[davidjoseph1]

Some notes from about a week of M90 ownership, which I bought in pre-order from the ONYX USA website.

Due to confusion in the initial mailing, the package dawdled in the bowels of the USPS system in Georgia/Florida for a week. Finally the shipment made it, ten days after I was given a USPS delivery confirmation tracking number. (9101 1501 3471 1772 8718 26 - if you want to watch its progress).

The M90 (in white) came with wall charger, USB mini-cable, leatherette/cardboard/felt cover folder, and penabled stylus.
I haven't used the wall charger, because I charge whatever I need to charge from my powered USB hub, which rests behind surge protection. If it were still justified to judge the potential reliability of electronic components by weight - I'd say the charger (A UL listed Huntkey switching adapter model hka00605010-28, .2A at 100-240V 50/60Hz to 5V DC 1A) felt a bit heavier than other power supplies, but they might have stuffed it with concrete instead. They're still a fire risk.

The penabled stylus will be lost at some point, and I will be unhappy, because the poorly designed retention stretch loops in the hinge of the cover suck. They do accept the stylus (pockets at each end) but the elastic is very fiddly and hard to stretch, since the stylus has a blunt end that does not slide easily into its pocket. The stylus is small and hard to hold for big hands like mine.

I had an installation of Calibre ready to go and began installing books on the device as soon as I got it. That was simple, however the folder system on the M90 is by author, not title, which can get tiresome if you are perusing summaries of legal research or cases in PDF, RTF, or DOC format.
I don't care to try to use any nesting folders in order to segregate by subject area - I don't want to break the file tree parser.

The UI is intuitive and easy to navigate - my wife picked it up in a couple of minutes. The IR mouse works fine indoors, with few failures to pick up a digit sweep - those times I've needed to sweep more than once seem to be associated with processor load, as though there were time-sharing issues between different modules.

I haven't noticed any auto-Portrait/Landscape render changing - and I thought this was a feature of the device? One can shift orientation manually.

I haven't used the M90 in sunlight yet. When I was using the M90 in line-of-sight from a 150W 3-Way light fixture (about three feet) I noticed that the odd angle change could actuate the IR mouse and turn the page or shift font zooming. This behavior was not observed, however, when I was working under a halogen lamp (with a significantly brighter and hotter light).

Software issues - the reader has crashed a couple of times reading non-encrypted .epubs (converted from .lit files via Calibre). There's an issue with one of my PDF's (a simple scanned document - 600 pages - no deep structure) that refuses to zoom properly. The Scribble worksheet doesn't recognize writing on a strip across the top 1.5 cm of the Wacom screen, nor across a similar strip across the bottom, but touch functions in those areas function in different system apps.

I can't seem to get the reader to log into our SSID-less, WPA2 home network. I have inputted the appropriate identifier and passkey, and set the appropriate conditions, but the reader chugs and chugs. I scanned for but did not notice any attempted access by the M90 in the logs of our WIFI router. So there may be software issues with the WIFI module, in terms of recognizing networks which do not announce SSID's in the clear. I also haven't been able to log into the open WIFI network to which I have had access in the last week.

I have not used an SD card with the M90 yet - 2GB seems to be more than enough for right now (with two 180MB PDF's rendering properly).

Otherwise, the M90 is my first baseline for experimenting with e-paper devices - I had avoided the prior iterations by Sony, Irex, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Jinke et al because:

1) I wanted an A4/8.5x11 rendered screen,
2) The limited ecosystem of e-book purchase options
3) Irex's collapse, and the crappy reputation of the DRS-1000
4) getting a Jinke A9 direcly from China was going to be a major hassle - Telegraph bank transfer - in 2011?!

I have to say, I'm not unhappy with the purchase. The screen is very clear. I don't use internet functions on the pad yet, so I can wait for the WIFI issue to be fixed - meanwhile, I use Calibre and simple folder management to handle documents. and WIFI is off, conserving battery power. Battery life seems fine - (1500 pages of reading, 2.5 bars of 6 in battery).