CES 2011: iRiver claims highest-resolution 6-inch e-book reader ever

iRiver, which unveiled but never introduced an e-book reader at last year's CES, is this year showing a souped-up version it claims will outperform the Kindle as a black-and-white e-book reader.

Like the Kindle, the iRiver Story HD has a 6-inch screen and eschews functions other than e-reading; the device lacks even the limited Web browser that Amazon buries behind an "experimental" tab on the Kindle.

iRiver claims the Story HD is superior to the Kindle in two key respects. The first is a sharper screen, with 768-by-1024 resolution. While the demo I received of the new device at CES was of a pre-production model that lacked full functionality, the images looked impressively sharp. That was especially true on graphics such as the artwork shown in the photo at right, which were rendered superbly.

The Kindle's screen is superb, though, and is more than adequate for rendering text and many graphics crisply. iRiver hopes the Story HD's screen will, in part, have niche appeal for readers of e-books that have a lot of black-and-white art or graphics, such as textbooks.

The company also claims the Story HD has faster page turns than the Kindle, which is already among the fastest models in our Ratings of e-book readers (available to subscribers). But I wasn't able to judge page turns on the limited demo sample iRiver was showing.

U.S. availability for the Story HD will be in the second quarter of 2011, said iRiver, with pricing that is "competitive with the Kindle." We will test the device if and when it actually hits the market.

—Paul Reynolds