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Viewsonic VEB620 e-Book reader

Monitor maker's word view

The tiresome part here is that the processor is slow. It really is tedious waiting for pages to roll forwards or backwards, and PDF reading is nigh-on impossible; being halted by waiting.

ViewSonic VEB620 ereader

The VEB625 Wi-Fi version is due out in July

The irritation of the slow processor is matched by the fact that the many buttons on the front facia didn’t always respond to my presses. Maybe I’m just too delicate, but I’m not used to having to press twice or three times to get a reaction. There are no fewer than seven buttons on the front fascia plus a navpad, making the ViewSonic VEB620 somewhat over-endowed. There are back and forwards buttons on the left and right sides, and then Back, Menu, Home, Bookmark and Text Size buttons in a row beneath the screen.

There is a G sensor too, which allows the screen to swivel in your hands as you turn the ViewSonic VEB620 but it was very unresponsive even when recalibrated. You can also do a shake-to-page-turn action, but I had to be so vigorous with this that it felt extremely unnatural. The good news is that the screen rotates into all four viewing angles, and you can reverse the forward and back page buttons so both right and left handed users should be able to find a comfortable orientation.

In addition to PDFs the ViewSonic VEB620 can read ePub, fb2, HTML, txt and rtf formats. You are informed of the format in an icon beside each book title as well as being shown how much of the title you have read as a percentage. When in any one book you can jump to the first or last page, see its table of contents, insert a bookmark, search for text and change font size. Searching for text is a tedious process involving using the navpad to pick out letters on a keyboard.

There is 2GB of internal storage of which 1.5GB is accessible and you can use an SD card to add more. The reader finds compatible files even if they are in folders on a card, so that this is by far the easiest way to get new data onto the device. You can connect to a PC with the provided USB cable if you prefer, though.

ViewSonic VEB620 ereader

USB connectivity allows use of internal storage and there's an SD card option too

Most unusually there is a loudspeaker which means those around you can hear the music you’ve chosen to accompany a reading session in a rather tinny rendition. Plug a set of headphones in and you can listen in private, yet the output remains tinny, alas.

ViewSonic VEB620 ereader

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