Its all a function of your needs and preferences:
Do you care that the Astak does TTS?
Do you care that it tries to read LIT files?
If yes, then the Pocket Pro is your toy.
Also, I have the older Hanlin v3 and stability is *not* its best suit. Not sure if the V5s are different but after a year of installing alternate firmware after alternate firmware, I just moved on to the PB360. Check the Astak and Hanlin forums for details on the current state of the firmware.
Conversely:
Do you care about end-user typographical controls? You choose font face and size, margins, chapter headings, and how practically every possible tag displays and even choose whether you want a status bar or not. (I don't; I want nothing but clean text with quarter inch margins all around. And I have that.) These overrides are all controlled globally, from inside the reader app, for DRM-free content, and via a less powerful but still useful userstyle css file for DRM'ed files. (This one is a recent hack--check the Pocketbook forum for details.)
Do you care that the PB360 Themes let you change the look of the Bookshelf *and* the features it offers? (I use the "Five" theme that displays the last nine opened bookss on the main page and only the five most used functions as Icons. It also adds an extra display mode for the bookshelf that lets you browse your folder structure 29 titles per page. I know of about two dozen other themes. You can also build your own. not trivial but not hard, either.)
Do you care that you can do dictionary look-up from multiple dictionaries from inside the ebook you're reading? They provide a tool that lets you create your own dictionaries if you choose to.
Do you care that you can do full page or partial page screen caps and paste them into an HTML file as a form of note taking?
Do you care that you can define the functions of every single button on the device to get it to work the way *you* want it to work? (I have mine configured so that I can control all the reading functions I care about with one finger, my thumb, with minimal effort. And I can hold it in position with either hand, stress-free, for hours.
Do you care that the hard cover it comes with clips to the rear? (Apparently some folks hadn't noticed that.
)
Do you care that you can choose which app opens DRM-free ePubs and PDFs by default and still choose an alternative manually on a book-by-book basis?
Do you care that (if you choose) you can assign a button to display a list of your last ten open books and you can switch to any of them on the fly from *inside* an open book? No need to quit one book and go to the bookshelf to open the other. It has its uses, I've found.
Do you care that the bookshelf has full file-managemennt features (copy, move, rename, delete, create folder, etc) and lets you choose whether to display file names or metadata?
Do you care that it comes with games and a calculator app and has several dozen other free games and apps you can install, from chess and checkers to a Bejeweled clone?
And (finally) do you care enough about enough of them to justify the cost?
Your call.
