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Home Page > Computers > Computer Forensics > Entourage Edge
Entourage Edge
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Posted: Jul 12, 2010 |Comments: 0
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Form Factor, E-Ink Screen
The Edge looks and feels like a small laptop when closed. It measures 8.3 by 10.8 by 1.0 inches (HWD) and weighs just over three pounds. It’s available in five colors (Dark Blue, Light Blue, Red, White, and Black); I tested the gloss black version. Flimsy feeling plastic parts abound, including plenty of hard buttons that generate a stiff “crack” when pressed. A backlit trackball offers sluggish Web page scrolling and not much else, as there’s no mouse cursor. Two stereo speakers are built into the stiff, massive hinge. You can open the unit like a book with both screens facing you, or fold it over so that one screen is open on the table while the other sits covered. There are so many switches, buttons, and ports on this thing, on all its seven edges, that I repeatedly forgot where the power switch was. The huge power adapter features a large, stiff AC cable; the combination makes the Edge even less portable/Get a Hp laptop ac adapter.
The 9.7-inch e-ink screen is the same size as the one on Amazon’s larger Kindle DX (9, ). With 825-by-1,200-pixel resolution, it can display eight shades of gray, compared with the DX’s 16 shades of gray. Screen contrast was roughly equivalent to a Barnes & Noble Nook (9, ) I had on hand, though page turns were slightly slower. Interestingly, the e-ink screen comes with a plastic stylus, which lets you take notes, draw, or annotate existing text on the screen. All of this worked well in practice, providing I wrote slowly and deliberately. Erasing also worked fine; the editing mode features two strips of icons across the top, plus a toolbar on the bottom, so you have plenty of options.
Granted, the Edge’s e-ink screen wasn’t as responsive to touch as the Sony Reader Daily Edition’s (9.99, ) display, though the Edge’s exhibited much better contrast. Even so, the Edge weighs twice as much as the already-too-heavy Apple iPad (9, ), and almost four times as much as the Nook or a standard-size Kindle (9, ). It’s also much thicker than any of those devices; forget holding the Edge up while resting on the couch. Lay it down and it’s not as bad, but there’s no getting around its girth.
Color Touch Screen, OS, and Bookstore
The other side of the Edge features a 10.1-inch, 600-by-1,024-pixel, plastic resistive color touch screen. It features four-way manual rotation via a switch (instead of a built-in accelerometer). Touch response was pretty poor in my tests; tapping and swiping often took several tries. Typing on the on-screen keyboard was okay in portrait mode, but a disaster in landscape mode, where the unit defaults to highly rectangular keys that are too squished. Worse, the screen was too dim even at the brightest setting, with low contrast and very poor viewing angles. Even looking at the display straight on, color accuracy varied at the edges, and from a slight angle it appeared noticeably dimmer.
The Edge runs Google’s Android 1.6 OS. During my tests, the device took an average of one minute and seven seconds to boot, which isn’t exactly fast. Five icons along the bottom handle basic functions: a shopping cart, your e-Book library, a Web browser, messaging, and a Menu button that brings up the Android main menu. For Internet connectivity, the Edge hooks into 802.11b/g Wi-Fi networks, but lacks any 3G cellular data options for buying books over the air. The e-book reader works with ePub and PDF files; you can buy them from Entourage’s own e-book store/Get a ebook battery, which includes some New York Times bestsellers, plus and copies of public domain books that you’re better off downloading from Project Gutenberg for free. The store looked pretty sparse compared with what Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s e-book stores offer; Entourage says it contains 200,000 titles (which is less than half of what Amazon offers) plus access to Google’s free book library of 1.3 million public domain titles. I didn’t see any magazines or newspapers, either.
Other Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
As a proper (large) Android device, you can watch videos, listen to music, or run plenty of other apps with the Edge. Browsing the Web worked fine using the WebKit browser, though the Edge’s dim, stubborn color screen made it much less fun than on an iPad. The built-in apps also had their share of UI issues. To cite just one example, I was excited to try Documents To Go, which normally works well on Android smartphones. But after registering the app, heading to Word To Go, and creating a new document, I couldn’t figure out how to bring up on the on-screen keyboard. I thought it was a bug, but it turns out you must click and hold the menu button in an open document.
For media, there’s 4GB of internal storage, with 3GB free for user programs and media files, plus a side-mounted SD card slot. A standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack lets you plug in standard headphones. There’s also a microphone input, Bluetooth, and a webcam. The Webcam works with the built-in camcorder, and Bluetooth lets you use wireless stereo earbuds, but that’s it; Entourage is working on additional features for the future. The lithium-polymer battery is good for up to six hours running the LCD screen. Even when fully charged and used partially in standby mode, the battery managed to drain almost completely by the end of the day.
Despite all this, dedicated Android enthusiasts that are also avid readers can find some things to like in the Entourage Edge. But I wager that’s a fairly small niche market. The Edge may be in a class of one, but it will take a strong anti-Microsoft bias to buy this thing over a 0 Windows 7 laptop, or a strong anti-Apple bias to choose it over an iPad. It’s also tough to recommend the Edge over Borders’ Kobo eReader (9.99, ), the 9 Wi-Fi-only Nook, or the 9 Kindle, which can even buy books over
