Quote:
Originally Posted by Prash
I am a student right now, and i have decided to go for a cheap ereader or PDA as a temporary solution for my requirements. My budget is around $55. If a device is worth it, i can extend it around $85. I will be using it only for an year, so going for the cheapest device i can get.
buy.
My main requirements:
1. Good/moderate screen size
2. Good readability
3. Ability to read PDF files(As most of the books i have are in pdf format, maybe this is too much to ask for in such a cheap device  ) |
Your budget is your big limitation.
I read ebooks on a Palm OS PDA. My device is a Tapwave Zodiac 2, whose manufacturer went out of business in 2005. It has a 320 x 480 color screen, 128MB of RAM, two SD card slots, bluetooth, and a few other features.
I prefer it over a dedicated ebook viewer because I need color and want to do other things besides read ebooks on it.
I have about 3,500 ebooks spread over two 2GB SD cards. Most are HTML format, converted for use with the Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS, a free open source product. I also have a fair number of files in Mobipocket, eReader, Word, RTF, text, and PDF formats, with four different viewers to handle them all. (The viewers are all freeware.)
The big issue is PDFs. There is a superb open source PDF viewer for Palm devices called PalmPDF, so you can read them. The problem is that most PDFs were created assuming a larger screen, and won't reflow to fit the smaller device screen. You may need to side scroll to view them, which can be aggravating. The same problem will affect any handheld device.
Of the ones you listed, I'd go for the T3, but that's due to long time use of and familiarity with Palm OS. The main limit on the T3 is that it won't handle SD cards larger than 1GB.
______
Dennis