Got a chance to play with one yesterday

[murraypaul]

Drove up to the Borders in Oxford to have a try out of the iLiad. Frustratingly they now have it locked away in a display case with no stylus, so you are limited in what you can do.

Even knowing what to expect, I still had a moment where I thought it was a dummy unit, the screen looks so unlike any other electrical device. Contrast was good, resolution was excellent. It does look pretty much like reading a real book, I could see it appealing to a much wider audience than devices like the Palm with backlit LCD screens which really are a very different reading experience.

In terms of amount of text on the screen it seemed roughly like the width you would get with a hardback, and the height you would get with a paperback. Without the stylus I couldn't do any testing of the available font sizes to see how much you could get on at once, but the license which flashed up at one point of the demo they had running used pretty small fonts and was still very readable.

Physically the screen seemed good, a nice matt finish which didn't take fingerprints or smudges. Page turning was slower than I hoped, without the stylus I couldn't see how well the partial screen updates worked for notations.

I could have done with a few more buttons around the screen, it looked like when using it landscape it would be a bit fiddly to use the rocker switch to change pages, a set of page up/down buttons on the bottom right might be a good idea.