The size is very good. If you only want to read books, it could be smaller, and for anything other it could be bigger, so its a very pleasant compromise.
The device itself has a very nice grip and feels good in the hand. The material has a pleasent feel, and looks good. No cheap plastic feel. It seems very well manufactured. Good casing, screwed together with star screws, The buttons are good to press and are at level with the rest of the serface. The upper left buttons could be a bit difficult to press if you have large hands. Using the flipbar is actually very comfortable and feels very natural. Even the switching left to go forward comes very easy if you think in terms of flipping a page.
It comes with protective covers for the CF and SD slot, which is quite good. Unfortunately i am having trouble reading SD cards. I have a 1GB Sandisk and a 2GB Transcend 150x. The "GB card has not been recognized once, the 1GB gets recognized sometimes. I havent found out why and when yet. Trying to reproduce the error. CF cards havent benn a problm so far and seem to work niceley, but i have only a 512MB card hee, so broblems might occur with larger cards.
I used the USB port only to connect a USB lamp, and that worked
The display itself is really amazing. When i opened the box, i found it quite greyish. And it is not as white as i had thought, but the readability is excelent. Even the smallest fonts are readable. That was a surprise to me. The contrast is about the same as newspaper, and the display gets easier to read, the more light you have. The plastic cover (i think its plastic) is brushed and reflects little, but it does reflect. So you dont have the complete paper feel. All in all the diplay is great and i think the next generation display of eink might do wonders (this one is, comparted to lcd in sunlight).
The connection to iDs should be easy, if you have a properly setup DHCP Server. I do not, and there seems to be no way to enter static LAN information yet. The connection to the wireless lan works though. Encryption can only be done with WEP.
The software is still beta as mentioned before. PDF files can be read well. I tried a copy of scientific american and it was all readable but not comfortable to read (will test scientific papers later). No zooming available yet. I also didnt find out how to jump to a specific page. And reopening a file always starts on the first page
HTML reader works fine, but no pagination and text gets cut of in the midle of a line. Havent tested nested and linked files yet.
The notetaking works faster than i expected. If you get the templates (most templates are just bmp or jpg files 538x658) you can write notes (only one per image so far, saves note as imagename_note.xxx)
the provided xeb file has 10 pages inside it and you can write your notes there aswell, but the usage is not quite intuitive and there is no information about it in the manuals. But the writing speed is pretty fast and it seems to work ok so far. I think the next software updates will give us better notetaking possibilities.
The filelist needs some rework in my oppinion. The displayed filenames are to short and i could not distinguish between many files, because the prefixes were the same. I also think that there should be more than 6 files on a page. Maybe thta will be customizable in a future OS version.
i have been playing around with the device for about 5 hours now (almost on all the time lots of pen usage) and the battery is at a third of its capacity (indicator is to small to be more precise)
The best format for PDF files, if you make your own is 12x15cm (1cm at the bottom gets reserved for menu icons) then you have a comfortable reading space and can controll margins yourself.
For now, i have to say, i love it. If the software gets updated and can do, what was promised, then i will be a very, very happy camper.
Hope thats enough for now, but i gladly answer any questions that you come up with.