Well, it arrived this morning. I was up early, eagerly awaiting the new addition to the family. The postman didn't disappoint and by eight o' clock I finally had my iLiad in my sweaty little mitts. I almost slammed the door in the man's face after signing for it, I was that eager.
Nicely packaged - cute how the box opens out like a book. A nice touch. The unit itself and the packaging smell like the first flat I lived in when I moved out of my parents house years ago - does that say more about the flat (crummy basement thing with a nasty landlady, a kitchen you could barely turn around in and a leccy meter which maliciously ran out every time I was under the electric shower with my hair full of soap, with no fifty pence pieces left to feed it) or about the iLiad unit itself ? - No idea, they just smell oddly the same.
The unit is slightly rubberised and thus warm to the touch. It fits nicely in the hand. The little well in the back that contains the reset button, presumably shaped for some sort of stand ? - is a nice place to put the tips of my fingers when holding it.
The e-ink display truly is a thing of wonder - it's like no display I have seen before. It looks like paper, it doesn't glow like a backlit display (of course, as it isn't backlit) and it looks organic and strangely ethereal to me.
The buttons are nicely placed - the flip page bar is a work of art. Yet the power on / off switch must have been designed by someone with a grudge to bear against people with guitar playing calluses or those who bite their nails - my fiance (who is both of those) couldn't feel it at all. Good job I've got fingernails.
The whole thing gives off an air of quiet, polite, obedience. Turn it on and it says, "Welcome". The set up wizards and user manual are polite and calm and obviously well brought up. Although I did notice an incorrect use of "off" instead of "of" somewhere in there, can't recall where exactly. Really, iRex. One hundred lines for you, see me after class.
Turn it off and it says, "The iLiad is preparing for power down."
Not "Please wait whilst windows shuts down your computer" or "Shutting down" or a spinning gear whilst it shuts up, but "The iLiad is preparing for power down." How much more lyrical could you get, whilst maintaining a polite level of courtesy and accuracy ? I envisage little twinkling star like jewels going out one by one, so sad to be leaving your service but resigned that it is your request and must be obeyed - yet hopeful that soon it will be called upon again.
Or maybe the mushrooms I had yesterday were a little gone over.
Getting it connected wireless to my network was a breeze - yet getting it to wirelessly sync content with my mac not so easy. Grr. But thanks to the numerous forum posts here and at the iRex site I figured it out in the end. Gleefully I fed it some books. It was happy. I was happy.
Then I decided to get shell access by asking the iRex Powers That Be to allow me to have access to the developer package. Signed into myiRex. Clicked link to send developer bumpf. Link doesn't work in Safari, -- dammit - open VMWare and windows xp intead. Click link again. Right.
Press top right button on the iLiad to sync. Choose IDS. Downloading - download complete.
And there is where it stopped. For ten minutes.
Search web. Have I bricked it already ? Fiance asks what's up. I tell him. He sez, helpfully, "Sounds f*cked to me darlin'." (Long haired rocker that he is - the only culture he has is in the bottom of left over coffee cups !)
Thanks for that, my love, you always know just what I want to hear.
Pressed reset button followed by on / off toggle. Nowt happens. Very disconcerting, for some reason, that the image is still on the screen, as if all is fine. But we know that underneath something is wrong. Tell me, oh iLiad, please ! Have I offended thee ?
Plug the power adapter in (though the battery had a full charge). Reset again, press power toggle.
A-ha - it lives ! Phew.
Install mrxthingy - run it, it works. Install FBReader, and Calibre on my mac so I can convert some of my pdfs to rtf, as I just cannae see the pdf fonts as they stand, and zooming, although useful, isn't quite the same for me as huge fonts.
And here we are, about to convert stuff for FBReader. Later we may install dillo and see how it copes with the web interface for my media centre (Plex - or osxbmc-that-was -on a mac mini connected to a 50" plasma tv in the lounge). If we're successful in this it will mean that the little iLiad will be fully integrated into my wifi home. Yes, I want to read books on it. But we are all multi-talented in this house - there are no single use items here. Even my fiance's guide dog thinks he's a guard dog (thankfully the two pet / guard dogs don't think they are guide dogs, else we'd probably be in trouble the second we walked out of the door !) I want more than books from my reader - I want all the other stuff too. That's why I chose the iLiad.
Am I in love yet ? Well, it's like any new relationship. You like the look of them from afar, you maybe ask some friends about them. Then you get to meet and you have to get to know each other. You find each others quirks, and you get to know what each other wants out of the relationship, and what you expect of each other. Only then can you know if it's going to last a lifetime, or a lunch time.
So far we're doing ok.
Rachael