minime28

Arrived today with my other books loot from Amazon.

The JBL is my first ebook reader, initial impressions are good.

- Roughly the size of a paper back, much thinner of course. Handy, the portruding battery compartment serving as a grip

- The text show well on the screen, easier to look at than text on a computer LCD screen. I prefer the LED screen to an e-ink display, the former doesn’t suffer from the blackout screen and refresh lag in between page scrolls. However the battery life is said to be much shorter, waiting to see how the eneloop lite batteries hold up.

- Controls feel simple and intuitive so far. The scroll bar is nicely placed on the left, allows one hand operation. I can grip the unit and

- The unit powers off automatically after a period of inactivity. The time is customizable, default being 5 mins. Just nice.  The unit resumes after 2-3 secs on the last viewed page of the novel after powerup, nice! This is the beauty of a dedicated ereader, i can treat it like a paperbook. Put it down when i am done reading and pick it up later to resume reading. No waiting for system startup and launching programs as i would be doing with a convergeance device such as netbooks or PCs.

- Supports multiple bookmarking for every novels. This would come handy for mystery novels especially. Adobe reader needs this feature badly.

- There is no backlight, which reduces eye fratigue when reading but is also may be a tad inconvenient on dark cast afternoon when i don’t to turn the lights on. I need to check out what clip on reading lights are there on the web stores.

- Unit comes with a selection of classics novels on the 100mb internal memory.

- First book - A Study in Scarlet :)

- No SD card bundled :(

- I bought it for 115usd at a Newegg special. This is a great price, but considering i need to pay borderlinx($10?), the eneloop lites($15), buy a pouch plus a SD card, the cost adds up.  Last i check, the Jetbook with build-in lithium-ion batteries and a pouch was selling $279.44 locally..hmm.  This is a close one. If i knew of this offer i could have bought it without waiting for shipment. It would probably has some form of local warranty too. Ah well. The ability to swap batteries will be handy on a trip, i already have cellphone and camera charging to deal with. I can share AA batteries between my iriver mp3 and the JBL too. Now thats a plus.

To do

- What size of SD card to buy?

- Where to get a nice pouch for the JBL?

- Check out reading lights

- No more excuses! This is why i bought this, time to catch up on my PDF documents reading list. Reading PDF on computers was a pain and most of the time i turned to surfing net anyway. Get off the pc and start reading!

Labels: gadgets