[naravive]

Well, it's been about 3 weeks since the M92 arrived. I haven't had a chance to use/test it as intensively as I would like, but in the interests of the forum, I thought I would present my thoughts so far. If I change my mind or find more problems, I will add that to the thread here.

BUYING: Not to sound repetitive, but Booxtor is the way to go. There's a sense of security there; he responds to PMs within about 2 days, he seems genuinely involved in the future of the machines, he offers specials and it's probably worth asking him about that before you buy. His competitors would be wise to be more active and responsive on this forum-- and I don't mean just hit-and-run advertisements, abject apologies or snarky comments. I mean, actually getting in on the technical stuff and showing your willingness to help and be involved.

I'm in the US, and the M92 arrived fairly quickly from Germany: 5 business days, I think it was. The shipping cost was not prohibitive, as you'll see if you add to your tray. Only one thing, choose paypal over the "Skrill moneybookers" portal. There was a simple issue that we ordered it while traveling outside of the US (going home to India) and for this, they made all sorts of problems, asking for id scans, and then asking again for hi-colour res scans, not reading our emails properly-- when all they really had to to was just call Mastercard directly and confirm with them!-- it was worse than dealing with bureaucracy in India or in the Austro-Hungarian empire! Then I wrote them a nasty note and all their strict bureaucratic requirements disappeared into thin air--but by that time it was too late for them, we'd already gone with paypal. So just go ahead use paypal with your credit card or whatever, especially when ordering from outside the EU.

GENERAL ISSUES SO FAR:
1) The pen was erratic and sometimes unresponsive out of the box; but after I upgraded to the latest firmware available here (you'll need an SD card) this problem seems to have disappeared.
2) I may possibly have that other issue reported here, where the "sleep" mode doesn't work properly and the pen becomes unresponsive after that. Am not sure, because it has only happened to me once so far; yesterday; I did a hard reset of the system (long-press power button until blank screen, then start again) and everything seems to be fine again.

PDFs:
Well everyone knows that this is sort of the raison d'etre of the M92, and indeed it is pretty glorious. This is my first 9.7 reader (my other the kindle keyboard) so maybe I don't have the right thing to compare it to, but I was stunned by how good the pdf looks, how well the zoom tools-- esp the "zoom by 2 points"-- work. The "glyph embolden" feature is also very good, and can make a huge difference. I haven't rigorously tested the hand annotation/scribbles, but I've tried it out and it seems to work fine--lovely! The work flow seems efficient enough to me; menu navigation is pretty quick. I found myself diving straight into pdfs that I had avoided reading for years because of lack of an appropriate platform. Generally on PDFs, the Boox M92 seems to be very strong and is quite likely the best e-ink device out there by far. There may be problems on more heavily annotated pdfs, at least as people are reporting here. I'll report on that if and when I get there. One thing I am concerned is that if the next upgrade ports us to Android, we'll lose this excellent pdf reader. I really hope that doesn't happen!

EPUBs:

Now here, there's certainly room for improvement. There are three choices of program for EPUB but not one of them quite does all the things it needs to. The FB reader seems to be at a loss for EPUBs with any kind of formatting; one of my Epubs was showing up blank on it! The CoolReader ought to be a better program, but it still seems pretty lousy to me. I can't for the life of me figure out how to add notes (does anyone know?) to highlights, and strangely, when you do make a highlight, you cannot erase it! Or merge it. The M92's own PDF reader itself reads EPUBs, and does so fairly well, with annotations, but you cannot change the margins on it (often they are too narrow) and you can't change fonts!

So effectively, the M92's PDF reader is probably your best bet for Epubs as well; however what the last problem listed above effectively also means, by the way, is that there is no point in adding new fonts, because you can't change them anyway! Not in the texts you're reading. Not in pdfs, obviously, not in Epubs, Doc files or anything else. Am I wrong?

Seems like a missed opportunity here. Why advertise Epub reading capabilities when they are flawed; why allow font flexibility when there is no good program to use it in?

For my money, the best bet for Boox would be to sharpen the Epub features on its own pdf reader. Add capability for margins and fonts; improve annotation if you can. And add capability for the pdf reader to also deal with mobi, doc, rtf and txt files (see below). Surely this would not be hard to do.

**UPDATE** Bizarrely, I just found some instapaper pages that the built-in PDF reader could not read... So I had to switch to cool reader for this...

DOC files:

Since the box and the wiki do say the boox can handle doc and rtf files, I wish there was a good reader to do it. The doc viewer is not cutting it; you can't make annotations. FB reader is not cutting it. CoolReader can handle doc files, as per its documentation, but for some reason it is not offered as an option for doc files under the M92's "preferred programs" dialog.

Again, a missed opportunity to make the M92 the best reader on the market for all kinds of files. What can be done. Could CoolReader be added as a "'preferred program" for doc files? But my own choice would, once again, to simply introduce doc read and annotate capabilities into the M92's own reader.

MOBI files:

Hmm, there is supposed to be Mobi capability, but I don't see any "preferred program" that I can choose to read it. Has anyone tried mobi/prc files on the M92?

Again, missed opportunity.

INTERNET:

Yes, a little slow, but no slower than the kindle, I think. Maybe even a little faster. The larger format is nice. Seems to work fine for all the basic uses I put it to. The main thing I use it for is instapaper, so I can download all my saved web articles periodically as ebooks. The instapaper download works very well (puts it in a folder marked ' download'); though as noted above, some of its epub pages cannot, for whatever reason, be read by the pdf reader.

SOUND: Couldn't care less about this feature. Why make this do that when we have phones and mp3 players that serve the purpose very well?

ANDROID: Booxtor says Android is coming to the M92, but I surfed the store yesterday and couldn't find a single e-reader relevant application that I was in any way excited about getting. What apps would people add if they had Android?

OVERALL:

Well overall, I must say I'm really happy with the M92! Four stars. The main advantage is with the pdfs, but this is already working so well and so smoothly (and apparently, being improved further) that it absolutely makes the device for me. If they could only tweak / add its epub, mobi, doc and rtf capabilities (doesn't seem to much to ask) --all firmware and not hardware issues-- then this would surely make this a contender for the best and most versatile e reader on the market. I'm hoping that day is not too far off.