Welcome to the Forum, KillerRabbit! (Do I detect a Monty Python reference?)
Well, you do have quite a list! I don't really have anything useful to say about some of them, but I'll hit a few. Perhaps others will chime in on the rest....
Let's see...
Of the three current (available or pending) readers, the closest to a standard battery is the HanLin, which uses a standard Nokia cellphone battery. However, something to consider here is that the final goal of these things is to allow you to go a couple of weeks without needing a recharge. iLiad isn't there yet, but they are making some progress.
The iLiad's U.S. price ends up being closer to $700 (depending on exchange rate), as non-Europeans don't have to pay the VAT (unless you're stationed in Europe, of course). Don't know how much difference that might make to you.
All three will handle PDF's natively, but it'll be impossible to tell which suits your need best until you can actually compare them to one another, difficult when two aren't released, and the third isn't sure what it'll end up doing to handle them. For MS Office, PDF & RTF (as applicable) will likely end up being your best options. Though HanLin claims they will support the MS file types natively in the V2.
They'll all do bookmarks, and it looks like the only one that won't do searching is the Sony, as it doesn't seem to have any direct input method. Ditto for annotiations.
Color. Well, e-ink *has* developed a 12-bit color display prototype, but it's several years from commercial availability, apparently, so for now if you want e-ink, you want grayscale. (shrug) And considering that the e-ink is the only thing that allows the crazy long battery-life ....
Interfaces, they all have USB, Sony's has a mini USB. iLiad will take a USB flashdrive (I don't think anyone's had the chance to try that on either of the others). They all take SD (or at least MMC in the iRex case), while HanLin & iLiad also take CF, Sony does the memorystick as its second type. And it appears that all three show up as a USB drive when connected to a 'puter.
I think iLiad lets you transfer from flash drive/cards to internal memory (someone who actually has one can answer that better
), but I don't think anyone's found any indication on that either way for the other two.
Page refresh. Presently, the absolute minimum refresh time for an e-ink display appears to be .5 seconds, with 1 second being the current standard, as that approach allows for a cleaner background (less ghosting). The time beyond that is rendering time for the unit to create the image that the screen will display. iLiad recently has implemented a pre-rendering scheme, so it seems to be getting pretty close to the minimum, as long as you're going to the "next" page, rather than jumping around. Most iLiadites have said that it's not too bothersome. I've seen one of these, by the generousity of an iLiadite who lives near me, and could be bribed with free coffee. It was running the non-pre-rendering version of OS at the time (~2 seconds), and I found it fine for reading purposes.
The videos of the HanLin and Sony appear to be pretty close to the minimum too. Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a vid that showed page turning in a PDF, only e-texts, which it seems to me should have lower rendering overhead. (shrug)
Of course, the U.S. Military will probably want to develop it's own version that has no EMF emissions, does everything okay but not great, weighs 30 pounds (most likely), and costs a mere $2.5 million per unit.
