Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
I can go back a lot farther still--try 1991 and the Sony Bookman with monochrome screen (no backlight). See photo. It used Sony mini-discs. Unfortunately Sony did what they often do and failed to support it with more than just a very few dozen books. I had one of these clamshell book readers. I then spent over a decade reading on Palm, Clie, and WM PDAs. Not only were the Palm screens small, even the TX, they had very low resolution. I think the Palm TX was 320 x 480 pixels. But it worked for a reader as I read hundreds of books on the Palm TX!
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Forgot about that one, and with good reason: HORRIBLE form factor, but I guess it was the best they could do at that time...
I used my upgraded IIIx (8M RAM/4M flash TRG's XTRA XTRA PRO upgrade board). 240x240 IIRC mono screen, but that's what I wanted a monochrome screen so I could actually read it in sunny/brightly lit areas... used it until I dropped it once to often and cracked the upper left corner of the screen... still need to track down a replacement screen...
ebookman: yeah batt life was short and mine was one of the ones with the faulty caps. Wasn't a design defect per se but a Taiwanese company corporate espionage phail whale. They tried to ripoff a Japanese's companies elecrolyte formula for their caps and stole the wrong one... oops... so the world went through alot of failing caps for a few years as they APPEARED to be as good as the Japanese cap and cheaper, but they usually failed after a short period of time unlike the REAL Japanese caps... affected alot of products.
I just used NiMH rechargeables in mine. It's 2 or 3d before I had to swap, and I had a batt meter app that recorded history and could graph things like batt voltage with a bunch of options.