Reader Henrique "Henrycat" Catarrunas
got his hands on the iRex iLiad reader
during a conference at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar in Portugal, and he was kind enough to send us a picture of his new baby. From the picture (attached to this post) it's obvious how much better the 1024x768 screen (with 16 grey scales) works for e-content compared to the 800x600 screen (with 4 grey scales) of the now slightly outdated Sony Librie.
Some nifty features of the iRex we didn't discuss before:
- Native support for PDF documents loaded straight from a CF card or even from a USB pen.
- Auto conversion of color pictures to grey scale.
- HTML documents are displayed as one page, which you can "flip" down.
For those miserable about the
delayed launch, Henrique was able to get some more information about this too. As we mentioned before, there's a problem with the iRex Web store which doesn't seem to be quite ready yet (according to Henrique, problems are related to processing and authorizing payments). But there are also still some unsolved software issues. The company who does the embedded Linux OS hasn't delivered a final version yet. The software reader, apparently called Apabi Reader and made by a
Chinese company (check out this
flash presentation) renders PDF documents too slow, which can perhaps be solved by precaching content. Meanwhile iRex is building up stock and expects more iLiad devices to arrive by the first week of May 2006.
Henrique, since you were granted the iLiad as a "permanent loan" (no comment!), please keep us updated as we are all craving for more photos and information!