First look at the Hyread Gaze Mini e

August 2, 2023 By Michael Kozlowski Leave a Comment

The Hyread Gaze Mini is a back-to-basics 6-inch e-reader with physical page-turn buttons. It supports many book formats, which is helpful since the included bookstore only has Chinese titles. However, there is an English option, which makes it quite useful for an international audience. You can purchase it from the Good e-Reader Store for $214.

Gaze Mini features a 6-inch E INK Carta HD black and white display with 300 PPI. It has a sleek white body and physical buttons. Unlike previous Gaze models, the Gaze Mini incorporates a concave screen design, a double row of physical buttons, and a built-in gyroscope and touchscreen. This enables convenient page-turning regardless of the user’s preferred hand. The physical buttons facilitate essential page-turning functions and offer shortcuts for returning to the main menu, taking screenshots, refreshing the screen, and activating the front reading light.

Gaze Mini has a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor, 3GB RAM, and 32GB storage capacity. If this does not suit your needs, an SD card slot can have an additional 1TB. It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi. The device includes built-in speakers, a microphone, and Type-C support for OTG. It is powered by a 2200mAh battery, which should be suitable for a few weeks. Android 11 is included; users can install their apps or alternative app stores.

The Gaze is perfectly suitable for reading books and manga. The device officially supports EPUB, PDF, MOBI, DOC, TXT, FB2, RTF, HTML/HTM, DJVU/DJV and CBZ. These formats are great if you have your collection, but the average user needs to; they do business with specific ecosystems such as Amazon, Kobo, Nook, Scribd, and Audible or get books from the public library. This is where apps come in; you can install Kindle Lite or Overdrive Libby.

Michael Kozlowski has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Filed Under: e-Reader News