RCA REB1100 eBook review

RCA's black-and-white REB1100 strikes a reasonable balance between price, portability, and features. And in this era of MP3-playing cameras and multifunction printers, you have to admire the fact that this e-book is just for reading books. However, that singular purpose, coupled with a rather limited selection of books, means that this gadget will appeal only to those who constantly read several best-sellers simultaneously. RCA's black-and-white REB1100 strikes a reasonable balance between price, portability, and features. And in this era of MP3-playing cameras and multifunction printers, you have to admire the fact that this e-book is just for reading books. However, that singular purpose, coupled with a rather limited selection of books, means that this gadget will appeal only to those who constantly read several best-sellers simultaneously.

Electronic paperback
About the size of a paperback book (5 inches by 7 inches by 1.5 inches) and weighing 18 ounces, the REB1100's molded plastic fits comfortably in your hand. The black-and-white touch-screen LCD (5.5-inch diagonal size; 320-by-480-pixel resolution) is certainly better than the display on a Palm Vx, but the relatively low resolution means that letters appear as if they were printed with a dot matrix printer. Two large buttons let you page through a book with ease. The unit runs on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that provides 20 to 40 hours of use.

There are some advantages of illuminated liquid crystals over paper. For one thing, the REB1100's backlighting opens a whole new world of reading under the covers. Those with less-than-perfect eyesight will appreciate the ability to increase the font size easily. You can underline or annotate interesting passages or look up any word in the built-in dictionary with just a few presses of your finger or taps of the included stylus. The unit's 8MB of memory can store about 8,000 pages of text--about 20 novels' worth--as well as editions of periodicals such as Newsweek or the New York Times. The unit sports a headphone jack and a music button; however, RCA hasn't enabled any music or audio book features yet.