Well, as sammykrupa said, the display is easily the most fragile part of the Reader, but it seems to be more robust than the iLiad's screen. That's probably mostly because it's a smaller screen. I don't feel all that nervous about it, myself (and yes, I
have accidentally dropped mine a time or two
)
Let's see, positives and drawbacks ... well most of these are going to be pretty subjective, so you'll have to decide for yourself if you like the aspects or not.
The Reader is great for displaying RTF files (but it won't show embedded pix), and it works very nicely with BBeB (Sony's format) files. It will display PDF files, but if they're originally A4 (letter) sized they'll almost certainly be too small to read on the 6" screen. PDF files that are sized to the Reader's screen work well, though depending on who you ask the font may seem a bit "washed out." It doesn't do encrypted PDFs at
all. And there are a number of homebrew apps around the forum to aid you with adjusting A4 files to something that displays better on the Reader.
The power usage is very small, I charge mine about every 2 weeks, but that's because I've gotten to where it bothers me if the battery meter doesn't show completely
full -- you can usually get a whole month without
having to recharge.
The page turn buttons are placed so they're fairly easy to reach left-handed, but not right-handed -- I'd suggest you find a demo device to check this on since everybody's hands are different.
Jumping around within a book is a bit cumbersome, but actually reading one, page by page, front to back, is what the Reader is optimized to do, so it's exceedingly simple and straightforward. The bookmark feature is very nice and easy to use.
Most of the drawbacks, in my opinion, are wrapped up in the PC software, but we're expecting an update to this sometime soon, so it may (ought to) improve with that. Further, you don't really have to use the ConnSoft if you don't want to. There are a growing number of tools to get around even using it, and you can always just put your files directly on an SD Card/Memory Stick and access them that way if you prefer.
Hmmm. Well those are the points off the top my my head, I'm sure others have more to add though.
I really love mine, I pretty much take it everywhere, unless it's somewhere I'm
sure I won't have time to read.
