Features:  

The COOL-ER eReader is so light, you can almost forget you have it. Throw it in your bag and it doesn’t start to weigh it down like the Sony or even the Kindle can. I had it everywhere with me and would pull it out when I had a down moment, if it wasn’t for how long it took to navigate back to my book, I would have felt like it was better than lugging around my dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice.

Not to be a stereotypical girl, but my favorite feature on the COOL-ER is the color options. I like to have choices and I buy the COOL-ER over another device if it meant coordinating the color with my iPod and purse. Having the colors makes it personal. Take a page out of Apple’s book, colors work.

The COOL-ER supports MP3s so I could listen to music while I was reading – it helped drown out those rowdy teens on the train. But the music player does drain the battery significantly, so use it sparingly if you’re traveling.

I liked that the COOL-ER came pre-loaded with several books in a variety of genres. Almost anyone could pull it out of the box and enjoy reading it right then without having to go through the computer the first time. But, once you do start loading books and the like it’s a simple process of dragging and dropping files. It was also nice to have Sodoku on the device. Sometimes, not often, I need a break from a book. Throwing down a game of Sodoku was a nice tangent. It was a little awkward navigating through the game with limited controls, but it worked and I still won.

The COOL-ER would time out and turn itself off if I didn’t use it for a while. This was nice when I was reading and would throw it in my bag before turning it off. That way I didn’t end up 20 pages ahead of where I left off because buttons invariably get pushed inside my bag.

My biggest gripe with most eBook readers, and it’s no different with the COOL-ER, is that when I turn it off and then on again, it goes straight to the main menu. I want the book-like experience. I want to be able to turn it off (to save the battery – I can’t get over that mental hurdle) and set it on the table or throw it in my bag but then come back to it and pick right up where I left off. Even if it does save the page I’m on, I still don’t like having to navigate through the library again to find the book. It was especially hard testing this model because we had the same book in a variety of formats and I had a hard time remembering which page format I had been last reading.

My second biggest problem with the COOL-ER is the slow response time. It was easy for me to feel confused with the COOL-ER, especially when I was first using it. Sometimes it would take so long for the screen to refresh or the page to turn that I wasn’t sure it had recognized my command. If I did it again, or pushed another button, it would all freeze up for a moment. This seemed to be worse when I was running music. Obviously because the COOL-ER hardware is so light, there isn’t a whole lot of computing power going on inside, so running multiple things will slow it down a bit.