One year ago I bought an Inkpad 840 specifically because the pbimageviewer app existed. I was leaning more towards the Onyx, the one with the same screen but running Android, knowing that nowadays the OS defines a device, but the existence of this app pushed me over to the Inkpad.
My primary use case was (and still is) reading manga in the summer, under the sun, hence my need for a large HD eInk screen. I got a 128 GB SD card to go with it, to keep my entire collection on the reader and I couldn't have been happier, right?
Well, I have been more than happy with rkomar's app: it does everything you might want and has great performance.
Unfortunately, I was less impressed by the firmware.
Running out of options, I downloaded the 4.4 firmware from their homepage (AHA! So they know their newer software is mediocre!) and lo and behold, most of these problems disappeared. Now I can actually keep track of what I'm reading and browse the contents of my SD card more easily.
What do you people think? Have you upgraded to 5 or downgraded to 4? How do you think this OS compares to the competition? Am I just having bad luck, or focusing on irrelevant details?
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Quick instructions for any passers-by: just download an appropriate firmware zip for your model, extract SWUPDATE.BIN into the internal memory or into the SD, and power it on while keeping both up and down buttons pressed. Wait for several flashes and reboots, don't touch anything until you get back to the PocketBook OS. Then download the correct versions of any custom apps (such as pbimageviewer) and install them over the old ones.
My primary use case was (and still is) reading manga in the summer, under the sun, hence my need for a large HD eInk screen. I got a 128 GB SD card to go with it, to keep my entire collection on the reader and I couldn't have been happier, right?
Well, I have been more than happy with rkomar's app: it does everything you might want and has great performance.
Unfortunately, I was less impressed by the firmware.
- Let's start with the most trivial and the most obvious: the horrible 3 book carousel in the homepage. Surely people are reading more than 3 things at the same time? This is compounded by the fact that with manga you usually have separate CBZs for each book or even chapter, so the list quickly fills up with the single most recent thing you've been reading.
- On top of that, items in the SD card would not show up at all in the homepage (even regular ebooks) which got me puzzled for a while, until a firmware update a few months later fixed it.
- The builtin browser is complete garbage, as any PB owner quickly finds out. A version of Opera Mini taken from a cheap Nokia phone (the ones with no touchscreen and 4 MB of RAM) would have been more useful.
- The file browser only has two possible views, each more annoying than the other: an icon mode that truncates the filenames and a list mode that only shows 5 items or such per page. Really, PocketBook? You sell a device with a 1600x1200 8" screen and you're showing me 5 lousy items per page? Was that designed by the same genius who did the 3 book carousel in the homepage? Are your programmers blind or just stupid?
- I apologize if this list is short, but I only ever needed to do 3 things with my Inkpad: fly over the useless homepage; using the file browser to open files; and trying the web browser, foolishly thinking I could read the news or download an ebook. Yeah, right. The mind boggles at the chasm of hopelessness and despair I would have plunged into, had I tried to use the other builtin apps, the social features, and so on.
- Finally, today I accepted the firmware update that had been bugging me for a while and... the damn thing froze on Database Update. No way to go forwards or backwards.
Running out of options, I downloaded the 4.4 firmware from their homepage (AHA! So they know their newer software is mediocre!) and lo and behold, most of these problems disappeared. Now I can actually keep track of what I'm reading and browse the contents of my SD card more easily.
What do you people think? Have you upgraded to 5 or downgraded to 4? How do you think this OS compares to the competition? Am I just having bad luck, or focusing on irrelevant details?
---
Quick instructions for any passers-by: just download an appropriate firmware zip for your model, extract SWUPDATE.BIN into the internal memory or into the SD, and power it on while keeping both up and down buttons pressed. Wait for several flashes and reboots, don't touch anything until you get back to the PocketBook OS. Then download the correct versions of any custom apps (such as pbimageviewer) and install them over the old ones.