Icarus eXceL review

There are two striking things about the eXceL, which tops Icarus’ range of eBook readers. The first is its huge 9.7″ E Ink screen, and the second is its eye-watering price; it’s four times as expensive as Icarus’ own Pocket model.

It’s certainly a fully-featured eBook reader. The vast screen has twice the area of a typical six-inch display, and its 825×1,200 resolution gives it twice as many pixels, resulting in huge, crisp documents. The screen helps in the menu system, too, which has room for plenty of icons, a progress display for the most recently read title and even an analogue clockface. While not a touchscreen as such, a stylus system lets you select, navigate and make on-screen annotations. There’s also Wi-Fi, and support for a wide range of file formats including Microsoft Office documents.

The eXceL’s screen may be large, but it’s quite a slim device and its slim bezel means it’s not too huge. This contributes to a smart look that continues with its controls. On the left of the screen are home and back buttons together with left and right navigation, while on the right is a joystick with a centre push for selecting. Their positioning means it’s easy to navigate and read one-handed, but the reader’s half-kilogram weight means you’re better off using both hands.

On the base is a headphone output, a dedicated volume rocker and an SD card slot, but these are all slightly recessed, making it tricky to insert and remove memory cards and some headphone plugs. Disappointingly Icarus hasn’t designed in somewhere to stow the stylus. The screen doesn’t respond to finger presses like a Kindle Touch, and only works with the special stylus.

The eXceL opened all our test files including Doc and Docx Word documents, although we found that page turning was inconsistent in both types, meaning we sometimes had to hunt backwards for skipped parts of the document. Our test HTML file opened in a browser and caused the wireless interface to switch on unnecessarily.

When viewing a document the stylus lets you select hyperlinked chapter headings if present, or you can gesture up and down with it to turn the page. We found that screen updates were leisurely compared to a Kindle, even when we turned off the default full refresh with each page turn. With full refresh disabled we could see ghosting from previous pages after a couple of turns.

There’s a huge range of options when viewing a document, ranging through comprehensive annotation and highlighting features, bookmarking, searching and dictionary lookups. Notes can be tapped out using the on-screen keyboard or even using handwriting recognition, although we found the recognition system unreliable. It’s possible to zoom in up to 500 per cent, potentially making this a great reader for anyone with impaired vision, but we found it hard to get the text-to-speech feature working, and when we did it pronounced contractions such as ‘won’t’ incorrectly.

Given the sophistication elsewhere it’s a shame that you can only browse content on the eXceL through a folder structure; there’s no library listing books by title, author or genre. Fortunately there is a search function which matches within author, title or filename, so it’s not the hindrance it could be.

This is a good reader, but its size means it won’t appeal to all users. More importantly it isn’t as slick or impressive as it needs to be to justify its premium price. If you have this much money to spend on something that isn’t pocket-sized, an iPad or Android tablet is a more flexible choice.