iLiad experiment

I was fortunate enough to be given an iLiad for the past six months. At first I couldn't believe my luck and loaded many books and PDFs onto it, in some cases giving away the hard-copy versions I had to save shelf space. Woe is me... wwwoooooeeeeee is me... *groan*

Before you get the wrong impression let me say the iLiad was a great recreational book reader while on travel. The screen was good, features adequate, battery life sufficient, and a great space saver.

The problems I had fell into two main categories:

1. It didn't work for technical tomes in the least. Or anything with a decent resolution diagram or graphic.
2. The stylus really sucked when trying to take any notes or sketch out ideas.

Until you can have a few e-ink devices spread out on your desk at different pages then using it for technical reading and reference is out of the question. It's not fast enough, you can't do enough with side-by-side pages, and technical publishers aren't flocking to the e-book market in general.

The stylus was atrocious at any reasonable writing speed or detail level. I can't begin to describe how unhappy I was with the note taking or sketching abilities of the iLiad.

To be sure there were other issues and glitches, not the least of which was buggy software on the device and on the PC, but I can safely say that those were readily workable and not too painful. What was painful was the slow realization that my TCP/IP reference wasn't going to read well. And that the stylus didn't work well or taste good for chewing.

Overall I'd give the iLiad, as a device, a B- grade. Primarily losing points for the stylus and the poor memory expansion options. As a market I'd give e-books a D since I'm not in the least bit interested in reading fiction exclusively.

Grumpy out, -Ali

Comments

[Michele]

Hohum,

I was thinking about getting myself a good e-book reader and the Iliad was pretty much on my top list. I'm having second thoughts now ;)