My impression of the DR1000

[kl612]

I got my device a few days ago, after several weeks of waiting.

As most others have observed, the screen is quite good, and it is fun to read with it. I use it mostly to read and annotate research papers, and for this is works quite well.

But still it is quite annoying that the DR1000 could be so much better without much effort.

My main points of annoyance:

- In general, the user interface "feels" like Windows 3.1 and not like a modern application. A pity Irex didn't hire someone who knows something about modern and efficient GUI design.
- Why do I have to navigate through multiple menus to shut off the DR? For this alone the user interface designers should be killed.
- Why are there 6 buttons for "next/previous page" navigation, and why does the middle button of one of the three otherwise identical button groups have a different meaning? I often hit some of these buttons accidentially. If you select something with the bottom buttons, then it is weird that you have to go to a different button group to confirm your choice.
- The PDF reader is too slow! It takes up to 5 seconds to turn a page. I am a software engineer, and I am pretty certain that this is only due to bad programming, and not hardware limitations. I'd like to use the DR for sheet music on my piano, but then 5 seconds is much too slow.
- In general, the buttons do not work very well. Often when I touch a button it is not registered as a button touch, or it is registered as two button touches (which means another 15 seconds of time lost - 10 seconds to turn two pages forward, and then 5 seconds to go back to the page I wanted originally)

It is a nice device (although too expensive for normal book reading). I sincerly hope that some of my concerns will be addressed by future software improvements.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by kl612

- The PDF reader is too slow! It takes up to 5 seconds to turn a page. I am a software engineer, and I am pretty certain that this is only due to bad programming, and not hardware limitations. I'd like to use the DR for sheet music on my piano, but then 5 seconds is much too slow.

That's not normal. How many PDFs have you tried, and do they all behave this way? I assume music PDFs store each page as an image. The DR can potentially be slow if it has to re-render image files to fit the size of the screen each time it turns a page. Most text PDFs should not do that though. Do you know what native resolution those music pages are stored as?