hi Rufus,
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Originally Posted by RufusA
Obviously the BE has the better screen, but how do the two readers compare in day to day use.
In particular I'm thinking speed, user interface, rendering of PDFs, searching for stuff, annotating documents (and getting those annotations off again in a usable format) etc.
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when it comes to reading books, the user interface and responsiveness of sony is certainly much better - you can view the books in different ways, easier to find books, search function is better, turning pages is very intuitive, faster and reliable. in short you can make out the the device is designed by people who know consumer market.
i have about 800 books and looking for them is not easy on iliad and extremely difficult for someone to just browse the list of titles, authors etc etc
note taking however is not a strong point on sony reader. it is there but not a great thing.
the iliad would be my preference for reading pdf, annotating it, saving it etc. although merging it is not a painless task. you need a windows based machine connected to it.
where iliad really shines is its note taking application (relative to other epaper devices). really good. almost seems like that it came from a different planet than the rest of iliad software ;-)
when it comes to battery life, sony beats iliad by miles. i have read elsewhere in these forums that you can setup sony where its battery life is comparable to iliad but i can only say that for the normal use (including reading with LEDs on in taxis/trains/buses), you get at least 3000 pages or so on sony. maybe 1000 on iliad.
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Knowing what you know now, which reader would you buy if you could only afford one?
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the primary advantage of e-paper devices is still book reading for me. for annotation etc, a tablet pc is still far more powerful and although epaper devices have more potential for that, it is early. pdf engines on all are excruciatingly slow for all but the most trivial pdfs (compared to what you can get on laptops). so a decent pdf engine is certainly needed. what gives me hope is that in the last couple of days, a port of xournal has appeared for dr1000s. once apps like that get stable then epaper devices would be more useable for annotating and note taking.
therefore if i could buy only one, i would go for sony.
but iliad is more fun at other times because it is hackable!!!!
hope this helps. good luck!