Hello, I was curious, as many of you, about the GoodEreader but after a lot of thinking I took the decision to buy Onyx.
Here are my thoughts after first day:
1. out of the box display looks crappy, fonts rendering issue - some letters are black contrasted but others are washed out. Looks like it's distributed in waves over the display surface. It turned out that I had to set screen refresh to on-every-page-trun (instead of the default at-5-pages) and rendering is perfect! I don't see any slowness or any other inconvenience with this setting, page turning is fast. I would suggest to make it a default so the out of the box experience would be very positive. Why not, anyway? Is there any issue with having the screen refresh every page turn?
2. Device is big, really big. I have to keep it with my arms stretched otherwise I find it odd - I am used too much to reading on 9"
3. when inserting new sd card be patient! I have moved my sd card from previous reader, containing ca 100 pdfs. Navigating through the storage was awkward, next. prev. buttons did not worked leaving me very puzzled how to scroll through your books. In setting I disabled reading metadata from the books, also I started playing with google play store etc. and when I finally came back to the storage it worked flawlessly, fast.
4. Using the stylus is OK. The sensitivity is very good - very fast reaction. Some buttons are designed however to activate when you keep them pressed for some time, there is no visual feedback so it makes the feeling that you should press harder - non of such thing, just tap gently and keep the pen on the spot
It's easy to get used to it.
5. The hardware is good enough. The deciding factor why I resigned from GoodEReader was the small RAM, only 512MB. I read about the RAM subject a lot and I have found out that ICS require ~300MB of RAM for itself (the kernel + the android) so really not much is left for apps albeit probably enough for just one pdf reader app. Nonetheless I have found out that each newer android consumed more RAM, about 50MB more.... so I realized that upgrading GoodEreader to modern android was a blunder but with Onyx it should be possible. Just now I have checked my Onyx - 392MB used by the system (on 512MB it would mean only ~100MB for app). By the way, according to my research for pdf app 100-150MB of RAM should be enough but that always depend on the complexity of the pdf.
Hope that helps anyone, have a good evening!
EDIT:
I thought that I may post some picture demonstrating the font rendering issue I mentioned. Maybe someone from Onyx read this forum and can just let me know the thoughts.
- screen refresh on every page turn
[Image violates Posting Guidelines for size - MODERATOR]
- screen refresh every 5 pages
[Image violates Posting Guidelines for size - MODERATOR]
Sorry for the quality, I'm just photographer amateur having a smartphone
plus I downsized the images to lower file size from 2+ MB to 40+ KB, still the images perfectly demonstrate what I was talking about. In case of any question about the screen quality in general, it is very sharp and nice white - these are just pictures taken without flash lamp and downsized so they lost the sharpness significantly.