[fool_on_the_hill]

A quick review from my initial impressions, which are very positive...

The build quality seems very high. From some of the photos online I was worried the device might be a bit plasticky, or like the glossy-white Apple iThings that smudge really badly. In the flesh, the feel and finish are excellent and the bezel isn't as shiny white as it looks in the pictures (it actually blends nicely with the slightly greyer e-ink screen). It's also very thin and lightweight, and comes with a perfectly functional case (at least as good as the Kindle cases for which Amazon charge £30 or more). If you prefer your ebook reader to be nude, then you'll find that the back of the device has a nice, slightly grippy, feel to it.

The only other reader I've used is a standard Kindle (edit: Kindle keyboard, 3rd generation), and the Boox M92 compares favourably. The screen seems at least as good, and the page turns are about the same speed (the screen can also be configured to refresh less often, presumably for faster page turns). Note that I haven't actually compared these devices side-by-side, as I don't have access to the Kindle right now.

I played around with some really huge PDFs (including an 1100 page technical book) with no freezes/crashes or other problems. The zoom options have a 'crop margins' setting which works great.

I had thought the OS might be a weak spot, but it seems pretty polished and is, for the most part, fairly intuitive. The stylus feels quite natural (much better than my old capacitive screen smartphone) and works well. The 'scribble' app is fun and works quite well, but seems a bit pointless. The on-screen keyboard is about as good as such things can be, and is perfectly usable. There's also a handwriting recognition option, which I didn't find usable (however I have terrible handwriting), and works in such a way that I can't see how it could possibly be faster than using the keyboard (even if it was 100% accurate).

For ePubs, the default viewer was a bit rubbish, displaying everything in two columns (with apparently no other layout options) and making a number of really glaring layout mistakes. However, the 'Preferred Applications' menu in the device settings allows you to choose another viewer for ePubs, and the two alternatives both worked fine. Of the two, FBReader (which is the default for other file types) seemed marginally better than Cool Reader, but I didn't spend long experimenting with both of them. The default viewer for ePubs was actually one named 'PDF Reader', which seems an odd choice for ePubs (something to do with the Adobe licensing, perhaps?).

I only have a couple of gripes so far, both of which can hopefully be resolved by a firmware update in future:
* The device can only connect to WiFi networks that are broadcasting their SSID (it's possible to configure a non-visible network, but the subsequent connection attempt fails); this seems to be a common issue with similar devices and it's not a major problem
* The browser doesn't seem to be able to connect to certain sites. As far as I can tell, the problem seems to be with any site that uses HTTPS (this is a shame as I thought the clean interface of workflowy.com might work well on this device, and obviously any online eBook store will use HTTPS at some point).