Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

• Ebooks in text, HTML or PDF format are easily uploaded to the reader via USB, without any special drivers or other software.
• Reading a page is very pleasant due to E-Ink, provided you have enough surrounding light. It even works in full day light, which an LCD can't handle.
• You can add any number of fonts from Windows and you can select among those via the reader and show the text at any size. This makes it very easy to achieve optimal reading comfort.
• It's very light, and no bother to hold for longer periods of time. I've read books for hours at a time without problems.
• In its 512M of Flash memory it can store many books, so it's no problem stacking up with books and documents for trips etc. Note that a typical book is less than 0.5M.

• Page flipping is slooooow, and to avoid 'ghosts' from previous pages the display is made completely black before the new content is displayed, which is annoying. This also affects browsing through menus.
• The PDF support is definitely not bug free. Actually in many cases it crashes on the first page of PDF files. Clearly a case for improvement. The reader is certainly not ideal for reading PDFs anyway, as you can't control the text size (PDF is by nature a final format), and the display is rather small, so text can become unreadable.
• The page flipping multi-function key is hard to press and placed badly. It would be better with page-flipping keys at the side of the reader, like on the Kindle.
• It can only show a very limited range of gray tones, which makes pictures look rather lo-fi.

It's definitely optimized for literature in text and HTML format, and works very well for that. Actually much better than the paper version (except for the slow flipping). I've used it to read manuals in PDF format as well, but that wasn't a hit, for the mentioned reasons.

Amazon Kindle 2 looks very promising too, and I'd like one of those, so if anyone wants to sponsor...

Posted by Anders Borg 14:50 | Permalink