The Wink e-reader wants to challenge Kindle,but has it got the plot right? If this influx of e-readers continues,the day when a bookworm will mean a virus that can eat through your collection of e-books is not far away. Till then,however,someone who is willing to spend more than what he would pay for his annual supply of books to possess an e-reader should be the legitimate holder of that soubriquet. An e-reader is for persons who take their books very seriously. The biggest utility of these handheld electronic libraries is its portability. For instance,the 6-inch Wink XTS,the second Indian e-reader after the Infibeams Pi,weighing all of 260 grams,can hold hundreds of titles with its 2GB in-built storage. So you will no longer have to haul around your books while going on long tours. Though e-readers were made popular by Kindle,the e-reader from Amazon has still not reached the masses in India,mostly due to the cost. In comparison,the Wink costs Rs 11,490 for the XTS version with Wi-Fi and Rs 14,990 for the 3G version with a slot for a SIM card. Users can download new titles using Wi-Fi or 3G depending on their models. They can also download titles in txt,rtf,doc,wolf,PDF,HTML,CHM,FB2,DjVu formats on to their computers and copy-paste them into the e-reader using an USB port. The Wink Store already has over 2,00,000 titles in English and Indian languages and is in the process of adding more. It helps that Wink is produced by Bangalore-based EC Media International,which has strong ties with DC Books,one of south Indias largest publishing houses. This means Wink has an enormous quantity of Indian content in 15 languages and can provide you the titles without any trouble. So what is good about the Wink? Well,to start with,it has almost all the features you will find in the Kindle or any other regular e-reader. It can go online and get you books and other content. It stores your titles in an easy to browse My Library section. It also plays music through a decent built-in speaker and a 3.5-mm stereo jack. It even multitasks to let you enjoy music while reading a book on the unit; a definite plus. Like Kindle,the Wink is also e-ink-based and is much less taxing on the eye than backlit screens. But this also means you will need light to read,so forget about catching up on Charles Dickens while travelling on an overnight bus. Most books on the Wink Store are reasonably priced while old titles are priced as low as Rs 29.95,you will have to pay the shelf rate for new books. You can also read PDF files which you can download for free from the Web,but this will mean a lot of zooming in and scrolling to read the text. The Wink also lets you make notes on the pages,an added advantage for students and researchers. The Li-Polymer 1500mAh battery the company claims,is good for 10,000 page views or 10 hours of music on a single charge. But the Wink loses out to the Kindle when it comes to processing speed. The 400 MHz ARM9 takes its own time moving from one application to another and almost goes to sleep when you try to read heavy PDF files. The qwerty keyboard is good to type on,but its small cursor keys can be a bit frustrating when you have to use it to navigate. The large page-flip buttons on the side only flip pages and are not useful for navigation. There are no shortcuts to zoom the text; you have to click the zoom button,then select the text size and press enter. There are handy volume control buttons on right side,but surprisingly no one thought of a scroll dial or zoom-in/zoom-out buttons to help with scrolling and reading. While Kindle scores high by letting users subscribe to thousands of magazines and newspapers,Wink users will have to do with a daily news update provided in collaboration with a news agency. The Wink is text to speech enabled,but the company is still working on a license to use this technology. Still,the Wink is a good option for Indian readers,especially since it is cheaper than Kindle and gives access to quality regional content. But I fear the price could still put off many,unless the love for literature far outweighs the economics.
