A week ago, I took the plunge and ordered my Bebook Neo from mybebook.com. I'd spent months reading this forum and analysing reviews, and decided that the Neo, in spite of its problematic battery life, was the device for me.
First things first, I really have to praise the delivery service that mybebook.com is using. My Neo was shipped on Wednesday, and on Thursday, there was a delivery notice in my mailbox! I live in a somewhat obscure where-the-hell-is-that country of Slovenia, so I'm not used to such prompt deliveries at all.
Incidentally, my electronicreading.eu cover that was supposedly shipped on Monday hasn't arrived yet...
My first impression was "oooh, it's an overgrown iPod!" However, the Neo felt much sturdier than an iPod, and pleasantly rough in my hands. I also liked the metal back. When it arrived, it was partially charged, and had the 1.3something firmware installed. I turned it on immediately and admired the screen. I liked the sharpness, and the fact that the background was light grey rather than white didn't bother me. I actually prefer it to pure white. I am a programmer by profession, I spend most of my day staring at computer screens, and usually set my application backgrounds to light grey rather than white, since my eyes seem to prefer it.
The most important thing that I was itching to try out was, of course, the sunlight issue. So I charged my Neo, loaded up some of my favourites from Project Gutenberg, and settled in the bright spring sun to enjoy. I read in the sun for about half an hour, turning pages, experimenting with full refresh on and off, and there was no change whatsoever in the colour of the e-ink. There was also no glare from the screen, which my eyes appreciated. If anything, the display was more readable in brighter light.
I had no trouble with purchased DRMed ePubs either, when I transferred them from my computer via USB. Then I decided to test the WiFi. Here, I encountered my first disappointment. My home WiFi network uses WPA, and is hidden. My Neo did find it, even if it could not show its name, but when I entered my password, it got stuck on "Connecting..." and never did get connected. Just for a test, I set my network to not hidden, and got connected immediately. This is not acceptable for me as I prefer to keep the network hidden for security reasons, so I guess I won't be using WiFi for the moment. I will, however, be submitting a request for the next firmware.
After my experiments with WiFi, I charged my Neo up and set to reading. Over the weekend, I was reading about 3 hours a day with Neo in standby if I was only going to leave it for a couple of minutes, and off when I went out and overnight. The battery is now down to three bars from the original five. I can live with that, although I would of course have been happier with a longer battery life.
What would have been very nice to have, however, would be not to have to reopen the book I was reading before I shut the Neo off. The "Recent documents" list seems to have a quirk, namely, all my "Last accessed" times are 00:00:00 - midnight, no matter when I actually opened the book. So when I was opening a lot of books in the beginning to see how they looked, "Last access time" was no help in finding my book since all the books had the same access time: 2010-05-22 00:00:00. I had to locate it manually on the fourth page. After that, I cleared the "Recent documents" list.
This is not a dealbreaker, but merely an annoyance. I know how quickly bugs can creep in, and I hope that this one, if it is a bug, gets resolved soon.
I have no complaints about the touchscreen, the sketch function is a nice addition and I haven't tested out the annotations yet. All in all, I am happy with my purchase because it performs its function - reading - extremely well. The screen is everything I hoped it would be and the WiFi problem will hopefully get resolved. I'm now eagerly awaiting the cover because I'm much too paranoid to take my Neo anywhere unprotected.