Waiting/wishlist for the 3rd Generation

[MarkRPenn]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

interesting.. although both your assumptions seem to presuppose either fairly affluent people being interested (engineers), or companies realizing the potential (and buying it for their employees), which would depend on their seeing that there are obvious advantages to using the iLiad compared to 'normal' paper for notating..

Well they're not assumptions; they're based on years of observation of what real people do in the real world. And yes, of course we're talking about selling to people who can afford it, though the more that are sold the more the cost comes down and the more that sell and........

If you've ever tried to manage a bundle of papers, or a laptop (or even a notebook bigger than A6) on a windy building site roof, the benefits over paper become obvious!

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I hadn't yet thought of taking something like lecture notes on this thing yet, but i suppose it would work very well (and better the more people start using it, as sharing the notes would quickly become easier)..
However, the thing isn't being marketed (here) like that at all (yet?), probably because of the price.. which is a real shame.

And so we come full circle - that's exactly my point! It's not being marketed or developed for those uses anywhere, but it should be!!!!!!!!!!! That (paper replacement), if properly developed, is what the hardware is crying out to be used for!!

Mark

[axel77]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

the scanned PDFs are nice, but 20-100mb per book with no text recognition is pretty useless)..

For me its hardly useless. First a scanned 350 page book is aprox. 15 MB not 100 with pretty good quality. If its more you are doing something wrong in scanning/compressing (see the content forum, posted recently the script I'm using).

I have now a 1GB MMC Card, that is 66 Books per 15$ card. Hardly useless. I just ordered a 8GB CF card for 60$. It will fit 500 scanned books, or what I'm aiming more for 1 complete Wikipedia and 250 scanned books.

[axel77]

Originally Posted by MarkRPenn

And so we come full circle - that's exactly my point! It's not being marketed or developed for those uses anywhere, but it should be!!!!!!!!!!! That (paper replacement), if properly developed, is what the hardware is crying out to be used for!!

Is the Iliad marketed at all? (I only knew of it, because I was actually looking for it, and well once have seen a news report long ago for e-ink, and was looking if devices for it are available already.)

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by axel77

For me its hardly useless. First a scanned 350 page book is aprox. 15 MB not 100 with pretty good quality. If its more you are doing something wrong in scanning/compressing (see the content forum, posted recently the script I'm using).

I have now a 1GB MMC Card, that is 66 Books per 15$ card. Hardly useless. I just ordered a 8GB CF card for 60$. It will fit 500 scanned books, or what I'm aiming more for 1 complete Wikipedia and 250 scanned books.

well, yes.. i'm not so much talking about the memory requirements (that's a secondary issue imo, although scrolling through scanned (non-ocr) pdfs in adobe takes lots and lots of CPU) as i am talking about the fact that you can't search for words/word groups in such a document. also (this is mostly relevant to students wanting to read their books on the thing, i imagine, as you can probably do it 'yourself' in most decent-sized companies) actually scanning the books isn't something you can do easily.

[MarkRPenn]

Originally Posted by axel77

Is the Iliad marketed at all? (I only knew of it, because I was actually looking for it, and well once have seen a news report long ago for e-ink, and was looking if devices for it are available already.)

I think you're right - it's not. I guess I meant "developed for" more than "marketed", but of course there's no point in developing something fantastic if you're then not going to tell anyone about it!

You prompted a little experiment:

1) Google "E-book Reader", and the iRex' adword appears at the top. That's as it should be, and is our "control" - it shows that iRex do know about adwords!.

2) Google "paper replacement", and there's no mention of e-paper within a million miles. Bad iRex et al, bad.

3) Google "electronic notebook" or "electronic notepad", and again there's no mention. That's unforgivable (if I were the iRex CEO I'd be firing people right now), but confirms my belief that iRex don't have a clue what they have here.

4) Google "e-paper notepad" and you get articles/blogs talking about the iLiad, but no iRex marketing or hits on their own site. This is the worst result of all - there are people talking about the notepad use of the product, yet they don't want to know!!!!!

So the bottom line is that if all I know is that I want an alternative to paper, I won't be offered an iLiad. That's ridiculous.

Mark

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by MarkRPenn

I think you're right - it's not. I guess I meant "developed for" more than "marketed", but of course there's no point in developing something fantastic if you're then not going to tell anyone about it!

You prompted a little experiment:

1) Google "E-book Reader", and the iRex' adword appears at the top. That's as it should be, and is our "control" - it shows that iRex do know about adwords!.

2) Google "paper replacement", and there's no mention of e-paper within a million miles. Bad iRex et al, bad.

3) Google "electronic notebook" or "electronic notepad", and again there's no mention. That's unforgivable (if I were the iRex CEO I'd be firing people right now), but confirms my belief that iRex don't have a clue what they have here.

4) Google "e-paper notepad" and you get articles/blogs talking about the iLiad, but no iRex marketing or hits on their own site. This is the worst result of all - there are people talking about the notepad use of the product, yet they don't want to know!!!!!

So the bottom line is that if all I know is that I want an alternative to paper, I won't be offered an iLiad. That's ridiculous.

Mark

one wonders, as one is new here, if iRex employees/marketing folks with any clout read this forum.

[axel77]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

well, yes.. i'm not so much talking about the memory requirements (that's a secondary issue imo, although scrolling through scanned (non-ocr) pdfs in adobe takes lots and lots of CPU) as i am talking about the fact that you can't search for words/word groups in such a document.

