Unboxing iRex 800 and first impressions

[catharsis]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Initial opening was extremely slow for me as well. I'd estimate about 20 seconds.

thanks a lot for the photos. maybe because it has vector graphics it takes so long. i printed the document myself from work using adobe acrobat, so i suppose i didn't use any weird settings.

[professzore]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

As described above: iRex 800 DOES HAVE folder support.

I love folders. :-) Another point for DR800.

BTW I put some personal / visitor messages on your Profile site. If you have some free time, please, make another test round.

Thanks!

[pauli]

Mgmueller and Dereader... any update on battery life yet? You've been using your DR800's for almost a week now.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Content, distribution, and capability.

It will be able to do everything all the other readers are trying to do but cannot because of the limitations of e-ink refresh rates and lack of color. You make all the correct points about backlighting, etc., but while all those things sound great on paper (har!), none of those reasons are going to matter in the real marketplace. It's analogous to the whole ePub format standard debacle of the last few years. The vast majority of people accept a ridiculously infantile typesetting model for their multi-hundred dollar devices: a model that renders text on that nice, pretty screen in a way that would make professional typesetters run screaming for the hills, simply because the vast majority of people (even bibliophiles such as populate boards like this, surprisingly enough) obviously don't give a flying rat's ass about good typesetting. Likewise, LCD vs. e-Ink isn't going to mean anything realistic to most people.

What will mean something to everyone who is going to buy one of these things over a dedicated e-Ink reader is that

1. it is made by Apple and will have the "cool" factor
2. it will have artistically beautiful construction design that will make everything else on the ereader market look like something developed by a sloven gang of junior-high-school kids in a single afternoon
3. it will be able to surf the complete Internet, certainly via WiFi, and possibly through 3G as well
4. it will be a gaming platform, a movie player, a music player, a photo viewer, and possibly give access to productivity tools like iWork as well
5. because it will probably have the same audio jack that will accept a combo mic/earphone set, you'll be able to install the Skype applet and use the damn thing to make phone calls for practically free - try doing that with your Kindle!
6. and lastly, and most importantly to the e-reader market: Apple is going to line up distribution deals directly with the publishers, which will simply mean that within the next couple of years, Apple will vault in one giant leap to being the largest single distributor of ebooks on the market, because every book publisher on the planet is going to be motivated to do a deal with Apple to get their books into the iTunes distribution chain in a way that Amazon with the Kindle just can't match. Itunes will be a single-point distributor of just about every kind of electronic media imaginable, and the tablet will be able to use every one of them, not just the books. You can't beat that kind of marketing potential. It's just going to swamp the ebook market completely.

Now, you take your average consumer and give him the choice of buying this tablet or buying a severely limited capability black and white device that can basically only present text to him, and which device do you think he's going to buy? Given the economy the way it is, how many people do you really think are going to shell out hundreds of dollars for an electronic book plus another wad of hundreds of dollars for a tablet? I'm guessing not very many people have that kind of disposable cash lying around, so if they're in the market for a reader, they're only going to buy one device, and any half-wit could predict what the vast majority of Joe Consumers are going to pick given the choice.

The Apple tablet is going to effectively end the business model of all the niche players in this field: Plastic Logic and Skiff, if they are successful at marketing their devices to business professionals, may find a tiny little corner of the market to sell several thousand units each, but not much more than that. The other little players in the ereader field such as B&N, iRex, etc., are just going to quietly vanish within a couple of years. Sony and Amazon might be able to still make their product sell just because of name recognition, but only if their prices are low enough - a $400 ereader is never going to sell next to Apple's tablet, and I'm not even sure Sony's readers will be able to survive, because in the end, the entire question of who is going to win this market war is not going to be who has e-Ink versus who has LCD: it's all going to come down to dominance of the media content. iTunes will have an effective lock on that within just a few years, thus Apple wins. It's as simple as that. All the minor-niche people who yammer on about e-ink versus LCD are picking the wrong battle: none of that matters, because most people simply aren't going to care - what they will care about is "cool", brand, content availability, and functionality. Nothing out there in the e-ink market will be able to touch Apple on any of these fronts, thus the battle is already lost. I predict that for the vast majority of typical consumers, this tablet device is going to make even having a laptop a bit superfluous, especially if it can do basic word processing through iWork.

Anyway, I know most people reading this are going to scream and slaver and gnash their teeth about how you'd have to pry their e-ink reader out of their cold, dead hands and yadda, yadda, yadda. Meaningless noise, basically. If this product launch were being done by Microsoft, I'd be a little more cautious about saying the war is lost. But this is Apple and the corporate business leadership genius behind it is Jobs. Lock, stock, and barrel.

