My Nokia 770 is always in my bag. I used it to watch movies the other day, and I often read using FBReader. But FBReader development has slowed, and it really, really needs bookmarks. And CSS support. I'd really love to move to Mer, but it's not stable enough yet. There have been a few fixes for OS2006 that stabilize web browsing, and I've added the fast SDHC kernel, and I think a few other small improvements. Pretty stable, nearly never crashes out. Not as useful as I'd wish though, especially for PDA purposes.
As for syncing the REB1100, the old Librarian software(s) doesn't exactly do that. It's more like a file manager -- you need to explicitly move the files, I think.
If you like command-line stuff, there is a linux program called
rebcomm that can do the job.
The old Rocket version of Librarian can do HTML conversion from web pages, but cannot communicate via USB. The newer REB1100 version can communicate via USB (and serial, I think) but cannot convert HTML. The new version was put out by Gemstar, which was trying to control content. It died very shortly after that.
There's also a program called
GEBLibrarian that, I think, can convert and communicate with all versions of the Gemstar readers (and maybe the EB1150, too.)
m a r