iRexDR1000s experiences and wish lists

[bazmi]

hi all,

its been about three weeks since i got my DR1000s. so with some experience in using it now, wanted to posts some opinions, issues, questions, suggestions etc.

overall, the screen is just fantastic - the size and resolution is awesome. and as it supports 16 grayscales, even photos in magazines, newspapers look quite good.

fbreader and press reader makes the device useful..

now some beefs:

the ergonomics is bad - the keys are exactly at the places you would want to hold and handle the device (at the middle of sides). as they are touch buttons, really keep touching them unintentionally. the buttons at the bottom are awful in placement if you try to write. again, unintentional touch will activate them. you can of course disable them but that defeats the purpose of having the buttons. and if you have full screen and disabled the bottom buttons, then a reset is the only answer.

the charging is at the bottom which makes it difficult to charge it while reading it

as the device is hardly priced for the mass market, why skimp on processor or memory. way too slow.

pdf engine is only good for single pages all text and even then it is slow compared to press reader. desperately need a good pdf reader

the write pad is really useless. my n800 with xournal is far far more useful. desperately needed

the battery life is very poor. again, my n800 (and multiple zauruses before that) woiuld last days before recharging.

boot and shutdown times are very slow. and no way to have it in standby. - does anybody know if the screen can be left with a page on display or should the device be shutdown everytime?

the device has a lot of promise but i dont know how much of it is due to the fact that it is intial and buggy software version (which would be ok as then it can improve) and how much inherent in the design choices (processor, memory size, battery capacity) in which case no amount of tweaking will help.

in the current version, formatting of SD cards dont work - all cards, regardless of capacity get formatted as 1 gb. need to format them separately before they work. also, only fat32 seem to be supported. no ext3.

the carrying case is thick and ugly leather. would be nice to have just a very thin and strong cover for the screen. why would the back need protecting?

if iRex looks at this post, here is my wish - i would be glad to pay even more but please dont skimp on the device capability.

cheers,

/bazmi.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by bazmi

pdf engine is only good for single pages all text and even then it is slow compared to press reader. desperately need a good pdf reader

A lot of that depends on the PDF you're looking at, and how much rendering needs to be done before it's ready to draw it on the screen.

the battery life is very poor. again, my n800 (and multiple zauruses before that) woiuld last days before recharging.

boot and shutdown times are very slow. and no way to have it in standby. - does anybody know if the screen can be left with a page on display or should the device be shutdown everytime?

A lot of this should be taken care of in the 1.5 firmware, due out soon.

in the current version, formatting of SD cards dont work - all cards, regardless of capacity get formatted as 1 gb. need to format them separately before they work. also, only fat32 seem to be supported. no ext3.

My understanding is that formatting doesn't work on the newer SDHC cards, because the DR1000 doesn't fully support them. Are you using a SDHC or a regular SD card?

Yes, it probably only supports fat32 natively. There was a way to get the iLiad to recognize ext3 filesystems, maybe that'll be possible on the DR1000 once somebody figures out how to modify the fstab.

[DannyR]

pdf engine is only good for single pages all text and even then it is slow compared to press reader. desperately need a good pdf reader

thats a bit of a different review than we've seen already. Is your problem with the PDFs just the speed? Or did you not think pdf's with images were rendered well?

Just wondering why your review of pdf performance is so different than others: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=266619

[bazmi]

Originally Posted by DannyR

thats a bit of a different review than we've seen already. Is your problem with the PDFs just the speed? Or did you not think pdf's with images were rendered well?

the pdf's that i am using are magazines - scientific american, ieee computer, spectrum etc etc. as these are professionally done, i would expect that they have used good engines. for instance, each issue of scientific american takes about 10-15 secs to open the first page and then any zooming, panning etc takes same amount of time. i find that practically unusable.

[omro]

It formatted my 2GB SD card without issues, but that's a standard SD not SDHC

I don't agree with the issue with the side buttons, I find that I can hold the reader with my thumb near the lower side button and just brush my thumb to the side to move the page on, I quite like that.

I agree about the writing, it's currently useless. But, I hope for an improvement there.

The issues with the bottom buttons I agree with when in full screen mode. Perhaps a key combination to unlock the buttons or revert from fullscreen mode.

The boot and shutdown don't really bother me, though any speed increases would always be appreciated.

The battery like of 4-5 hours doesn't worry me in the short term, I expect to see this corrected soon.

My flip case is light and compact and actually makes the device easier to hold IMHO.

The power cable, I will agree with, but I mainly charge it during use with a Motorola Razr charger which conveniently is right angled :-)

It seems fine with my PDFs, the novels flip just as fast as anything, while the magazines are somewhat slower, but by no means intolerable.

[bazmi]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

A lot of that depends on the PDF you're looking at, and how much rendering needs to be done before it's ready to draw it on the screen..

sure. my problem is that most of what i use (scientific american for instance) seem to require that.

A lot of this should be taken care of in the 1.5 firmware, due out soon..

great will look out for it.

My understanding is that formatting doesn't work on the newer SDHC cards, because the DR1000 doesn't fully support them. Are you using a SDHC or a regular SD card?

thanks for the info. yes, these are SDHC cards. i am using sandisk 16gb ultra 2.

many thanks for your reply.