Some specs of Apple's iPad:
Weight: 1.5 pounds (.68 kg) Wi-Fi model; 1.6 pounds (.73 kg) Wi-Fi + 3G model
Okay for surfing the web on your couch. But reading an eBook for, let's say, 6 hours at once?
Battery and Power: Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music
And we all know, those 10 hours are under "ideal" conditions. Lots of members have considered iRex Iliad's 12+ hours ridiculously low. Certainly not for traveling. On my eInk devices, I easily can do an entire week without re-charging.

Don't get me wrong: I'll buy it. But only as my surfing station on the couch. And as a replacement for my UMPC. But not as a successor for Kindle, Sony or iRex. And let's see about the reactions of those members who bashed against Sony 700's glare...

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by pauli

Mgmueller and Dereader... any update on battery life yet? You've been using your DR800's for almost a week now.

About 15 hours of usage, battery down 40%.

[pilotbob]

Well, lets get down to reality here now the Job's is off the stage. They didn't invent a new class of device as Jobs said. The iPad is a MID, plain and simple. However, size, weight, battery life, screen quality on the iPad does seem to be better than anything out there I was aware of, Including Archos, Nokias, etc.

Also, quality/feature to price ratio seems very high to me. Although it is very hard to compare a CPU that is only in one device to the other ones out there.

BOb

[professzore]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

And let's see about the reactions of those members who bashed against Sony 700's glare...

Later this week we'll make a comparison test under "lab environment" for display quality and glare of several e-reader devices, both e-ink and tft.
I'll post the results here on Mobilereader too. Unfortunately, without any iRex.

Today I made a deeper in-store test of sony PRS-600. Lot of glare, acceptable "quality" contrast and fascinating grayscale rendering process.

[Dulin's Books]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Did you see the recent post from iRex about the source code being released for the DR800? There's a comment from one of their developers that makes it sound like folder support is fairly simple to re-enable yourself, if you want to.

Having the option to do that should make a lot of people happier.

thanks for that

glad to see the folder support. now for note taking....

[The Straven]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Did you see the recent post from iRex about the source code being released for the DR800? There's a comment from one of their developers that makes it sound like folder support is fairly simple to re-enable yourself, if you want to.

Having the option to do that should make a lot of people happier.

It does indeed make me a lot happier. DeReader or mgmueller, your photos show that the folder navigation is titled "SD Card - by title", but I'm guessing that's not accurate; does the view show the full filename?

*sigh* ... Now if only IRex will implement PDF zoom and annotations ... *much longer sigh*

- James

P.S. You do a lot of legwork, Shaggy. Thanks.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Well, lets get down to reality here now the Job's is off the stage. They didn't invent a new class of device as Jobs said. The iPad is a MID, plain and simple. However, size, weight, battery life, screen quality on the iPad does seem to be better than anything out there I was aware of, Including Archos, Nokias, etc.

Also, quality/feature to price ratio seems very high to me. Although it is very hard to compare a CPU that is only in one device to the other ones out there.

BOb

Unfortunately it is not even an MID. This is just a giant PDA. MIDs are fully functional computers.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Okay for surfing the web on your couch. But reading an eBook for, let's say, 6 hours at once?

...

Don't get me wrong: I'll buy it. But only as my surfing station on the couch. And as a replacement for my UMPC. But not as a successor for Kindle, Sony or iRex. And let's see about the reactions of those members who bashed against Sony 700's glare...

And therein lies the crux of the matter. You're going to buy it. Good God Almighty, at $499 my dog is going to buy it. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but the point is that most people who like to just surf around the web and whatnot and don't really need a full-blown laptop are going to want this sort of device. It's perfect for that kind of computing. Talking about people buying this device solely to read books is totally missing the point: a vast number of people are going to purchase vast numbers of this thing for vast amounts of reasons. The reasons don't matter at all; they're completely irrelevant. The point is that vast numbers of people are going to buy this thing, and that is what is going to kill the e-ink reader market. Because everyone who buys it, regardless of why they bought it, will be able to read books on it in a way that they couldn't with their iPhones or Palms or Blackberries, and for 98% of those people, that will be good enough. Of the huge numbers of Joe Consumers out there, how many of them will drop $500 to $700 on an iPad and then drop another $300 to $600 on an e-ink based e-reader? Any moron can tell you that very, very few people are going to do that. And that's your problem right there. There won't be enough fanatics buying $400 e-ink readers in addition to the iPad to make sales of e-ink readers robust enough to keep businesses like iRex viable.

