Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
P.S. Can anyone who has one of these do a mini-review on the text search feature please? Is it easy to use? Is it reasonably fast?
The text serch would be the only reason I'd get one of these, My Sony 505 works well enough except I REALLY miss being able to search.
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Like Kris777 says, it's pretty nifty. You have your choice between T9 input, or a what I find to be very cumbersome alternative method. It is not multi tap, where you just push the same key till your proper letter appears. Wish it was. You press the number on the right vertical keyboard corresponding to the letter you want, and then a scrollable window pops up with each letter assigned a number. You can either scroll down the list using the D pad arrows and then hit OK, or press the corresponding number beside your letter. The first (usually 3) letters in the window are CAPS, followed by lower case, then finally the number. Looks just like this if you push #4, which has the letters GHI.
[1] G
[2] H
[3] I
[4] g
So now if you want a cap H you now push #2. After realizing this, I thought if I wanted a lower case h, next in the list if you scroll down, I would skip scrolling and just hit #5. But it doesn't work that way and won't let you. You MUST scroll down, only to find this:
[1] h
[2] i
[3] 4
These letters have been assigned the same numbers, and now pressing #2 gives you a lower case i in your search field. Unless I completely missed something, this is quite tedious.
The good news is that T9 input works quite well. "Tedious" takes just 4 pushes on 3 keys (TEDI, that's 8334 on keypad) until it appears in the box, and two quick pushes of the OK button, the first to enter your word in the search field, and the second to initiate the search, brings up split second results.
To initiate a search in any book, just hit #4 on the vertical keypad.
The dictionary (Your Sony doesn't have that either does it?
)is even better. Simply hit #1, and the first word on that page is highlighted. Scroll down and over word by word using the D pad arrows (scrolling is slightly laggy) until you highlight the word you want to look up, hit OK and the results are instantaneous.
The thought occurred to me that the vertical keypad could be used to instantly scroll to a line, but no.
I'm using the English dictionary, and unlike my Mac dictionary, it has trouble with foreign words. Portmanteau, quickly defined by my Mac as a two sided suitcase, brought up the definition for "portrait" on the jetBook. This is while using the English version of "The Invisible Man" as an example.
EDIT: Search still works in dedrm'd books. It also works with a pdf>epub conversion I made using Calibre. It becomes #3 on keypad instead of #4, because the dictionary does not function in any of the books I have dedrm'd, or with converted pdf's, and no longer appears as option #1 in settings. The jetBook doesn't allow a random lookup of a word either, unlike the Kindle.