I am a law student and need to read a lot of books so I bought this reader with a view that it might help me save some money on print-outs. However, the purchase turned out to be a complete nightmare.
I bought this product in June 2010, when the Amazon Kindle was priced very high in India, I had to buy this since this was the only reader easily available in India at that time. I must accept, though that Infibeam managed to get pretty good coverage for the Pi in media - as it was extensively featured in TV shows like Gadget Guru and a number of popular tech websites. This also influenced my decision. I believed that a product by an Indian company would not be a Chinese counterfeit.
- Build Quality
As soon as I first opened the Pi, I realized what a mistake I had made. The plastic used in Pi is extremely cheap and very prone to breaking, even with the slightest of impacts. The four-way button is hard to press and all buttons are poor in quality.
The screen has no protective covering of any sort. It has really bad contrast and is difficult to read even in bright light. The background is dark grey instead of white which makes it look like real cheap paper as compared to higher contrast screens found on other e-ink based readers. Only after a week of using the device, the screen was damaged and would not display anything. The pi had to be sent back to Infibeam for repairs, which began another long ordeal with their customer service.
- User Interface
The interface of the device is extremely difficult to use. The basic features like fullscreen mode and search are inside deep menus, which have to be accessed by a single four-way button. There is neither a physical keyboard nor a touchscreen in this device which makes it a dead reader. The on-screen keyboard available for search option is really difficult to access using the four-way button, also considering the very slow nature of device, it may take you upto 10 minutes to perform a single search, rendering the feature useless. Besides, the device is really slow and there is a lag between page turns which is very irritating.
- Features
This device has hardly any features for its price. The Amazon kindle3(wifi) - which costs cheaper in India even after adding customs and shipping charges offers wi-fi for downloading books and browsing the internet. In the pi, you cannot highlight text or add annotations to text. Also, there are no inbuilt dictionaries as in Kindle or sony Readers.
Probably the only good features it has is the wide variety of file-formats it can support including epub, doc, html etc and the support for Indian languages.
- Customer Service
The customer service of Infibeam is almost non-existent. Repeated phone calls and emails result in no-reply. After the screen of Pi was damaged, I called their customer service repeatedly, only to find that my calls were transferred from one person to another and I was told to call again after sometime. They finally told me to courier the device back in Ahmedabad, for which I had to pay 500Rs. to Blue Dart, despite the device being covered under warranty.
About one month later, I got an e-mail from them asking me to pay Rs. 3800/- to repair the device, as the screen was damaged; despite the warranty being perfectly valid. I was told that the screen is not covered under the warranty. (Then what is -- USB cable??) In the hope to be finally able to use the Pi, I made the online transfer, and the device was returened to me after a month.
However, again the screen stopped working within a week and displayed bizzaire patterns as before. I decided not to take a chance with their customer service for a second time and had to throw the device into trash, where it rightfully belongs.
- Value for Money
With no extra features like wifi, web browsing, built-in dictionaries, highlighting etc., the price of the device is unbelievably high for a standalone reader which does nothing but reads books. It is priced far above competition, and has no durablity.
I would recommend all serious readers and gadget freaks not to waste their hard-earned money on this. There are much better readers available in India which are priced even less.