Look at any ePub book on the market today. Even the best ePubs look horrible compared to a professionally typeset book. Yet you have many, many people reading ebooks today who have dropped hundreds of dollars on their ereaders and, astoundingly, are willing to accept extremely poor typesetting on their incredibly expensive devices. It's ironic in the extreme, but it proves the point: people are willing to accept anything that is "good enough," so long as it's convenient. For 98% of the market for the iPad, which absolutely will include 98% of anyone who is a gadget freak enough to want an e-reader in the first place, reading their books on a LCD with the brightness turned down will be good enough, and that simple fact of human psychology will completely destroy the e-ink e-reader market. There simply won't be enough fanatics who will be willing to lug both an iPad and an e-reader around when the iPad will be good enough, so sales of those expensive e-ink devices will plummet, meaning that you, even though you are in the minority who would be willing to have both kinds of devices, simply won't be able to find one on sale anywhere to buy.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

And therein lies the crux of the matter. You're going to buy it. Good God Almighty, at $499 my dog is going to buy it. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but the point is that most people who like to just surf around the web and whatnot and don't really need a full-blown laptop are going to want this sort of device. It's perfect for that kind of computing. Talking about people buying this device solely to read books is totally missing the point: a vast number of people are going to purchase vast numbers of this thing for vast amounts of reasons. The reasons don't matter at all; they're completely irrelevant. The point is that vast numbers of people are going to buy this thing, and that is what is going to kill the e-ink reader market. Because everyone who buys it, regardless of why they bought it, will be able to read books on it in a way that they couldn't with their iPhones or Palms or Blackberries, and for 98% of those people, that will be good enough. Of the huge numbers of Joe Consumers out there, how many of them will drop $500 to $900 on an iPad and then drop another $300 to $600 on an e-ink based e-reader? Any moron can tell you that very, very few people are going to do that. And that's your problem right there. There won't be enough fanatics buying $400 e-ink readers in addition to the iPad to make sales of e-ink readers robust enough to keep businesses like iRex viable.

Look at any ePub book on the market today. Even the best ePubs look horrible compared to a professionally typeset book. Yet you have many, many people reading ebooks today who have dropped hundreds of dollars on their ereaders and, astoundingly, are willing to accept extremely poor typesetting on their incredibly expensive devices. It's ironic in the extreme, but it proves the point: people are willing to accept anything that is "good enough," so long as it's convenient. For 98% of the market for the iPad, which absolutely will include 98% of anyone who is a gadget freak enough to want an e-reader in the first place, reading their books on a LCD with the brightness turned down will be good enough, and that simple fact of human psychology will completely destroy the e-ink e-reader market. There simply won't be enough fanatics who will be willing to lug both an iPad and an e-reader around when the iPad will be good enough, so sales of those expensive e-ink devices will plummet, meaning that you, even though you are in the minority who would be willing to have both kinds of devices, simply won't be able to find one on sale anywhere to buy.

I'm sorry, but if you read your posts carefully, you will see that the second paragraph is little more than a restatement of the first, and as such not a little redundant. I realise this information seems to affect you quite strongly, but I really don't get what all the fuss is about. People will buy what they want anyway. Keeping the market artificially devoid of competing devices seems a fairly strange solution to the problem of the 'smaller devices that can be used to read on comfortably' product group.
Personally, I find the notion that people will spend $500-900 on a device like this, plus 30$ monthly for 2 years to AT&T, just a little ridiculous. While netbooks have certainly become popular lately, they seem comparable in functionality (save the touchscreen), but they also start at a far lower price point than this iPad thing will, and those things aren't quite ubiquitous yet either.
The only thing I would like to reiterate towards iRex is that they should really work to add annotation support back in, as it's one of the best features of their other products, and the single feature that made me buy the iLiad.

You keep talking as though the world only contains a single type of customer, whereas if only 0.5% of the world's (internet) users are interested in a device like the DR800/1000/iLiad, you have a potential market of 5-35 million people.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by The Straven

It does indeed make me a lot happier. DeReader or mgmueller, your photos show that the folder navigation is titled "SD Card - by title", but I'm guessing that's not accurate; does the view show the full filename?

*sigh* ... Now if only IRex will implement PDF zoom and annotations ... *much longer sigh*

- James

P.S. You do a lot of legwork, Shaggy. Thanks.

On my pics you see cover view (thumbnails). In list view you'd see more details.
Instead of "sort by title" you can choose "sort by author" or "sort by date added" as well.
On my pics it's "sort by title". It doesn't show the filename, but the book title. You can change those metadata, i. e. via calibre, of course.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I'm sorry, but if you read your posts carefully, you will see that the second paragraph is little more than a restatement of the first, and as such not a little redundant.

Odd, I didn't recall this forum including a creative writing class. In any case, I warmly invite you to not read any post of mine if you find my writing style not to your liking. There, happy?

[ahawk]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

It's tricky and has room for improvement. 2 or 3 times, instead of switching it off, I accidentally did a reboot. This did reset my viewing setting ("by Date Added" instead of "by Title"). After some days I've got the feel for it now. But it's not really intuitive, you actually have to "train" it.
- Briefly sliding off (maybe 0.5 seconds) = standby.
- Switching off for maybe 5 seconds = reset.
- Switching off for maybe 3 seconds = turn off.

Hi
I just got my d800s
I tried this but still failed for the turn off
at 3s it just standby and longer it reset
sometimes the light turns blue and red, is there anything with it?
If I cannot turn off, do I have to remove the battery to change the dr.ini in SD card?

Thanks a lot.