MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How it compares to the 505

tigran · 11-17-2009, 03:37 PM

Both Sony PRS-505 and Hanlin V3 have Adobe reader which supports reflow. Hanlin also has XPDF which can handle files too complex for Adobe.
Hanlin V3 also supports a LOT more formats than Sony, e.g. fb2, DjVu (all scanned books are in this format as it is more efficient than PDF for this), CHM, RTF etc etc.

But the most important reason why Hanlin V3 is better is because it supports normal directory browsing of the files and directories. Sony does not and as a result (i.e. reading all metadata of ALL files on startup in order to present them as a tree based on things like Author/Title/Date etc) it takes about 15 minutes to start up on a moderate collection of books (about 5000 or so). Hanlin takes 3 seconds to start up on the same collection. The reason why nobody noticed this is because most users have a few hundred books and think "this is good enough" even though it takes a minute or so to start up on such a tiny collection as well.

I use Hanlin not just as a reader but as a digital library, i.e. each 16GB (ah, I forgot to mention that Hanlin V3 supports 16GB SDHC cards whilst Sony is limited to 2x4GB with both slots occupied.) is a reasonable window (of about 6-7000 books) into my collection (of about million books, i.e. practically all _interesting_ books ever written (inc manuscripts) from 1st century BC to the present

Besides, I have written a DjVu viewer (see http://www.bibles.org.uk/libdjvu) for Hanlin V3 so for accessing scanned books Hanlin V3 now has no equals...

(I am still working on the DjVu viewer, so the current version should be considered "beta" --- but soon I'll release the latest stable version with lots more features etc)

11-17-2009, 03:37 PM	#2
tigran Zealot Posts: 140 Karma: 23528 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: London Device: Kobo Aura One,HD,H2O,Touch,Mini,Kindle 3+DXG,Nook Simple Touch	Both Sony PRS-505 and Hanlin V3 have Adobe reader which supports reflow. Hanlin also has XPDF which can handle files too complex for Adobe. Hanlin V3 also supports a LOT more formats than Sony, e.g. fb2, DjVu (all scanned books are in this format as it is more efficient than PDF for this), CHM, RTF etc etc. But the most important reason why Hanlin V3 is better is because it supports normal directory browsing of the files and directories. Sony does not and as a result (i.e. reading all metadata of ALL files on startup in order to present them as a tree based on things like Author/Title/Date etc) it takes about 15 minutes to start up on a moderate collection of books (about 5000 or so). Hanlin takes 3 seconds to start up on the same collection. The reason why nobody noticed this is because most users have a few hundred books and think "this is good enough" even though it takes a minute or so to start up on such a tiny collection as well. I use Hanlin not just as a reader but as a digital library, i.e. each 16GB (ah, I forgot to mention that Hanlin V3 supports 16GB SDHC cards whilst Sony is limited to 2x4GB with both slots occupied.) is a reasonable window (of about 6-7000 books) into my collection (of about million books, i.e. practically all _interesting_ books ever written (inc manuscripts) from 1st century BC to the present Besides, I have written a DjVu viewer (see http://www.bibles.org.uk/libdjvu) for Hanlin V3 so for accessing scanned books Hanlin V3 now has no equals... (I am still working on the DjVu viewer, so the current version should be considered "beta" --- but soon I'll release the latest stable version with lots more features etc)