went ahead and got a 505

[sigma8]

Last week I posted a thread here asking for some brainstorming help, and while perhaps at that point I was already mostly decided, I appreciated the replies to that thread, and it did help me cement my decision.

More significantly, it was other, pre-existing threads and information on this website and its forums that really helped me research the decision. I would have scarcely known anything about the different eBook formats or the various softwares (like Caliber!) if I hadn't stumbled into here. So, I would like to give a big "thanks!" to a lot of people who unknowingly helped me make up my mind.

Now that I have it, I'm pretty happy. I'm ever-so-slightly perturbed by a small imperfection in the screen. The screen itself has a bit of a grainy texture, with the grains being smaller than pixels, and grey. It looks like a newspaper texture, which I think is part of what makes the device's screen so nice-looking.

However, there is a single, super-tiny grain on there which is darker (maybe even darker than the "ink"), and also reflects differently (it reflects only glare (white) from certain angles--differently from the surrounding screen)...making me think it's an imperfection in the screen. It's hard to notice unless you look for it. I didn't notice it for the first day of ownership--and that was including a thorough once-over of the screen. It wasn't until I was more familiar with the natural and expected imperfections of the screen, that I realized this little spec was different.

I'm inclined to do nothing about it. God knows I've played the "I need a perfect device" game before and more often than not, it turns into an exploration of how many different ways a product can be imperfect. That said, I'm curious if anyone has noticed anything about their screens?

As for content, I'm currently packing many free classics and several newsfeeds from various websites--all having been loaded on the device with Caliber. I haven't even installed the Sony software (which I'd need to do in a Windows Virtual Machine anyway, since my main machine is a mac), and probably never will until I need it to perform a firmware update.

I've only bought one commercial book so far--a programming book from O'Reilly (oreilly.com), and it's an adventure figuring out how to use this device with this kind of book, but I'm looking forward to figuring it out--because I hate buying computer books in print (they become obsolete almost as fast as computer hardware) and I don't like reading them as PDF's (reading a book format on the monitor is harder, somehow...can't explain it--oddly, I have no issues reading HTML pages that know they are HTML pages and aren't formatted like books).

thanks again to everyone!