Re: [tlug] New Kindle

[Dan Burrowes <danburrowes@example.com>]

On 07/30/2010 11:03 AM, Darren Cook wrote:
> Anyone got any thoughts, or seen any early reviews?

I've been holding my breath for the ASUS DR-900.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/asus-dr-900-e-reader-hands-on/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mi0BDw3a-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AAas61WyGA

9-inch screen and resolution is *slightly* smaller than the KindleDX,
but the price is rumored to be competitive, and will support far more
(open) formats than the Kindle.

I got to use a 6" Kindle (second version?) for about 3 hours worth of
reading with my own documents and ebooks.  If you are reading a
Kindle/ebook-format book, the text is beautiful, and it is very
comfortable to read for long periods.  You need to "turn" pages often,
however, because even text at the smallest size is rather large.  I
usually read A4-sized PDFs, however, and for this, the 6" Kindle is
unusable.  The font size gets squashed too much, and leaves the page
almost illegible unless you rotate the page to the landscape position
and zoom the PDF about 25%.  Unfortunately, this let's you read only
half of an A4 page, and if you're a fast reader, you find yourself
constantly waiting for the screen refresh as you go through PAGE-TOP,
PAGE-BOTTOM, NEXT-PAGE-TOP, NEXT-PAGE-BOTTOM, etc...  If you want a
simple simulation, take an A4 PDF, reduce the print size to about 80%,
then print two pages per sheet of paper.  You'll find that it's a
challenge to read even a printed document let alone e-ink.  That said,
my e-ink reading experience at larger font sizes was excellent enough to
make me wait for a better/larger/cheaper unit and prevented me from
buying an iPad or other LCD-based unit for reading documents.

Other major drawback for me is that the Kindle does NOT support East
Asian languages including Japanese.  Text is rendered as moji-bake
unless a PDF has been created via the "text-as-images" method, even so,
however, the rendering is not good enough for kanji to be legible.
Also, God help you if you should be trying to read a PDF with font sizes
set at 9pt or less (company annual reports, etc...).  I've seen images
of the ASUS model rendering legible Chinese, so I'm hoping that Japanese
will be possible as well.


ASUS leaked info about this back in January, so it's been a very long
time coming, but rumors are that August is the release month.

--dan