Semi-OT: Apple iPad

We've just gone through this excercise - my wife has been reading ebooks on a Sony Clie for many years and we wanted to update it. We ultimately settled on the B&N "Nook" because it is pretty much the only one that will read her many existing books which are mostly in B&N "PDB" format - so far she's been very happy with it. Whe she was looking at them for ebooks, I evaluated them as PDF readers. I use a *LOT* of PDF databooks, and being somewhat old-fashioned, I like to work with them in my lap or on the table ... so I end up printing them out. I usually try to print only the sections I need, but always end up missing something and having to stop and print in the middle of my work - I thought an e-reader would be a good alternative and would have the added bonus of not having to lug 2-foot thick stacks of paper to customer sites. I haven't gotten the nook away from her long enough to try it yet, but two I did try are the "Aluratek Libra" and the "Sony PRS600 touch". The Libra was pretty much a no-go from the start. It had findamental errors like not handling the table-of-contents in many of my PDFs (they worked in some, not in others) - I use the TOC a lot! It also tried to format them in ways that were unviewable and pan and zoom were pretty much unusable. Other issues were slowness and random crashes requiring a reset esp. with larger PDFs. The Sony was more promising, it formatted PDFs properly - I use a lot of databooks with register descriptions and other charts which need to be viewed in their native format. The 6" screen wasn't "quite" big enough - barely readable if you turned it sideways, and although their pan and zoom worked better than the libre, the slowness of the display to respond made it very difficult to use. It basically wasn't real-time pan and zoom. I found it very difficult and tiring to use even with small PDFs which displayed relatively quickly. The big problem with the Sony was the speed of it's processor. On moderate sized PDFs (3-4 megs) it would often become unresponsive for the better part of a minite, causing you to believe it had crashed. It did however faithfully record all your actions during this time so that once it did get around to finishing the operation, it would then "do" all the things you tried to while wondering if it had crashed. This would tie up the device for many minites, and at the end you would be nowhere near where you wanted to be. Even if you were very careful to not stack operations, taking a minite to go to a new page, link etc. makes it unusable in my opinion. Other than pan/zoom, the second it takes to redraw a page did not bother me at all. The largest PDF I tried on the Sony was the ARM architecture manual, which IIRC is about 12M - I ended up resetting it because it hung and apparently "never came back". One thing I really liked about the Sony was that it had a built-in app for taking notes with a stylus - I'm constantly searching for a scrap of paper to write down a note, work out a registers content etc. all of which I need for only a few minites. The Sony worked quite well as a reusable bit of scrap paper. Couldn't justify it's $300 price tag for just this function however. I have high hopes for the Ipad - although I won't be able to get one for some time yet (I'm not a wait-in-line for hours before the store opens kind of guy). It has a larger screen, and not being e-Ink it should pan/zoom much better. Another big advantage I see to it is that you are not tied to a PDF reader provided with it. The restrictions imposed by Apple regarding file transfers are annoying, however there are work arounds. I have an iPod touch which works pretty well except for the fact that the screen us far too small to be useable as a technical PDF viewer. I've seen references to third party stylus and note taking apps as well. [So even though it's not a classic device - I've been reading all the notes on the Ipad esp. as a PDF reader with great interest] Dave -- dave09 (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Classic Computers: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/