In the past, my PRS-650 has been very solid, with no spooky lockups at all, even with about 1250 books now loaded.
About 3 days back, I went to open a book from the main screen, and accidentally did a stutter-tap (tapped the screen, then inadvertently laid my finger back down on the screen almost immediately, causing a second tap)
The 650 seemed to freeze up, so after about half a minute I cycled the power down manually and rebooted, and it came up and restarted fine, with no lost notes or other problems.
So I do think there is some sort of minor issue that can happen if you cause a second input on the home library screen while it is just starting to open your initial selection.
Like that old vaudeville joke goes - guy says to his doctor "doc, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor replies "then don't to that!"
This is apparently just one of those "don't to that" things.
As far as certain PDFs locking up the 350/650/950, I don't doubt that this can happen. Time was when a powerful CPU with 256 megs of memory, driving a tiny 800x600 screen, would have been a no brainer for something as simple as running Adobe Acrobat.
These days, it's barely enough to boot up and run, thanks to software bloat caused by hack programmers who just want to slap together a bunch of freebie library code. I've seen a moron import 50 megs of graphic libraries, to strip something out of a JPG header that could be done in about 12 lines of 'C' code.
How well would your PC run these days with a 2 Gig hard drive and 256 megs of memory - Answer, not very well unless you go shopping for a stripped down lightweight Linux OS (which is exactly what they DO use on virtually all these portable book readers).
Unfortunately, with todays bloated software, a PDF reader on a bookreader that only has a few hundred megs of Flash Drive and RAM space available is going to have some compromises.
Sad, really sad. My ancient 10 plus year old laptop with Windowz 98 and 128 Megs of Ram runs Adobe Reader 5 flawlessly, and will load up HUGE scanned PDFs without even breathing hard.
I have high hopes though for the NEXT generation of readers based on Google's Android OS.
In Android, nearly all Apps are written in the same high level Java like language, using a common set of operating system provided libraries and a common system API, which should finally start to reign in some of the software BLOAT and allow the creation of more reliable less buggy systems.
Sorry to drift a little off topic and wax philosophical, but I wanted you to understand that, when it comes to reading PDF's on the 650, there are some technical issues that require you think of it a little like the case of a "dog walking on it's hind legs" - i.e. the wonder is not how
well it's done, but
that it can be done at all.
The 'About' screen on the 650 credits it as using 'Adobe Reader Mobile'. So Sony did the best they could by paying for officially licensed code from Adobe. I'm not sure if that's the case with the Nook or Kindle, but I can say that, having seen all three devices, the Sony does do a slightly better job of 'walking on it's hind legs' then the other two.
