Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia
I went to the Borders in Central Cardiff today and played with the demonstration Elonex Ebook Reader for a little while.
The screen is clear and very legible. However the case is made of plastic and seems much more flimsy than my sturdy Sony 505. It comes with a hundred books preloaded. I opened a Shakespeare poem and found that it displayed rather poorly: it didn't really look like verse at all. But this may just have been the result of a poor automatic conversion.
The device supports TXT, PDF, HTML and ePub.
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I agree - I had a play with the Elonex Ebook at a Borders, and this is what I thought:
1. Light and comfortable to hold, and the buttons are reasonably laid out. Seems plasticky though
2. Software is *dreadful*. Takes ages to start up, and the menu system is totally non-intuitive. It is very hard to navigate around the book list - at the end of the list you can't click 'down', you have to click 'right'. Why not just make both work??? Argh.
3. Worst of all, when you turn off the machine it forgets where you were.
4. Where's the bookmark button?
5. The preloaded books don't format correctly. Maybe proper ePub works better, but you would have thought they could have made the shop demos look good. Not a good sign.
6. There is significant ghosting on the screen - enough to be distracting. Much worse than the Sony PRS-505 I usually use.
7. It's £189! That is the same more or less as the Sony RRP. And you can get the Sony 505 on Play.com for 150 quid right now.
There is no reason to buy one of these things - stick with the Sony. The Elonex is way over-priced, presumably because they think that consumer ignorance in this product area will enable them to charge extra (it works on memory cards in camera shops). If the Elonex were about 50-80 quid it would be a good price point. But no way at nearly 200!