Quote:
Originally Posted by brecklundin
Personally I sense the Pocket Pro and likely all other Astak readers will end up as footnotes in the history of ereading devices. They are nice tries at a product but ultimately they are simply clones of other device all made in the same factory and seemingly all with the same specs and firmware.
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But, in fairness, the same is true of most readers. If you ignore the "big players", who genuinely can design their own machines, there are really only two manufacturers around: Netronix in the Republic of China, and Jinke in mainland China. All the other machines on the market (with a small number of exceptions) are made by them. Astak sell both Netronix and Jinke devices; Pocketbook are Netronix, as are Bookeen, and Cool-ER. BeBook are Jinke, etc etc.
What distinguishes the various suppliers are whether they use the "stock" factory firmware (as all the Jinke clones appear to) or whether they simply use the manufacturer's hardware and base operating system and write their own firmware (as Pocketbook and Bookeen do, for example).
Speaking personally, I looked carefully at the Pocket Pro, and went for the Pocketbook 360 instead. The Pocket Pro has a number of shortcomings which I disliked, such as the extreme difficulty of navigating hyperlinks, due to the lack of a simple "D-pad" navigation control.