Entourage Edge review
By Joanna Stern 
posted March 12th 2010 3:19PM
posted March 12th 2010 3:19PM
Look and feel
We'd be lying if we said we thought the Edge was attractive. When closed the glossy white and boxy design continually made us think that it belonged in a sterile hospital room, and its silverish gray trim doesn't really do much for us either. Entourage does plan to offer a variety of colors, but it's still quite vanilla looking. The other thing that makes the Edge look like a laptop is the number of ports that surround it: two USB, a micro-USB, mic and headphone jacks, and SIM and SD card slots. A stylus is tucked into the side, and a curious three megapixel camera lives above the LCD screen. We looked through Android menus for about 20 minutes before we realized there's no way to use it -- a future software update will apparently enable camera functionality.
E-reader experience
Speaking of the touch, it's pretty nice: you can underline/highlight text and jot down notes in the margin or in a separate journal page with the included stylus, and you also can save a marked up page or journal document as a PDF and then easily transfer it to the LCD screen and email it to a friend. Pretty impressive, but because the screen is E Ink based the writing experience is laggy; there's about a second delay until the text shows up. Those worried about missing a word can always launch the Android audio recorder which uses the Edge's dual microphones. They picked up a bit of background noise when we recorded a meeting, but we could clearly make out the conversation.
As an e-reader the Edge is actually solid until it comes to buying books. Though you can download books over the air from the Entourage Edge store, the selection is lacking compared to Amazon and Barnes & Noble's e-book stores, not to mention quite expensive. Entourage says there are over 225,000 trade books, 65 current New York Times best sellers as well and over 1,500 newspapers in its store -- we found some titles by our favorite authors including Nick Hornby and Jodi Picolt, but when searching for others like John Grisham we came up empty handed. The company is really banking on people using the device to download free ePub books and PDFs from Google Books. You can actually do this right from the Android browser on the LCD screen; once you download a book the Edge automatically puts it in your library and will open it on the E Ink display. You can also sideload content either using the SD slot or by transferring files to the 4GB of onboard memory directly from your desktop.
Android tablet experience
The rest of the Android experience is also quite mediocre. To its credit the company has added a nice shortcut bar to the home screen with icons to the library, bookstore, browser and e-mail, but the resistive touchscreen gets in the way of smoothly navigating menus and browsing the web. While we got the hang of having to press harder on the screen and on the virtual keyboard, we seemed to select the wrong links and letters more often than not. There's a trackball on the right to make up for it, but it just felt counterintuitive to switch between the screen and the ball. In the end, the tablet is best used for light web browsing, checking email and listening to some music -- the speakers between the screens are actually fairly loud. Oh and while the company promises Flash Lite support, we couldn't get YouTube videos to play in the browser, and the YouTube app isn't preloaded.
Performance and battery life
Battery life is really dependent on what you're doing. With WiFi and both screens turned on the Edge only lasted four hours. That's pretty awful for an ARM-based tablet like this, but if you turn off the LCD screen in settings – we wish there was a physical switch for this – it should get over 16 hours of standby. (That's still less than the Kindle's three days.) Oddly, when we closed the device it didn't go to sleep, but this will apparently be fixed in the first firmware update. Still, you'll have to charge the Edge quite frequently -- too bad the charger is larger and less portable than most laptop AC adapters.
Wrap-up
Is this half-baked junk supposed to be an iPad KILLER..??
I'm sure it has its merits, and it's going to be great for a few people, but it's sure as hell not an iPad killer.
Oh please reserve one for me! This would be an excellent candidate for "will it blend". Blending may actually make it look better and become more useful after it's recycled.
"2010! The year of the wanna be tablets" 100 will show up, 2 or 3 may make it. This won't be one of em.
They did however cover the entire checklist of ports and "features" and clearly covered the three most important design elements.
1) Huge bezel
2) Slow netbook performance
3) Ugly
Should sell 10 or 20 by the holidays!
I'm a grad student and have been waiting for a device like this. Nothing else does all the academic tasks I use my laptop for while at school (email, web, PDF annotation, music, lecture recording, in an average day, and I believe the potential is there for hooking up an external keyboard for notetaking and writing...) with a screen that won't kill my eyes. It's not refined at all an I won't be getting one at this price. What I'd really like is a snappy convertible netbook or smartbook with capacitive touch and a digitizer on a pixel qi/ mirasol/ whatever comes out on top in the unlit display market. Soon?
Does the edge have a digitizer on the e ink side? I think I'd have a hard time writing in the margins scratching away at a resistive screen.
I'll think I'll stick to my $499 iPad.
This thing is a serious piece of crap.
This has promise, not in this incarnation, but maybe future versions will be lighter, faster, and with better software. But they better do that quickly as the market is moving quickly.
I really think this pre-order business is a sly way of getting money quickly, especially when the product isn't so good. I think it's better to wait a bit and read the reviews before ordering.
Oh, no! Bad resistive touch-screen again! I'm sick of that crappy screens on Camangi WebStation and Archos 5 Android tablets. They predate real Android experience. Please stop using resistive screens. Look at iPad and Notion Ink Adam.
Oh good grief. The ghost of designers past are rolling over in their graves right now. How anyone could put that thing out to market as a finished product is just laughable. That's a perfect example of what happens when your primary focus is cramming every possible feature into your product, instead of making one that works well. It's the Homer Car of tablets.
Another iPad "killer", dead before it's even born.
Why do so many of these device manufacturers decide to release their products months before it is near completion. With some actual effort, beefier processor, more RAM, higher capacity battery, and a capacitive screen... this could have been one hell of a device. It's got to be thinner and lighter, however. Ditch it and start anew...
Sad... just so sad...
- AdamZ