Pocketbook Verse Pro Color Review

September 14, 2024

6

The Pocketbook Verse Pro Color is a new e-reader that has only been available to purchase for the past few weeks. The industrial design and software experience is identical to the Pocketbook Verse Pro black and white model, except the Verse Pro Color has an E INK Kaleido 3 e-paper display. This is perfect for viewing ebook cover art, PDF files, comics, and magazines. The big selling points are the physical page-turn buttons, IPX8 water protection, audiobook support with Bluetooth, Text-to-Speech function, adaptive SMARTlight feature, and Quad-Core processor.

Hardware

The Verse Pro Colour features a 6-inch E INK Kaleido 3 colour e-paper display with a black-and-white resolution of 1448×1072 and 300 PPI and a colour resolution of 536×724 and 150 PPI. Verse Pro Color delivers stunning clarity and detail. Reproducing 4096 colours and shades, PocketBook Verse Pro Color provides an eye-safe, glare-free, and comfortable e-reading experience, as its optical characteristics are as close to ordinary printed pages as possible.

The e-reader’s Color scheme is piano black on the front and back platting, and there is a strip of gunmetal grey alongside the side of the bezel; Pocketbook has named this colour Stormy. The front of the e-reader has a slight dip and a recessed screen with no glass; this is great since the screen won’t reflect light from overhead lighting or when reading outdoors in the sun.

SMARTlight enhances the reading experience by offering a customizable frontlight. Users can tailor their lighting preferences from a calm, bluish tone for daylight reading to a warm, soothing yellow hue for bedtime stories. With manual mode, adjust brightness and choose between warm or cool tones, saving personalized settings for effortless switching. In automatic mode, SMARTlight intelligently adapts brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day, ensuring optimal reading conditions.

Underneath the hood is a quad-core 1.8ghz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. There is a g-sensor for automatic screen rotation and Bluetooth 5.4 to pair wireless headphones and earbuds to listen to audiobooks sideloaded to the e-reader or purchased from the Pocketbook Bookstore. Dual-band WIFi will allow users to connect to the internet and use the browser to surf the web or connect to said bookstore. Certified to withstand immersion in fresh water up to 2 meters deep for 60 minutes, PocketBook Verse Color Pro lets users dive into their favourite book, whether taking a bath or lounging by the pool. Designed for an active lifestyle, Verse Color Pro combines compactness and functionality with robust water resistance, allowing users to read without worrying about water exposure. With IPX8 protection, users can feel confident reading in any environment, whether caught in the rain or enjoying a relaxing soak with their favourite book. It is powered by a 2100 mAh battery with dimensions of 108 × 156 × 7,6 mm and weighs 182g.

Software

Pocketbook has always run Linux on all of its e-readers, the same OS that the Amazon Kindle and Kobo e-readers employ. This OS helps preserve battery life because no background processes are running. It is also rock-stable and seldom crashes. It is super tough, although this prevents users from installing any apps on the device. Pocketbook is using Linux 3.10.65 on the Verse Pro Color.

The main home screen comprises a widget at the top, showcasing the books you are reading or have downloaded from the store and haven’t started yet. If there are a few books you are in the process of reading, there is a multi-page layout, which you can swipe on to see the following few books on the carousel. Around nine bestselling titles are underneath some recommended books from the Pocketbook Store. The main navigation has icons with text underneath them. They provide shortcuts to your library, audiobook player, store, note taking and apps.

Your library is where all of your content is housed, and you can separate it by formats, author, date and sort by list view or cover art view. If some of your books still need to cover art images because you downloaded them online, a metadata system will look at the book’s title and author and fetch metadata. You will likely be on this screen because you buy and load hundreds of books. You can also hit switches on a particular book to flag it as finished, making it disappear from the home screen. Since this is a colour e-reader, all cover art will appear in vibrant, full colour.

The Store is something that Pocketbook has been working on for a long time. They have been ironing out deals with publishers to stock bestsellers and books you would like to read, not open-source royalty-free textbooks. When you buy a Pocketbook, some titles are only European, or your price might be in Euros. All you need to do is contact the company and give them your serial number; they can change the region where you are based. We always do this with our review units, so it only shows English books and Canadian dollars. There is a starred rating system, a sample download is available, and you can read the description and standard fare. However, Kindle and Kobo have more comprehensive content selections since they both have self-publishing platforms, such as KDP and KWL. They also stock millions of books in different markets all over the world. Pocketbook might have a few thousand, but at least they are working on expanding it. They also introduced an audiobook section, so you don’t have to sideload everything; you can download and listen to them on the audiobook player.

