Originally Posted by twoflower
My first impressions of 902 after two days of usage.
Positive
1. The document rendering capabilities of PB902 are good. I have tried many files from my personal library - mostly OCRed and scanned PDF, CHM, EPUB, DJVU and HTML files - and each one is readable. Even the scanned PDFs/DJVUs are readable on the device and the G-sensor works with them - in the landscape mode it zooms fine. When I zoom so much that the text is wider than the device, I still don't know to navigate through the text, but that's probably because I haven't read the manual yet. And this scenario (text line wider than the device) is not suitable for continuous reading anyway. If I read a two-column PDF, I can set the zoom mode to count with this layout (number of columns can be adjusted from 2 to 5) so that the reader presents me the first columns first and as I reach its end, it automatically jumps to beginning of the second column. Very convenient.
2. The device itself feels solid and the buttons response nicely (I am not talking about the speed now).
3. WiFi is working, as I just found out at home. WPA2-PSK on my router doesn't seem to be a problem. Anyway, I haven't found the browser yet so I only tested connecting to Bookland.
4. The included Text-to-speech and vocabularies work fine. I tried EN-CS vocabulary and has been satisfied.
Negative
1. I can see the previous contents under the current contents on the display. Is this a property of all eInk devices? Sometimes it is quite obvious, sometimes hardly noticeable.
2. The software is far from perfect. In particular, it has some redrawing issues. For example, when I was testing the music player and tried to open a book while the music was playing, the reader got really confused and only restarting it helped.
3. I connected to Bookland several times, but after loading the page and pressing some of the navigation buttons, it gets unresponsive. Luckily, the "return" button works and I can get out of Bookland back to main menu.
4. When you want to use the vocabulary, the navigation for the particular word on a page is very slow (mainly the navigation in between the lines, within the line it is faster).
Note taking in PDF
First to make this clear - the device almost surely does not allow making regular PDF annotations. The notes here, if I understand it right, are just portions of text from the document. If you want to make a note in a document, you select the region of text it should span and that's it. Then, you can review the notes you created from the main menu where they are organized under the respective books. Anyway, I was not able to create a note in the PDF file. I tried it, selected the text region, but I could not find the note in the menu then (the book was not listed there at all). Then I tried to create a note in an EPUB file and this time it was ok.
About the brightness and contrast
The display is gray, the font is not really black BUT for me, it is okay. Indeed, this is not the biggest concern for me, personally. I compared the device with Kindle DX (the first generation, unfortunately) and I could not see any remarkable difference. The fonts could have sharper edges, but maybe this can be fixed and again, it does not make the documents unreadable, at least for me.
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If you want to test the rendering of some documents you have, feel free to send me the files (or put them right in this thread) and I can take the photos for you.
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