The Camangi people were good enough to send me a WebStation to take a look at. This isn’t a full review of the unit, but a look at how it can be used as an ebook reader. Our sister publication, Gadgetell, has a review of the unit in more general terms. You can find that here.
The WebStation is a really neat 7″ tablet with a resistive touchscreen. It runs a customized version of Android 1.5. For all its specs see the Gadgetell review I mentioned above.
I’m primarily interested in the WebStation as an ereader, and the WebStation included two ereading programs – one for Google Book Search and Aldiko, a full featured ereading program designed especially for Android. Let’s look at them both.
Google Book Search
This “reader” is really a dedicated browser link to Google Book Search and it has its own icon on the home page.
When open the page you are taken to a home page which gives you books you have recently opened, recently viewed books, featured books, and it also allows you to browse the following categories: adventure, business, classics, drama, mythology, general fiction, history, misc., mystery, philosophy, political science, religion, science and math, science fiction and fantasy, short stories, social science and travel.
Since this is really a shortcut to a browser window, you are not given the ability to change fonts, backgrounds, etc.. Nevertheless, all the books I tried were very readable and I would have had no problem reading an entire book this way. The instructions don’t make it clear, but you must be sure to bookmark your book using the browser bookmark function or you won’t be able to get back to the place you left when you open it again.
Aldiko
Since Aldiko has been out for Android for over a year, it’s pretty clear where Apple took it’s opening page for the iBookstore! Above is what you are greeted with when you open Aldiko. from this page you can download ebooks or browse your own collection.
If want to download a book you are given the option to automatically go to catalogs by Feedbooks, with separate entries for free public domain, original, movies, great books of the Western World, and high school reading. You also have an entry for Smashwords (with a breakdown of the catalog on the next page), O’Reilly and All Romance Ebooks. You can buy the books directly from the application.
When you want to select a book this is what you are presented with. Look familiar?
And here is the book I chose from Feedbooks.
Aldiko is a very full-featured ereader with a huge amount of options. You can toggle between a day and night theme. The night theme is a black background with white text. The day theme is completely customizable. You can set many different font colors, background colors, link colors and search highlight colors.
For fonts, you can choose Arial, Georgia, Courier, Times New Roman, Verdana, default serif, default sans serif, default cursive and default fantasy. Font sizes go from 10 to 24 in one point increments and font weights are lighter, normal, bold and bolder.
There is even more customization. You can set line spacing from 1.0 to 3.0 in 0.1 increments, set your horizontal or vertical margins and do left, right or justified text alignment. You can adjust screen brightness and set what swipes you want to effect this, lock the display orientation and enable CSS stylesheets.
Text is crisp, clean and easy to read. Overall, the display quality is really excellent and it unit can be used outside, though direct sun is a bit much.
Other matters
I must admit that I was a bit confused, at first, about how the Android OS worked. I’m used to the Apple GUI, or to Windows Mobile, so it took me a while to become accustomed to how the new OS worked. After I did I found it easy to use. Getting used to a resistive touch screen, after all those years of using a capacitive one on my iPhone, took some getting used to as well.
As a general web tablet the WebStation works very well. It had no problems connecting to any WiFi source I tried. The Android web browser took anything I threw at it. Camangi has its own, rather small, app store, but I haven’t had time to poke around it too much.
The WebStation is available direct from Camangi or from Amazon and costs $275. Camangi has a good website where you can look at all of the unit’s features.
I, personally, am not at all convinced that the iPad is worth Apple’s high asking price, but I do think that the WebStation is worth the price. Let me quote from the Gadgetell review:
The important part, the bottom line and big questions. Would I buy it, and would I recommend it? Yes, on both counts. I would buy one, though I would say I would feel much better about my purchase with a price of $199 instead of $275. As for recommending it, I would not really hesitate, though I would say a regular (non-geek) user would probably enjoy it a little more just because they would not go in with pre-conceived thoughts about the tablet running Android. Again the WebStation is running Android, but I would not describe it as an Android tablet. Once I realized that and just accepted the WebStation as a decent sized Internet tablet I became really glad to have it in hand.
