Engadget | Blio for Windows review, now available for download

September 30, 2010

Engadget — September 29, 2010 | Joanna Stern

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

Last week we brought you news that KNF-B was prepping for a September 28 launch of its Blio e-reader software, and according to our date books, the time has come! The free PC software (Windows XP, Vista and 7 are all supported) can be downloaded now at the source link below; the iPhone app should be hitting the App Store very soon, however. We’ve been using the program for the last few days to, you know, “read,” so before heading over to download it yourself you’ll naturally want to hit the break for our impressions of the unique reading application.

The Blio experience is closer to that of iBooks than Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook programs, and that’s because it was designed to actually mimic the experience of reading a real book. The entire reading experience, down to opening the cover of a book, is animated to feel like you’re actually turning a paper page. We tested the application on a Windows 7 Nav 9 tablet (review of that actual tablet coming soon) and the Core i3-powered ThinkPad Edge 11. We found the application to be relatively snappy, although we noticed some lag in turning pages on the Nav 9 — that, of course, could be related to the Atom N280 CPU.