Well actually you *DID* talk about memory requirements (*rollseyes* ) But yes, you can't search and thats not ideal, but its not something you gain when you again use paper instead There are more reasons to read on an e-paper device than just being able to do text searches.

also (this is mostly relevant to students wanting to read their books on the thing, i imagine, as you can probably do it 'yourself' in most decent-sized companies) actually scanning the books isn't something you can do easily.

Scanners are available at the university. I checked the university of vienna, the central copyservice has some devices that can take an USB-Stick, and you get the data on the stick instead of a printout (unfortunally they still charge as you would copy it on paper). Some 150$ Canon scanner are available free to use in the IT-center. The technical university has a "book-eye", a new book scanner available for students, you open the book under its eye and it "scans" 2 sides with a click (its actually a high-definition camera like all the expensive dedicated book scanners today use).They write on the homepage they bought it, because students damage the books using a standard photocopier. I will check the quality of this when I have time gonig there. Otherwise a 100$ cannon scanner will do the job. you need 300 dpi Black/white to get decent results on the iliad screen, thats what cheap scanners can do already. Anything more is just waste of scanning time, disk space.

I heared the library of the university of paderborn have a scan-on-demand-service, you send them the title and the chapter, they send you the PDF. However available only for lecturers . However I'd even pay something for such a service, but it needs to be less than buying the book would cost. The central national library of austria also sends you PDFs on requests, but you also have to pay them, haven't yet checked how much they want..

But you see I'm still inquireing about these things. Right now I scan my books with a 250$ Canon Scanner. A 300 pages book aprox. takes a day to do it, but I can read while I'm doing it...

[DonRobodroid]

Well, I think the next gen iLiad should focus more on hardware reliability/ruggedness/connector usability than on features - size is simply perfect for my needs, although more resolution would be a NTH (as color would be).

But a definite MUST are MANY enhancements in the software department. There's so many little annoyances just about everywhere, iRex REALLY should invest their money there instead of into new hardware fancies.

The iLiad is the most valuable (and expensive) reader device on the market at the moment, let's hope iRex will do the right thing to fend off the next gens of the competition.

Cheers,
- Don [:-], who despite the afore mentioned annoyances is already very happy with his iLiad. Just LOOK at the other readers...

[cen]

Similar to DonRobodroid, I'd like to see more hardware updates between v2 and v3 than there were with v1 to v2.

1) A realistically portable charging / networking (wired) solution. preferably USB based. I already take USB cables with me when I travel. I'd rather not have to take the bulky charging solution the iRex currently has with me, it takes up valuable space.

2) more page turn options. While reading on the iLiad while in the left hand is fine, if I want to hold the device in my right, reading becomes a two handed affair. You should be able to turn the page regardless of what hand you hold it in. It's be nice to have options on both the left and right side of the screen (as with the kindle, just not as but ) or like the librie and its left side and middle bottom.

3) A smaller sized iLiad (while keeping the 8" version). I like the size of the gen1 and 2 and suit pretty much all the tasks I use it for, at times I miss having a smaller device (like my librie). And wouldnt be adverse to buying two sizes.

4) A dock. I know this was on the cards before and I believe the idea was shelved for some reason or other. For stability it could dock flat or on its side rather than upright.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by axel77

Well actually you *DID* talk about memory requirements (*rollseyes* ) But yes, you can't search and thats not ideal, but its not something you gain when you again use paper instead There are more reasons to read on an e-paper device than just being able to do text searches.

But you see I'm still inquireing about these things. Right now I scan my books with a 250$ Canon Scanner. A 300 pages book aprox. takes a day to do it, but I can read while I'm doing it...

well, yeah.. but i was thinking mostly of the fact that 40-60mb un-OCR'ed PDFs take a bit longer to render, thus decreasing battery life.

anyway, what i really wanted to say: Apparently about 900 iLiads have been sold in the past month in combination with the newspaper subscription (NRC Handelsblad, about 250k subscribers)

[Redfox]

1. I second (fourth? fifth? I lost count!) better digitizer accuracy. I'm a writer, and I use the PDF annotation function when editing/proofreading/critiquing manuscripts, just as I would with a paper copy - so much easier on the eye that using a computer! However that requires accuracy, and the 2nd gen device doesn't quite cut it.

2. Better file management. The '6 items per page' Contentlister sucks as an interface, making a slow device even slower. C'mon guys, let's have a decent graphical file manager, it's not exactly rocket science!

3. Separate charger and sync pod. I can appreciate that fitting an RJ45 in a device that thin just isn't going to happen, but with WiFi built in, you are much more likely to need a charger than a connection cable.

Re issues that have been brought up:

I work in academia and have already bumped into one person on campus who also owns one - we independently pulled out our iLiads whilst sitting next to one another on the bus back into town, did a double-take and went "Snap!"

Bad marketing is sadly the death of all too many great new things. Only last autumn the Palm Foleo was killed before it even debuted! Admittedly it wasn't helped by its high price, but it was basically a 10" clamshell PDA with full keyboard, running Linux, with WiFi, Firefox and Office compatibility, ideal for students, etc, etc. So what did Palm do? Market it purely as a smartphone accessory for executives, and get laughed off the Web by the PDA community...

[nekokami]

Note-taking really should be the iLiad's "claim to fame" and primary selling point, and iRex should be putting a lot of emphasis on note-taking, annotating, and note management software. But since this started as a discussion about improvements to 3d generation hardware, I think it's also fair to say that fixing the power management is critical. Having to wait 45 seconds for the unit to power up before you can jot a note is a product killer. I was astonished when iRex admitted that they wouldn't be able to add a suspend mode to fix this in software, due to a design flaw. There are a lot of ways in which they need to improve the software, but this is the big improvement that needs to occur with the hardware.