[bazmi]

Originally Posted by omro

It formatted my 2GB SD card without issues, but that's a standard SD not SDHC.

yes, the cards i was using were SDHC cards.

I don't agree with the issue with the side buttons, I find that I can hold the reader with my thumb near the lower side button and just brush my thumb to the side to move the page on, I quite like that.

i like the capacitative buttons too. just that if someone handles the device and they are not familiar with it, they are more likely than not to hold it at the wrong place. ;-(

The battery like of 4-5 hours doesn't worry me in the short term, I expect to see this corrected soon.

depends of what you compare with. devices which were out 10 years ago (like newton), this would have been considered good. but not todays devices. my laptop (and that weighs 1.3 Kg) lasts over 6 hours if i shut off the radios etc. and that is with a very hungry screen. with a technology which has no refresh cycle, one would expect way way better performance. i take flights that last over 12 hours end to end quite regularly and my expectation would be that this would last well over that time. i do hope that this is corrected soon.

[omro]

Originally Posted by bazmi

depends of what you compare with. devices which were out 10 years ago (like newton), this would have been considered good. but not todays devices. my laptop (and that weighs 1.3 Kg) lasts over 6 hours if i shut off the radios etc. and that is with a very hungry screen. with a technology which has no refresh cycle, one would expect way way better performance. i take flights that last over 12 hours end to end quite regularly and my expectation would be that this would last well over that time. i do hope that this is corrected soon.

If the 1.5 update comes out and battery life doesn't significantly improve, then yes, I'll be very annoyed. But knowing that APM isn't working properly at this time and is expected to be, I won't get too worried now.

[Vadrus]

I have to agree with how painfully slow it is at opening and turning pages in many pdfs.

I use mine to read various RPG books and the size of the pdf isn't the issue, it's the complexity of the page layout, art, etc.

As an example I have one game that is 100meg pdf of over 600 pages, this the reader handles no problem, it has a simple page layout and clean simple pictures.

A different game that is only a 7 meg pdf, the reader can't even open, it times out and crashed, this publisher uses complex page layouts, background images, etc, and all their products are effectively impossible to use on the dr1000.

Tbh it has been slightly disappointing, it is just about usable at home where all I want to do is read through a game book at a slow pace, as a usable item for using during game play when you need to be able to find information quickly it fails utterly

Hopefully things will improve as the software evolves, but at the moment it is a disappointing purchase.

Edit: Though I'd better add I have a Cybook Gen 3 that I've been using for a while now that I love and got used to how quickly it does normal page turns (never tried pdfs on it though) so perhaps I had an unrealistic viewpoint based upon how quick pdf pageturns are on my PC's, but waiting 10-20 secs for a page turn on the dr1000 feels like a lifetime.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by bazmi

the pdf's that i am using are magazines - scientific american, ieee computer, spectrum etc etc. as these are professionally done, i would expect that they have used good engines. for instance, each issue of scientific american takes about 10-15 secs to open the first page and then any zooming, panning etc takes same amount of time. i find that practically unusable.

I'm sure they're professionally done, but I doubt they're optimized well for the DR. Each page is probably stored inside the PDF document as an image file with high resolution, high number of colors, possibly compression, etc. When the DR wants to display each page it needs to resize the resolution and convert to 16 gray scale, which is slow. A PDF that uses images with resolutions/colors closer to the native resolution/grayscale of the DR or one that stores the pages as text instead of images should be much faster.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by omro

If the 1.5 update comes out and battery life doesn't significantly improve, then yes, I'll be very annoyed. But knowing that APM isn't working properly at this time and is expected to be, I won't get too worried now.

It's more than just not working properly. APM doesn't even exist in the DR yet.

[bazmi]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I'm sure they're professionally done, but I doubt they're optimized well for the DR. Each page is probably stored inside the PDF document as an image file with high resolution, high number of colors, possibly compression, etc. When the DR wants to display each page it needs to resize the resolution and convert to 16 gray scale, which is slow. A PDF that uses images with resolutions/colors closer to the native resolution/grayscale of the DR or one that stores the pages as text instead of images should be much faster.

in which case, the whole idea of portability is defeated in all but a technicality. and if i can open them om my numerous other devices, n800, zaurus etc with a lot better performance then there must be something wrong with the dr1000s pdf reader. if it requires the pdf to be optimised for the device, then it is not really very usable.

maybe evince reader should be ported to dr1000s. anyone willing to take that on will get a lot of very grateful people thanking him/her.
cheers

/bazmi.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by bazmi

for instance, each issue of scientific american takes about 10-15 secs to open the first page and then any zooming, panning etc takes same amount of time. i find that practically unusable.

If anyone wants to try this, SciAm has a sample issue, which is only part of the May 2004 magazine. Perhaps this isn't a good example, but it was not slow at all rendering on my relatively old Windows laptop. I was also surprised how well this works in Sony eLibrary on a Windows PC (emulates a PRS-700). This was again not slow at all, and the reflowing seemed to work and to be fast. Note that the fact that the reflow worked implies that this isn't a PDF of images.

The DR1000S approach is to zoom, rather than reflow, which means that it has to render the entire page again. The DR1000S has a slower processor than my PC, but not slower than, say, a Nokia Internet Tablet (which also has to render the entire page to zoom). So is this PDF intrinsically hard to display or is the DR1000S PDF implementation inefficient?