I'm almost thinking about getting 2 ebook devices...
An Hanlin V8 for travel-purposes...small, light, with hardcover and (in comparison to irex at least) cheap. The Formats it supports should be enough for me.
HTML and .txt is enough for my uses at the moment. Books in .lit format can be converted and that just about sums up what you can get as ebook at the moment (well...there is still PDF, but the V8 can handle that as far as I know).
For reading at home and in "controllable environments" I'd like something like the Iliad...bigger screen, better screen (at least if you compare them from the pictures, the Iliad seems to be the "whitest" of the new epaper displays...maybe because the frame is black and not white like the Hanlin's?) and nice features like drawing and taking notes (you can take notes with the handlin too, but I'm not sure how well that works with the slave-display...the little review vids that are floating about don't really go into detail about the slave display...or rather..they just don't show it in action...so no idea....).
The problem is...with those 2 devices I've still got unsolved issues.
First and biggest one is: I can get alarge number of free and commercial books, but if I want to get the newest Terry Pratchett or Robert Jordan, Tom Holt or Jasper Fforde or something like that (I think you get the pictures...) I'm probably buggered...best choice there would probably be the sony...but that is one device that is seriously under-featured and over-priced. Of course you don't really need a touchscreen, a calender function, notes, etc...but the Hanlin V8 is cheaper than the Sony will be (as far as we can tell) and has these features...so...well...no deal.
The other thing is, that to get a Hanlin device, I'd have to order it from China. No problemo, but first of all i can't even find an "online shop" or anything, then I'd probably have to pay almost as much transport-cost than I'd pay for the device, then customs and import VAT...and probably end up paying well over 300Euro for a device that i'm actually considering since it's the cheapest and weakest (processor and OS wise) device on the market. This is just weird...call that globalization? And what if there is some damage during transport or the device is Dead on Arrival? No end of trouble I'd guess...
Well...enough ranting...I'm not sure anymore where I wanted to go with this post...maybe it'll come back to me later and I'll let you know...
Oh by the way...I've taken another look a the V8 manual...not a bad device at all features-wise...I wonder how that 48Mhz processor manages to handle that so well...and what is going to be so different in V2 that it needs 4 times as much processing power...does Linux eat so many resources?