So, I have the stream3 granted by RAMQ.
I hated it for the first year, it was the most buggy expensive thing I fortunately didn't pay, and I am still mad at humanware at this. Crashes everywhere to the point of path/to/file.cpp line n, frequent forced reboots, and worst of all, the usual large file that worked perfectly and very reliably with my stream 2 didn't work, and the text bookshelf was the worst, like come on it's your main feature!
Thankfully after idk for how many years this trash of a software has been around, they listened at least and I can read almost as comfortably as on stream 2 now with less crashes, v1.7.
A friend of mine has orbit player, I've seen it and as they proudly say, it has a real processor and an os, and apparently fm radio too which all talking book players should have imo no exception.
For those who have one, what is your honest daily experience with orbit player? It would be especially interesting if you can compare both stream 3 and orbit player. HW did slightly reduce cold boot time of stream3 in v1.7 but it's still criminally slow for the price we pay while stream 2 was up under 10-15s max, and okay their upg files were very very fun to brows in. Busybox or something? I wonder if the software did a checksome of the audio files for the messages it would have been fun to load whatever thing we wanted, but anyway. I bet the stream3 has some security like modern phones it has to decrypt / do the cert trust chain and its poor soc can't follow hence the aweful boot time, same for the bi 40x I have btw. I wonder if esilor forced them to do, which is the least bad thing, but if hwe did this on their own then sorry you are exploiting us with no benefit in return.
TLDR' I know orbit player also has a long cold start time, but then it's, well, as fast as my ipod 6 / 7 was.
I was told that orbit player is very good with audio files but vr stream is better for text files (on paper) in terms of easy navigation and etc?
Thanks for any insight guys.
By TheBlindGuy07, 14 October, 2026
Forum
Assistive Technology
Comments
orbit player
I've been using my orbit player for the past year since it first came out. I havent had any problems with it at all. I read pdf books and text documents with no problems. orbit probably done had more updates in the first whole year of the orbit player, than human where has had in the past 3 years for the victor reader stream3. I had held off on getting the victor when I saw how buggy it was, especially those first 2 years. even keeping up with the victor email list made me not want to get that thing. I've always enjoyed listneing to podcast on a seperate device from my phone. As you know with the latest update on the orbit player they updated the podcast player as well as some other features on the device, more recently they just added the alexa app on there, where we can access it with the buttons now, and a couple of months ago they added Bard. they plan on adding more third party apps to the orbit player in the future. as of right now, not able to do audible. they may be working on that for the future though. we'll see. that's no big deal to me, but for some it may be. plus it runs on there own version of an updated version of android. plus it's half the price of the victor. highly recommend the orbit player. yep.
Well this is convincing
Might as well get one.
OMG please don't tell me this thing was released in 2020 ish? the stream. What a scam of a software, they barely did fix text reading as a whole just like 3w ago and even then the stream 1 and 2 was way way better and stable. And how can they justify the premium AT price! Yes the victor mailing list tells you a lot about how the average blind person is in his daily life. Pathetic. Sorry but true. I personally know the guy who worked on the french translation of the orbit player. I want to get this.
Anyone Remember The Maestro?
It had Victor Reader Pocket on it.
I sadly still have Mine.
For context, it is the Trekker Pro Dell Axim X51 PDA, not the HP one that came after Dell left the tablet business.
What!?
I don't know any of these.
But plextalk ptp1 was the best form factor and I think only orbit is getting close. Ptp1 is still miles better than the current trash humanware sells.