Pocketbook 360 is a great choice, mefeels.
1 and 2. I'm right-handed and I tend to use it with my left hand because it allows me to hold something in the right one easily. Completely fine for that.
3. It skates in the floor and falls from 5 feet high and is unscathed (per my own experience), it survives car crashes (per another forum member)... durable it is, I say. Plus, you don't need to get a cover for it as it has a detachable plastic lid which protects the screen and doesn't add bulk to the device.
4. It is one of the most pocketable units, but it has a screen size of 5 inches. 6 inch readers are hardly stored in any pocket, and bigger screen sizes do not fit at all.
5 and 7. No touchscreen= no gloss.
6. If you can use it one-handed comfortably, you can guess it's very well thought-out.
8 and 9. It has Vizplex e-Ink screens. It has a good contrast, not as huge as the new Kindle's Pearl e-Ink, but mighty fine if you ask me.
10. Check. MicroSD/SDHC slot for you.
11. Since the screen is small, you'll have to read normally formatted PDF files in landscape mode. However, the PDF handling by the device is very interesting, though its small size.
12. From what the
e-Book Matrix says: FB2, TXT, PDF, DJVU, RTF, HTML, PRC, PDB (PalmDoc), Plucker, CHM, EPUB, DOC, TCR, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF. No audio formats though, as the PB360 has no audio output.
13. The device has three things: the power button, the card port and the USB entry in the lower side. When you stick the card, it enters the device, so to say, so you have no salient side. Your only source of worry may be the USB cable... but you can flip the device in any direction thanks to its G-sensor.
14 and 15. The battery lasts ca. 2 weeks for me and it is user-replaceable.
16 and 17. It has no Wi-Fi or 3G. You need to get the books inside the device with a computer.
18. You don't have a need for it, as the device is recognized as a USB stick and you can copy-paste the files inside, but you can use the world-praised
Calibre software if you want to build an ebook catalog and manage your collection. It makes decent format transformations too.
19. You can save text from a file to read it later... The downside is that the output is a BMP file (that is, an image, not text). Pretty dumb indeed.
20. It costs $199 in the USA. You have vendors in this very forum to get in contact with.