early experiences

[axel77]

So now owning an Iliad for closely 2 weeks, I had today my first larger reading session in the train for a pdf I prepared a few days ago. One thing I noticed is the screen be far more reflective than a real paper. I always looked into the head lights of the train when looking into the iliad, which after time did actually give a bit headache syndrom. Also now in office, when I turn on the headlight, it reflects directly in the screen. I've seen someone mentioning putting some anti-reflection foil on his/her screen. So questions regarding this, does it work? how is it done? is it worth it?

This term I started taking my lecture notes on the Iliad, this works actually quite well, but the stylus is too small. Human writing tool development is over 2000 years old, and I guess the size a pencil today has, is the result of lots of experiences with the human hand. I don't know why today we just disregard this old knowledge and think a larger toothpick size stick will just work as well... Well I ordered already a WACOM pen, I am very nosy already how this will work. But amazon didn't yet send me a shipment affirmation, seems to take a lot longer than ordering the whole iliad from germany which went through in 7 days with prepay. Calibration works fine enough for note taking, only on the right boarder it is quite off... The reason why I'd prefer an e-Ink device on real paper here, is that I'm very chaotic. I'd always lose my papers sooner or later, so some digital guidance could be of real help, to archive knowledge and ideas. However also here the iLiad is not the strongest point, the papers are all called "squares 1082943", I can tag them, but not really rename them as far I discovered. really a bookkeeping/sorting software for notes is hardly present...

During boring episodes of lectures I tried a bit sketching on the iliad, this gives surprisingly nice results (especially compared to try to do anything with a mouse), only downside I see is that as pencil sketcher one is used to, and uses it a lot, that a pencil gives completly different results depending on the angle it is hold. I heared other WACOM devices can do it. But okay, thats not what the iliad was build for

The other thing is, like what I've seen here so many other iliad users, I'm using the ILiad for scientific texts. Compared to entertainment text it is important to *work* with the text, thats where the stylus comes into play, and thats why iLiad was the only choice for me. Highlighting text would be cool feature, but well without yellow its hardly possible, is it? But okay I got used to underlining already also on paper, because well I hardly can manage to keep a ballpoint with me, the highlighter get lost too fast eitherway. But when underlining I am always used to not to hold the pen like normal writing, but to turn the paper (or the iliad) in a way, so the resulting line is a natural wave with the hand from body away, so you can make quite straight lines. And unfortunally calibration totally fails here, and the line often enough strikes through text, instead of underlining it.

All in all, I'm still enthusiastic about it, and gladly show the device anybody (rub it under his face) that runs my way studends, co-workers, teachers. But without some healthy splasher of good faith that this is going to be something very cool some day, one has still a hard time... I'd buy 1000 devices to support this technology if I could, but 1 every 4 years maybe actually hits my real budget. But as customer I always will prefer open devices, as I also think its our responsibilty to take care we don't sink under this whole digital right managment junk, and "don't touch me", devices. IMHO it had a reason why the IBM PC was the winner of the computer computition in the 90ies, because it was the device people could *play* with most.

[axel77]

Okay, user report now some weeks later. I got myself fullscreen iPdf installed, and actually used the device regulary.

After I got used to what the iLiad can't do well, I now see much better what it *can* do well. Everytime I take into my hands I'm again and again astonished of the display quality. I got myself the WACOM pen, so using it as Notepad is much more fun now than with the stylus toothpick. The train with over-head lights turned out to be actually the most terrible reading condition of all. Everywhere else I have no problem positioning myself of my lights in a way they don't reflect in the screen. I got now a thick paper book to read (>600 pages), and I'm luckily enough to have got PDFs from it! So now I gladly take the iLiad everytime with me to continue reading that, since alone this book weigths at least 3 or 4 times as much as the iLiad .

Also I like the attention I get in university classes with the device, since everyone wants to hold it once

[junkyardwillie]

The one thing that irked me about the sony reader was that I couldnt take notes on it (especially when e"paper" begs to be written on). I heard there is a delay in recognition which I guess would make it hard to take real notes in but I'd like to have the option to mess around with it. I'm still waiting for mine to come in and I have a bunch of finance books that I want to read on it instead of having to kill 1000 trees to print them all out (not too mention having to figure out where to store all of them). I'm hoping it lives up to my expectations, which are pretty low mainly just being able to read PDFs better than the sony reader 500 and get a little Suduko in, I pretty much just bought it because there aren't any other tech devices that are worth buying (Still waiting on a 32gb iphone with some 3g speed and some Microsoft apps in it). Until then the Iliad will be getting all of my love.