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Originally Posted by windowsrefund
Somewhere on this forum, someone mentioned something about chapters being cached but I can't see how this would help matters as user's hardly bother to switch between chapters. In the case of caches, I'd think both the previous and next pages should be cached so they can be called up immediately rather than what's happening now.
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Hmm... I think you're misunderstanding what it means for a chapter to be cached. It basically means that all pages in the chapter are in RAM and ready to go. Therefore, the previous and next pages are already cached. They've basically already done what you're asking for.
When you get to the end of a chapter, there's that wait time that you have to sit through till the next chapter loads. That's why that happens. The next chapter is being pushed into memory.
I think that short of moving to the new Pearl screen and increasing CPU speed, only a very very modest speed increase could ever likely be achieved on the Kobo Wifi. I'm only speculating of course because I don't know anything about the Kobo software.
I have programmed for the Kindles though, and for non-reading tasks you can do tricks such as employ dirty rects to refresh only bits of a screen, but for reading and other things that require full screen refresh, you're going to be limited by the screen's ability to refresh itself.
If I remember correctly (it's been a few months), the Kindle 2's full screen refresh is about as fast as Kobo Wifi's, and the Kindle 3's was a lot faster because of the new Pearl screen.
One thing I do notice about the Kobo is that it throws away all page-turn button presses until it is completely finished refreshing a page. That's a bit irritating, removing that and buffering some of the key presses could help give the appearance of faster page turns (like for when you're flipping pages to get to a certain page). I could have sworn that the Kindle 2 did not eat button presses while it was refreshing. I thought it simply immediately went to refresh the next page after finishing the current one, but I could be wrong...
Oh, one more thing, the StarEbook doesn't look like it's twice as fast as the Kobo when you check out the YouTube videos of it... It looks about the same speed. I think that might have been a bit of an exaggeration... Anyway, aren't the Kobo and StarEbook both made by the same company (Netronix)?