Cruz Reader:Tablet Lite

I was hoping to enter the Android-age this week courtesy of Velocity Micro’s $199 Cruz Reader. The Reader arrived yesterday on my porch sometime during a late afternoon editorial meeting. I excitedly opened up the UPS cardboard to be teased by the words “Unlimited Possibilities” printed on the Cruz’s product packaging.

I haven’t purchased that much gadgetry in recent years, but I do recall that my cell phone  came with a fairly thick operating manual. The Cruz Reader takes a more minimalist approach, providing you with a single-page folded booklet. I couldn’t find much more on-line, so I assumed this is a completely intuitive device that will guide my fingers in doing the work.

After booting up and then adjusting the touch calibration setting, I found that I couldn’t get the Cruz Reader to respond. I thought I had paper-weighted this thing. My fingers told me to reboot this mini-tablet by pressing the silvery on-off button on the side. I learned later that I was actually just putting it into a kind of sleep mode.

I discovered by accident that to power down the Reader, you need to depress that silver key until a menu pops up with a “power down” entry, which you then touch to get this silicon slab to reboot.

I then re-entered the calibration utility, went through the training sequence again, and began to explore my possibilities.

If like me you’ve only worked with capacitive touch interfaces, the Cruz Reader’s resistance-based screens takes some getting used to. It becomes a full-contact sport: you really have to make sure finger and screen completely meet. That quirk and the touch calibration utility’s inadequate validation—really none at all— sent me off to a false start.

Once I righted myself, I sailed into the browser and email, two core utilities where I would be spending perhaps 60-70% of my time.

Cruz takes 45 seconds to load a non-optimized page from say, The New York Times. The Technoverse Blog loads more quickly—one benefit of less content. Sites that have been customized for small screen smartphones and tablets also do well: Tech Crunch‘s front page, for example, loads quickly enough at under 20 seconds.

By the way, I am enjoying the color display.

Cruz Reader: crisp print, but sluggish scrolling.

Email is workable. You just have to keep in mind that fingers have to completely connect with the virtual keyboard. Did I say I’m not fond of resistive interfaces?

Other gripes: the accelerometer of whatever the chip is that determines orientation take too long to responds I am also having transient Wi-Fi issues. And the gesturing is unintuitive: to scroll down it appears you have to gesture up. [Editor’s note: Hey, you’re metaphorically touching the page and “moving” it up and down. Get used to it!]

So what’s it like to read a book on the Cruz Reader, this device’s raison-d’etre? To find out, I downloaded the classic “The Last Days of a Rake” by Donna Lea Simpson (Carina Press). This book may be a page turner, but on the Cruz Reader, you really have to drag your fingers in a swipe gesture to move to the next page.

I wasn’t expecting that much for $199.  And I wasn’t disappointed in that respect, so the Micro Velocity may just be right for my purposes: a simple information gadget I can use to read and send emails, browse web pages, and study documents while I’m at a WiFi hotspot.

I’ll  explore some of the application possibilities of this inexpensive Android gadget in a future post.

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