The Apps section mainly comprises all the different Pocketbook apps like Sending to Pocketbook, Pocketbook Cloud, Dropbox, and a few games like chess. Pocketbook does have a few apps that take advantage of the colour screen. The first is primarily aimed at kids; it is a colouring book. You have eight primary colours that you can choose from. Tap on various images, and they fill the object. There is a sketch app, too. Draw, take notes or develop reading or to-do- lists.

There are a few settings and options that I want to draw attention to. System-wide dark mode inverts the colour of your display. The background can be black, and all text is white. Want to know how much you are using the light? A new graph breaks down the entire day and shows whether you use the front-lit display or colour temperature system. The physical buttons, such as home, settings and the page-turn buttons, can be keyed to do different things.

Reading

This e-reader is designed for reading books, and users can access the Pocketbook Store to download thousands of books. However, the real power is sideloading in your content; it supports DRM EPUB and PDF files and books you download online. It has extensive support for ACSM, AZW, AZW3, CBR, CBZ, CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB(DRM), EPUB, FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTM, HTML, MOBI, PDF (DRM), PDF, PRC, RTF, and TXT.

With DRM EPUB and PDF, users can purchase ebooks from other stores like Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Google. You can also download books from the public library, such as Overdrive. You must copy the book you bought to your computer or MAC and download Adobe Digital Editions. Create an account or log in to an existing one. Select the book you downloaded to the computer, plug in your Pocketbook Color 2 to your PC and transfer the book. It would be best to use this software because Adobe must verify you own the book.

Speaking of the library, Pocketbook has been supported by thousands of European and North American public libraries in the apps section. You can enter your local branch or search by country and select the branch you do business with. Enter your library card number, and you can borrow and read books on your e-reader without needing a PC or MAC. This is a very underrated feature that most reviewers ignore.

The physical page turn buttons are on the bottom of the screen, which is less intuitive than having them on the sides of the screen. With that out of the way, Pocketbook has the best page-turn buttons in the business; they are easy to press down and have good build quality. Accidental miss clicks are rare. If you hold down on the page forward or back, you can rapidly turn pages in any direction. This is similar to the system the Kobo Aura One Limited Edition and Kindle Manga Reader used.

The stock ebook reader is what you will use daily to read ebooks since there are no other options. This is due to the inability to download apps since this is running Linux and not Google Android. You can tap or gesture to turn the pages of the book. One of the most excellent new software features is the ability to pinch and zoom to change how big you want the fonts to be instead of going to the ebook settings menu. This makes it more intuitive for new users of e-readers. You can also increase the size of the fonts with a slider bar. Around 50 different fonts are pre-loaded, but you can install your own. Of course, like any e-reader, you can adjust the margins and fonts.

One of my favourite settings on the Verse Pro Color is the visual settings. You can change the contrast, saturation and brightness. This is useful if you read a scanned document or the text is too light and want to make it darker. A recent firmware update introduced dark mode. Using Dark mode on your PocketBook can provide more comfort in reading in low-light environments and at nighttime. This feature alters the display settings, presenting white text on a dark background, which does not contrast with the dark surroundings and does not interfere with the eyes. You can also switch the inversion of book illustrations while reading in Dark mode.

Many avid readers have discovered that utilizing Dark mode on their devices helps to ease fatigue in their eyes from looking at a bright screen. Moreover, Dark mode proves highly beneficial for nighttime reading, as it reduces the amount of blue light emitted by the screen, which can contribute to eyestrain and fatigue.

Pocketbook is a rare brand with native support for CBR and CBZ, two of the world’s best manga formats. Finding these online or buying from other stores and loading them on your PB is straightforward. You can treat these two formats as file containers that have a bunch of pictures inside of them. The most accessible reference is to think of a ZIP file full of pictures, but you don’t need to unzip the file to view them. It is straightforward to find these CBR/CBZ formats online.

Wrap Up

Pocketbook has been making e-readers for over a decade, and they have a storied career in making excellent e-book readers with little to no bloatware. Most of their e-readers look alike, so there is consistency in their brand but little to separate them from one another. You put 4-5 Pocketbook e-readers side by side; visually, there is little difference.

The Verse Pro Color makes sense if you want a platform-agnostic e-reading experience. Unlike Amazon, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble, pocketbooks do not lock you into a walled garden. Sure, you can buy books from the Pocketbook Store, but the real power is sideloading your collection or downloading free audiobooks or ebooks from the Internet.

I recommend the Verse Pro Color if you want an excellent e-reader with no extra frills like note-taking or drawing. All your colour content will look fantastic, and ditto with web browsing. Magazines, comics, newspapers, and PDF files will all look good, but the coloured manga is where it’s at.