Phenomshel,
My pleasure. As far as my ordering process, I purchased my device through
Eletroworld like many folks here have. I asked if they had any in stock and if they accepted paypal first. They responded about 10 minutes after I sent my email and gave me a quote of $233 shipped through EMS to Arizona in the US. Shipping and the paypal charge took the price from $189 to $233 for me. It took about 10 business days to arrive.
On the topic of WinCE all I've heard is that it is coming soon and Eletroworld sent me a link to
this page which gives information about it. They haven't released a price for it yet, but SmartDevices did say that if you purchase the device before June 20th, the OS would be provided for free. Those who purchase it after would have to pay for it. I wouldn't take that as fact, but it is posted on the actual SmartDevices page
here.
Regarding PDFs, I think there is room for improvement on the device, but it depends on what you are doing. I was able to rotate the Ancestor book you see in my screenshots to be portrait, but the text was rather small to see. It could be that particular PDF book though. It really depends what you will use it for, but I found reading PDF books (so far) to be best in landscape mode and to just scroll down the page as you read it from page to page. It also has a "play" feature that scrolls the PDF automatically, it zooms in and out, and more. While I think this device is perfect for viewing comics, maps, images, and ebooks in landscape mode, I still need to do a little more testing on documents in portrait mode. My guess is that it will render your cookbooks quite nicely for you in portrait. Your patterns, well it depends on how small the writing is. Comic book writing is pretty small and it comes out perfectly on the device. If you want to test something, just send me a page from one of your PDFs and I'll take a screenshot for you.
Regards,
Cold