The idea behind the Barnes & Noble Nook Color ($249, 4 stars) is an excellent one—a reading-focused tablet for users that want the simplicity and immersion E Ink-based readers like the Amazon Kindle offer, but with some of the extra features and applications tablets offer. The Nook Color has done well, too, earning an Editors' Choice for color ebook readers. The Aluratek Libre Touch copies the Nook's blueprint, offering an Android-based system, apps for email and calendar, a full Web browser, and an LCD instead of the E Ink display. Unfortunately, the features checklist is where the comparison ends: the Libre Touch is infuriating to use, its Android tweaks hurt more than help, and its dim, cloudy, glare-prone screen makes reading difficult. At $149, it might be a fun toy for an Android hacker to play with, but it's certainly not an ebook reader or a tablet a consumer should consider.
Design
Aesthetically, there's a lot to like about the Libre Touch. At 8.0 by 4.9 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighing 11.9 ounces, it's a nice size that's easy to hold in one hand, matte black and nicely minimalistic. On the front is a Libre Touch logo, a silver do-everything hardware button, page forward/back controls on the right side, and the 7-inch screen. On top is the power button; the bottom houses a headphone jack, volume controls, a micro-SD card slot, and a micro-USB port for connecting the Libre Touch to a computer. Around back is an Aluratek logo and a single speaker.
Now, about that 7-inch screen: It's a 800 by 480 TFT LCD. It's resistive rather than capacitive, which means you'll need to press harder than normal to make presses register. That's totally forgivable for a $150 device. More problematic is the fact that the screen is downright difficult to look at for more than a couple of minutes. The screen almost appears to move, as if it's getting some interference and is displaying static. This glittery, moving look makes it hard to look at the screen for long, and it's certainly not something you'd want to read a book with. The screen is also extremely dim by default, and even turned up to the battery-crushing brightest setting it isn't very bright.
Aluratek rates the battery life of the Libre Touch at 8 hours. In my tests, that was about right, and it's pretty disappointing for an ebook reader. The Nook Color isn't any better, but when most ebook readers can get battery lives of weeks with E Ink screens, it's still a problem. And the tradeoffs make more sense considering the Nook Color's excellent screen.
Reading
The Libre Touch has reading problems beyond just the screen. First is the bookstore, which at first is extremely confusing to deal with. The bookstore is powered by Kobo, which is a good thing; Kobo has plenty of books, and good apps on many other devices. However, it's not a real bookstore app, since all you get is a mobile version of the Kobo website. That's fine, once you get there, but first you'll need to sign in with an Adobe Digital Editions account, which requires going to the Adobe site and setting it up. It's more unnecessary hassle, just to get you to a website.
The Kobo website works pretty well, and downloading books is simple enough: Just sign in or sign up, and two taps downloads the book to your device. Books are downloaded as ePub files, and for some inexplicable reason are not automatically added to your library, so you'll spend a lot of time digging through the file explorer app to find your books. Once reading, pages turned fairly responsively when I used the hardware buttons, but tapping on the screen was hit or miss—and mostly miss.
The Libre Touch comes with 100 books pre-loaded, all classics now available in the public domain. They're all just plain text files, which means anything from footnotes to images is going to get messed up. ePub files worked much better, and fortunately all files can be easily exported off the Libre Touch onto another device.
Other Apps and Multimedia
Android 1.5 powers the Libre Touch. (The Nook Color runs Android 2.2, and many tablets are up to Android 3.0 now.) It has a full Web browser, and email and calendar clients. All are basic, but all work well enough. The Libre Touch has Wi-Fi built in, and once you connect you can sync your Google email and calendar, or a variety of other services. (Of course, given how unreliable and difficult the screen is, it might take you a few tries to get your password right.)
Unfortunately, there's no access to the Android Market, so your only available apps are those that come pre-installed (or you can manually download and install your own, by checking the Unknown Sources box in Settings): Alarm Clock, Browser, Calculator, Email, Explorer (a file browser), Global Time, Music, Photo Viewer, and Video. All are basic, and look like phone-sized apps blown up to fit the 7-inch screen, but work fine. Files can be loaded via a micro-SD card, or via USB onto the 2.8GB of free internal storage. Between the screen's low resolution and difficult interaction, though, things like scrolling a webpage become a chore, and watching a video isn't exactly a nice experience on a 7-inch, 800 by 480 screen.
There's more I could discuss about the Aluratek Libre Touch, but there's no reason to pile on. The long and short of it is this: Don't buy this device. Even at $149, it's not worth the user experience headaches, the outdated software, the low-res and difficult screen, and the low quality of the reading experience. If what you want is to read, buy an Amazon Kindle ($139, 4 stars) or a Barnes & Noble Nook ($139, 4.5 stars)—they're hard to beat when it comes to reading experience. If you want a tablet, pony up the extra $100 for the Nook Color, which is everything the Aluratek Libre Touch isn't.
