iRex Digital Reader: Going to receive a review unit - post your questions

[bob_ninja]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I think iRex has already said that the battery is not user replaceable, which I would assume means there is no panel/compartment.

WTF?!?!?!?!

Why would I spend so much money on a gizmo that will die in 5-10 years due to battery even if screen and other components are perfectly fine????? Every laptop has an easy to replace battery. What the h311??????

Why is so hard to get such a simple option? Sigh

I hope it is easy to access though, even if not sanctioned by iRex. I am not buying these things to change every few years.

[junkyardwillie]

Is there anyone that has a laptop from 5 - 10 years ago that is worried about their battery life?? Technology is only good for about 4 years max and then the new stuff is so much better and usually cheaper no one in their right mind would stick with the old one. Look at the iPhone, who needs to worry about a battery not keeping charge, people replace that in about 2 months (they aren't in their right mind however)

[dhill]

From the iRex Q&A:

Q: Does the iRex Digital Reader 1000 feature SDHC support?
A: The iRex Digital Reader 1000 is able to recognize and work with all compliant SD cards. Officially we do not support SDHC cards but we have noticed that most SDHC cards do work.

This makes no sense. Either it can handle SDHC or not. Either they purchased SDHC parts for the DR1000 or not. Let us know if it really has the SDHC card reader/controller and what is the highest capacity SD that you can test.

[NatCh]

It may be a matter of the SDHC card makers complying with the standard properly or not, as well. That's come up before.

[sasilk]

OK, the things I would be interested in knowing:

• Boot up time
  
• Page refresh time
  
• Does it have Suspend/Hibernate functionality yet? (Currently said to be for later release)
  
• Verification that it will handle SD cards larger than 1Gb
  
• Is a standard-size tech book (eg a For Dummies book or similar) easily readable. (This has been the greatest drawback for me with the iLiad. I can read fiction easily on it but tech books just don't scale well.)
  
• Can you use your own directory system within it? ie Are you constrained to the books/news/notes/docs subdir structure?
  
• When you print to it, can you choose where the document is to go - card or memory? And can you choose the subdirectory for it?
  
• Is the interface for actually finding what you want to read better? I have thousands of files on my iLiad and finding the one I want can be a nightmare.

Echoing others here, thank you very much for doing this. It will make all our decision-making that much easier.

SAS

[jfvelez]

Some times I need to view a concrete page (for example page 245) in a large PDF (for example with 950 pages). As Iliad don't have numeric key pad, this operation could spent a lot of time (I usually spent more than 30 seconds).

How much time do you spent in such operation in an IRex 1000?

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by guguy

I've heard the Wacom sensor of the iLiad darkened the screen, we will have the answer by comparing the 1000 and 1000S

I don't see why this would be the case. The Wacom technology is behind the screen, not in front of it. Resistive touch screens do darken the screen, which is why (I presume) iRex didn't use them for the iLiad, even though they're less expensive.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I don't see why this would be the case. The Wacom technology is behind the screen, not in front of it. Resistive touch screens do darken the screen, which is why (I presume) iRex didn't use them for the iLiad, even though they're less expensive.

I hadn't heard that either. I think they were just confusing it with a resistive touch screen.

[nekokami]

The interesting question is why iRex isn't using the capacitive screen used by Apple for the iPhone, rather than the proprietary (and expensive) Wacom technology. Is the problem that even with a conductive stylus, the granularity of the input wouldn't be sufficient for ink notes?

[martinrebas]

I want an ebook reader to read comics on, so my main questions are:

1. Is there cbz/cbr support?

2. If not, can you browse images from zip/rar files named .zip/.rar?

3. If not, can you browse forward/back between sequential fullscreen images stored in a folder?

4. How hard would it be to install/write/port a comic reader application?

5. I often want to switch between several books; maybe reading in a foreign language while also using a dictionary, for example. Or trying to learn Japanese by reading Japanese and English versions of a manga simultaneously. Is it possible to quickly switch between several documents (maybe like using tabs in a web browser), with the ebook remembering the current position in each one?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by martinrebas

4. How hard would it be to install/write/port a comic reader application?

Huh. I'm not sure a reviewer would be able to answer this one. "How hard" is pretty subjective depending on the person. I bet it would be much harder for Sarah Palin to do it than for Linus Torvalds to do it.

Perhaps a better question is what type of SDK is provided to developers and what features of the device does the API allow access to.

BOb

[Adam B.]

Originally Posted by martinrebas

1. Is there cbz/cbr support?

2. If not, can you browse images from zip/rar files named .zip/.rar?

I'm pretty sure I can already answer the first two without a device. No, and No.

I'm sure a plugin can be created to do this for the UDS. But someone will have to write it.

[Boreras]

I'm very interested in the use of Math and Physics books on this device, mostly because that's what I'd buy a larger touch-enabled ereader for.
It obviously has been asked before, but I have some .PDFs that I'd consider good reference material:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4587 (some random LaTeX abuse)
http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~bon/Fourier%20Theory.pdf (another one) or http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/resources...strangtext.htm (The first would be best for testing heavy math-LaTeX battering, and would probably be most evident in showing delays. Choose the pages with the most math. squiggly stuff in it.)
For people interested in general rendering time, and even more for the people interested particularity in the rendering delay of college texts (LaTeX mostly), this may be a useful example and test. I am also searching for photocopy texts, to compare, and I found tons of those, but they were all illegal! So if anyone could find this, I'd be much obliged, and, of course, even more obliged to Adam or Tribble or whoever would be willing to take the time to report on this.
The essence of this test would be to know the total render time and the added time compared with PDFs that are simple paperback texts (from ebook shops, or gutenberg, etc.).

Of course, this message would practically be a good non-math reference too. Such a wall of text for something simple.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by nekokami

The interesting question is why iRex isn't using the capacitive screen used by Apple for the iPhone, rather than the proprietary (and expensive) Wacom technology. Is the problem that even with a conductive stylus, the granularity of the input wouldn't be sufficient for ink notes?

I'm not an expert, but that's my understanding. That type of screen works well for finger touch interaction, etc, but you can't write on it with a stylus.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by martinrebas

I want an ebook reader to read comics on, so my main questions are:

1. Is there cbz/cbr support?

2. If not, can you browse images from zip/rar files named .zip/.rar?

3. If not, can you browse forward/back between sequential fullscreen images stored in a folder?

4. How hard would it be to install/write/port a comic reader application?

5. I often want to switch between several books; maybe reading in a foreign language while also using a dictionary, for example. Or trying to learn Japanese by reading Japanese and English versions of a manga simultaneously. Is it possible to quickly switch between several documents (maybe like using tabs in a web browser), with the ebook remembering the current position in each one?

There is a comic viewer ported to the iLiad, using Java, so it might be possible to port this (or a similar application) to the DR. But that will depend on what the SDK turns out to be like. (The CBZ format is extremely simple, though, so developing a plugin for the DS viewer should be simple.)

Meanwhile, you might consider using one of the CBZ->PDF converters (check threads in the iLiad section). Then you could read them using the DS viewer, and be able to switch between them.