dual-core processor.
- 16GB storage space.
- 1GB RAM.
- MicroSD card slot supports cards up to 32GB.
- Wi-Fi.
- Bluetooth.
- USB-C port.
- Rotation sensor.
- 2900mAh battery.
- Supported formats: EPUB, PDF, CBR, CBZ, TXT, FB2, HTML, DJVU, RTF, DOC, plus others.
- Dimensions: 195 x 136.5 x 8mm.
- Weight: 225 grams.
- Sells on Amazon with a list price of $329.
actually KoReader can’t be installed on Pocketbook Color and InkPad Color until now due to some error
with this pbimageviewer (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162852)
CBZ/CBR file reading is a lot faster than the stock software (4-5 times faster from my observation)
Thanks for the heads-up! But I did install KOReader on the original Pocketbook Color so I’m not sure what you mean.
Oh, really? No issue for KoReader on the 6″ Pocketbook Color?
I haven’t try the 6 ” but they mentioned the same error occured on it. Could you confirm? And KoReader can display color without issue?
If koreader is working then I will take a 6″ Color. 😄
Thanks in advance!
It’s been over six months since I installed it so I don’t know the current state of things, but it had some problems back then. I was mostly using it for dark mode because that makes the grid virtually invisible. I’d assumed they would have fixed the problems by now but maybe not. I don’t use KOReader so I haven’t been following the progress at all.
I have a stupid question. Why are the manufacturers using a color layer and a black and white layer? My understanding is that this is the reason for the screen door effect when looking at black and white text.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply use the color layer to make black and white?
My understanding is that Onyx made a 10 inch color device that did this called the “Youngy Boox.” It was intended for schools only, but YouTube videos of it are available and to my eyes it looks better than Kaleido 1 and 2.
That’s not how E Ink screens work. It’s explained at the beginning of the Nova3 color unveiling video. The Youngy Boox had a color filter over the top of a black and white screen as well.
Hi Nathan, I noticed some of your videos have a bit of lens distortion. I don’t know what software you use to edit videos, but if you can apply a warp effect when it happens, you should set it to about +7 degrees (judging from a still of this video in particular).
Ok, that aside, lol… I’m curious about how this lower PPI colour filter works, it’s running along the regular 300 PPI b/w matrix, right? It doesn’t force the screen down in resolution when colour is displayed? Wanted to ask this because I might pick one of these up in the future based on this. TIA!
The color is just a filter with 3 color pigments over the black and white screen. That’s why color resolution is one third of black and white resolution. E Ink’s newer Gallery 3 screens use actual colored micro-pixels so color and resolution are better, but the refresh rate is much slower to change the pixels so it still needs more optimizing.
Also, I did use video software to correct lens distortion with this video, but if you go too far it starts to warp the top and bottom. Now I use a different phone camera that corrects it automatically (mostly).
Thank you for the link, I completely missed that announcement. 599€ is too steep for what I’m willing to invest, though… I suppose this model will stick around while that one becomes the flagship PocketBook colour reader.