First off, I don't have a dog in this hunt. I'm a Sony Reader owner, and I'm quite happy with my acquisition.
Frankly, I'd probably be fairly happy with the iLiad for my own purposes, too (except the battery life), but that doesn't make it all right to deliver less than is advertised, and still charge full price.
You see, the problem, JayK, is that a lot of folks purchased an iLiad expecting it to do more than it actually does,
not because they didn't research it beforehand, but because they took iRex's word on what the device would do eventually, which iRex has since admitted isn't physically possible, given the hardware choices they made. It's not that iRex said it
might do such and such, it's that iRex said it
would do particular things and it doesn't. Further, iRex repeatedly insisted that it
would do those things, in, as you say, time, and it has not come to pass.
In fact, the things you point to as laudable that they've done, have been largely a result of pressure from the MobileRead community.
It's entirely possible that iRex honestly believed they would be able to achieve what they were advertising (I for one, believe that they did so believe), but they simply haven't. Given that circumstance, I don't think that it's just a matter of a buyer denying his responsibility in an immature fashion, there's plenty of responsibility on the part of the seller. The default doesn't have to be deliberate to be a default, it just has to be a default.
Riocaz has been active here since May of last year, at the time, MobileRead was the best (almost only) source of information on these devices (still is, arguably), and we counted among our number someone who had his hands on an evaluation unit. It is very wise to wait for the comments of those who've had their hands on a unit, and to get all the information available before buying, however, generally speaking,
somebody has to buy the device
without any such comments, or there never
are any such comments.
I'm glad that you have a device that does what you want, that's a big goal of MobileRead, to get folks information so that they can get what they'll be happy with. But it's not always an option to know everything (or even most everything) before making a decision, and that's part of MobileRead too: to pass on the experiences of the brave souls who jump in first, so that others can know what the water is like.
If this were a situation of a device that did what it said it would but just not in the way the buyer expected it to, or not in a way that he liked or wanted it done, that would be one thing, and the "grown up" thing
would be to just accept that he should have looked more before leaping. But this is, instead, a situation where a device was specifically
advertised to do functions A through L and it only does B, D, and G through H, and some of those only sort of.
That's not a matter of not researching enough to know what to reasonably expect, it's a situation of a device being significantly different than what it was represented to be, and that's just not right, even if it wasn't deliberate, and even though some folks are happy with getting only a fraction of the features they paid for.
You know, the ironic thing is, the last time I saw Riocaz get upset (and a good deal more upset that time) it was in
defense of iRex and the iLiad.
