Quote:
Originally Posted by jboardman
My overarching question about the Iliad 2nd edition and/or the Iliad Book Reader is this: will the company continue to support and upgrade the firmware and software for this device? Are there enough Iliad users who can program to maintain the device competitive with the newer devices being released? I love the size of the Iliad, but I worry that I will not be able to read as much on it as I can on my Kindle 1.
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As a new iLiad owner I struggled with this very question. I also added in the idea that if I waited til the end of the year I'd find a less expensive and better produced product. This gathered from the information I found searching this board.
There is always advancement in any market for electronic devices. Think about your first MP3 player or your first computer. These things came and went. Some of them where hung on to some of them went away. I remember my C-64. Noone has one of those anymore. Very few people would have an Archos Jukebox 20 either.
What I came up with is as follows- I can live with the power issue. I'll simply treat it like my cell phone and charge it as I sleep
- It does what it promises out of the box. I can read books on it and it has some wifi.
- The development commuity has been at work on the issues.
- The final thing that made me go with it was the iLiad OS bundles all the popular 3rd party software together.
With those things in place I figured it was worth the risk. I really want to have note taking and annoting pdfs in my book reader. This is my first reader and I think I made the right choice.
My Archos was not an Ipod but I had differnt wants and needs. That too was the right choice for me right up until I replaced it. The device I replaced it with is still not an Ipod but a newer model from the same small company. I think if you take a risk on a small company sometimes you get surpised with what you get out of it.
My advice is if this fits with your wants and needs it should be ok. After all in a year or 2 you will be replacing it anyway for something else because there is always advancement.
The only thing that truly saddens me about iRex is the lack of support from the company for the users base. Simply merging the advancements into the production code base will actually be able to supply upgrades to the other users via iDs. But that's for another soap box.