[twowheels]

Found one! Bought it today for my daughter (12). Not being very good at hiding gifts, especially ones that she can get such good use from, I gave it to her right away... well, actually, she was with me at the store (I'd made a special trip and told her that they had what I wanted to get for her, but I wasn't sure it was in stock. When I pointed to it and said "that's it, do you want one?" her eyes got really wide and she was extremely excited.

She couldn't wait to get it home... she had it open in the car and was taking advantage of the pre-charged state of the battery. I didn't get to use it much, she had it in front of her face almost the entire day, but, here are my impressions from having loaded it and helped set the clock, etc...

In the package it looked very nice. It was well packaged and easy to open. At first I thought that it had a fake facade in the front of the box with raised bumps to represent the buttons like the Kindle box, but then I realized that was the actual device. The metallic finish is very nice and looks far from cheap. The buttons feel nice, though a little bit more play than I'd like. The next/prev page buttons work more like the Kindle DX than the Kindle 3 in that you press them on the inner edge rather than the outer edge. They are well placed, though I'd like the a little bit lower and/or longer like my Kindle 3. The screen is undeniably LCD, so I won't get into that debate. I do see the horizontal lines that others have mentioned, but I think that's some of the leftover adhesive from peeling away the full color sample screen overlay that was glued on (overly sticky). If it doesn't lean up with some screen wipes I'll call the company. I then put on the case, which was surprisingly nice -- I really expected a worse case. It has a faux leather exterior and soft interior and is slightly reminiscent of my Amazon lighted Kindle case, though thinner, doesn't have a closure strap, and clips on with two clips on the bottom and one on each side (looks very secure, and clean).

Navigation through the menus was quite simple. First thing I set the time and found my first bug... 12 noon to 1:00 pm is shown as AM, oops. My daughter then read some ebooks until we got it home. She plugged it in using the included wall charger (which uses a small barrel connector) while I sorted out some of my unprotected epub files and music. She then brought it in and we connected it to the computer. We run Linux, and it was immediately detected and showed up as EREADER on the desktop. I created a few folders, Music, Videos, Pictures, and copied a bit of each over.

Back to the device... reading was fine. We couldn't change the font size (like some reviews that we saw), perhaps the CSS overrides all other settings? Didn't play with that much because the default font size is just fine. We quickly turned off auto rotate as it seemed a bit touchy. All of the epub files that we tried worked well (the covers don't show up until you've opened the books). It looks like it might only remember the reading position in the latest book, though that might have been user error on her part (I didn't play with it yet), so she said that she'll use bookmarks to be safe. Didn't try PDF files.

The music player was quite simple... no genre, artist, etc controls, just a list lumped together, not even sorted by folder, even thought the music that I dumped in was in folders. Cover art (folder.jpg) wasn't shown, not sure if it was supposed to. Music is obviously secondary, and the play/pause button is much like pressing ALT/Space on the Kindle to get it playing in the background -- background music, that's what it's good for. We didn't try the headphones, just the built in speaker, which was better than expected considering how small it was. One big problem is that it uses the D-pad to change the volume, which has a different meaning in the reader, so you can't change the volume while you're reading!! (you'd need to use headphones with a built in volume control).

Pictures displayed fine. We had auto rotate off, so I only viewed them in portrait mode, but they worked as expected. We had no luck with videos, all videos that we tried (in FLV, WMV, and MP4) gave a format error, but we didn't pursue that any more since that wasn't the purpose of the reader.

Can't judge battery life yet, but she read for about 6 hours on it today with only a small charge and it still showed full minus one bar (it'd never gotten to full).

My take on it? If you're looking for a nice cheap reader for a kid who's a bit hard on electronics it looks like a really nice buy for a lot less than many others. IMO many of the low end LCD readers come too close to the price of an entry level eInk reader, and are inferior, thus they're not worth buying, but this one is $60 less than the Kindle 3 WiFi (even bigger savings if you consider the case), making it a decent entry level device. We'll see if I still feel that way after a few weeks of use... and more importantly we'll see how she feels about it.