Like many others here, I wasn't terribly impressed with the Reader's PDF support. I have quite a few commercial pdf's, most obtained when I bought the hard copy book, and the Reader won't display them readably. It gets old processing the files before reading- I could do that for my Reb and Rocketbook. Not to mention that I have spent hundreds of dollars over the years buying conversion software (not just for the Sony).

Today, my Archos 504 video player arrived, and it has the capacity to display pdf's. I didn't hold out much hope of it working well as a pdf reader- until I copied some pdf's (commercial, non-drm'd) over to it and tried reading them. Well, out of the 9 I have tested so far, 7 are very readable. You have to scroll down the page to see everything, but it beats using a Palm and I don't have to pre-process the files.

The Archos is also a much better video player than the Ipod, so I am very happy with it. Maybe Sony should see what this device can do and start paying attention to the shortcomings with PDF display that the Reader has.

Nice one, wgrimm. When you've had a chance to get acquainted with your new toy, maybe you could write up a review for us? I think your the first one to have one ....

Part of what's hampering the Reader with PDFs (besides the screen size and the unimaginative PDF renderer) is the relatively wimpy processor -- the Archos is naturally going to have a much more powerful processor.

I'm kind of hoping that Adobe's Digital editions might, eventually have some impact on the PDF thing. PDF is fine for things that need a fixed size and layout, but PDF is getting used for a lot of things that don't need those things, and in fact are hampered by them. And of course, books are among those things. :sad:

D.E. seems to have the potential to become as widely used as PDF is now, and allow a much more flexible handling of dox that don't need fixed layouts, a much more promising option, it seems to me. :smiley:

Nice one, wgrimm. When you've had a chance to get acquainted with your new toy, maybe you could write up a review for us? I think your the first one to have one ....


I've got an Archos 604 but, for some reason, the thought of using it to display e-Books had never even occured to me - I'll have to experiment with it. The manual for it is supplied as a PDF file, and it certainly does display that very nicely indeed.

It's absolutely great for video which is, of course, what I bought it for!

One of the nice things about Archos is that they seem to release new firmware versions, which introduce nice new features, literally every few weeks. Certain other companies could certainly benefit from similar policies...

I've looked at the Archos a few times, but it has a couple of shortcomings that kept me from buying it, mainly; a) it's a bit on the heavy side, b) it's battery life isn't up to snuff. On the other hand, it has a nice sized screen and you can record directly to it using either supplied or purchased cables (if your set didn't come with them).

I'm still holding out for something a little smaller, weight, thickness, etc., but with the same size screen. There's a new video player over here now that has a 2.5 inch screen, the usnit itself is really tiny (you can put it in your front pant pocket!), though it's still a bit on the pricey side.

I've got an Archos 604 but, for some reason, the thought of using it to display e-Books had never even occured to meThat's okay, we're interested in mobile devices that aren't dedicated reading devices too, that's why there are other sections of the forum. :grin:

So you can both do reviews! :laugh4:

The latest version of the MobiPocket Desktop program has a converter that will convert a number of formats (Office, HTML,text, CHM, OCF), including PDF, to MobiPocket format. I've done a number of PDF conversions and the resulting output works just fine when using MobiPocket on my Nokia e62.