The Wexler Flex One isn’t the only ebook reader from outside the US market that is available for purchase at Amazon.
Yesterday I came across a listing for the Icarus Illumina HD on Amazon for $139.95 plus $4.91 for shipping, a pretty good price considering the specs.
Awhile ago I posted about two other Icarus ebook readers being sold on Amazon, the 6″ Icarus Essence and the 8″ Icarus 8. Icarus is based in the Netherlands, and sell mostly in Europe, but they also sell through a third-party merchant on Amazon called Odyssey Shop.
Both the Icarus Essence and Icarus 8 are basic ebook readers, but the Illumina HD is a step up. It has an HD E Ink screen as well as a frontlight. It also has a microSD card slot and a capacitive touch screen.
Other features include eight brightness settings for the frontlight, physical buttons in addition to touchscreen navigation, it supports any True Type fonts, margins and linespacing are adjustable, there are bookmarks and landscape mode, it has an audio player, PDF reflow, plus the device supports StarDict dictionaries.
Here’s the full list of specs for the Illumina HD:
- 6-inch E-Ink Pearl display
- 1024 x 758 screen resolution
- Capacitive touchscreen
- 4Gb internal memory
- Micro SD card slot for cards up to 32GB
- WiFi 802.11 B/G/N
- Supported ebook formats: PDF, FB2, EPUB, RTF, MOBI, TXT, HTM
- Supported audio formats: MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AAC, OGG
- Battery: 1500mAh, up to one thousand page refreshes
- Dimensions and weight: 125 x 180 x 10mm, 229 grams
Any info on the seller? 93% feedback in the last year doesn’t look promising. I’ve been getting lemons lately from reputable online retailers … Hmmm, nah, it seems like asking for a trouble …
I haven’t dealt with Odyssey Web Shop before so I don’t know personally. I’m not sure if it’s the same store as the Icarus website. Both are based in the Netherlands so probably. I dealt with the Icarus folks when reviewing the Icarus Excel and they were easy to work with, they answered emails and questions quickly. 93% is pretty good actually, considering the lower number of reviews. Based on the number that Amazon gives, you can determine that there are 2 negative reviews and 1 neutral out of 44.
Thanks. Very tempting. Hmmmm …