[Sylver]

I have Sony PRS 300, EZReader PocketPro, Astak Mentor, and Nook. And I mainly read Chinese. Of all these, Nook best suits my needs.

Two issues with PRS 300: 1) it does not natively support Chinese, so I need to embed Chinese fonts into PDF hence significantly increase the file size (double or triple a standard novel), and PRS 300 cannot be expanded by SD card; 2) Even if you can embed Chinese into the PDF, the title still cannot be recognized by the device, so you have to rename all the Chinese books to latin alphabets, such that 红楼梦 becomes "Dream of the Red Chamber" or "Hong Lou Meng", imagine you have 30 plus Chinese novel named that way, you cannot glance it quickly. Chinese hack on PRS 300 is not as easier as PRS505 or PRS600, as the internal memory is too small to load decent Chinese fonts. I do love the portability and the screen contrast of PRS 300. The other downside for PRS 300 is it takes forever to load an unformated .txt file (with normal Chinese novel lengths it's about 3mb) and takes forever to change the font size for a novel embedded in Chinese fonts.

The Astak Mentor has the same screen contrast as PRS300 which is very good, the e-ink rendering sometimes leaves more ghost effect than PRS 300, but it is 6", so gives you about 40% more real estate. However, though officially supports Chinese, it has the ugliest Chinese fonts I have ever seen, and you cannot load your own fonts. It also supports MP3 play back, but the earphone jack is not the standard 3.5mm. It does have nice folder structure wth huge icons showing the book coverart, however, the navigation is a little sluggish, and the page buttons sometimes do not respond as quickly and consistently as it should. It is probably the lightest 6" device but not as solid.

The EZReader PocketPro also is from Astak, PocketPro is 5" and they also have an EZReader 6" which they call basic (a new plus version is coming out soon, possibly end of July). Function wise, PocketPro is unbeatable, it loads books so fast, page turn is quick, supports Chinese natively, the built-in Chinese font is good enough, but you can add whatever Chinese fonts you want to the SD card, it has standard 3.5mm earphone jack for mp3 playback, it has text-to-speech features for both English and Chinese (the English TTS is kinda poor, the Chinese TTS is actually very good IMO). It has user replaceable battery, it comes with a free case and a 2gb SD card, it reads almost all file formats you will ever need including djvu, chm and other formats you won't usually need for a book reader (except proprietary formats from Amazon and B&N), it has customizeable logon and logoff screen (kinda like screensavers on kindle and the nook), it can rotate horizontally for files to read and can zoom in scanned PDFs. Above all, it is very very fast - the fastest among all ereaders I have seen. Everything is sooooo good except for one thing and that one thing I consider very critical: the screen contrast. Not only the contrast is not as sharp as the Sony or the Astak Mentor (the font is not dark enough and the background not white enough), but both the foreground and the background also have some greenish yellowish tint that I found annoying and unbearable for long time reading. If the screen can be fixed, I would say it is the best basic reader (without connection though which I dont mind at all) out there, but too bad, it's a shame to see such a nicely engineered (both processor wise and software wise) device comes with such an inferior screen.

Then finally the nook that I am very happy with. You must have read a lot about its specs, I think the wifi only version for $150 has very good value. For Chinese reading purpose, it is not as powerful and flexible of the EZReader PocketPro, it does not have text-to-speech and it does not support .txt file like PocketPro. But value wise, it is very good. The screen contrast is the best of all ereaders I have seen (beats Kindle or other and beats all touch screen Sony's, and is even a little better than the non-touch Sony PRS 300), also it is 6" reader, the design is elegant and the build solid. File management is easy (hook USB and just copy over the file to device), and it goes without saying that it supports PDF's and epub's embedded in Chinese fonts, and if you don't want to embed Chinese fonts into PDF or epub (to keep small file size), all you need to do is to convert .txt file to epub using Calibre with a customized style sheets (to use the built in android unicode fonts which natively supports Chinese). The android unicode fonts come with the nook look very good in Chinese novels (way better than the Astak mentor font which supports Chinese natively) and it supports both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese characters elegantly - you won't see an line starts with an ":" or an "," sign; For firmware v1.3, the Chinese text in epub or PDF looks fine but somehow, some titles do not show properly on the library page, with firmware v1.4 update, all my titles now show properly on the library page. Let me make it clear, the support of Chinese does not require you softroot the nook, but if you opt to softroot the nook, obviously with the android system unleashed, it can be a very powerful device, with a 3G nook softrooted, even if you go to China, you can still use a local prepaid SIM card and browse the web on the nook, I have yet to see another e-reader that can achieve the same.