You may already have heard of the really revolutionary E Lnk e-paper and the dedicated book readers using it. The most important in-production ones are, currently, as follows. (If interested, see the full list / a full comparison chart HERE; note that the matrix doesn’t contain the very important effective resolution; I’ve fixed this in the short listing below as the value after the slash. Note that, in order for quick accessibility, I’ve also listed the grayscale levels supported in here too.)

iRex iLiad - in my opinion, the best ebook reader, mostly because of its high-resolution (XGA,1024*768) screen and the quality material. (resolution: XGA / no effective resolution given (but, in Landscape mode, it’s only a little bit narrower than 1024 pixel); 16 grayscale)

Sony LIBRIé (resolution: SVGA / 754 x 584, 4 grayscale)

Sony Reader PRS-500/505 (a somewhat enhanced LIBRIé for the U.S. market; it’s smaller (no keyboard) and features a dual Memory Stick PRO Duo/SD slot to augment the memory) (resolution: SVGA / 754 x 584, 4/8 grayscale in 500/505)

Cybook Gen3 (resolution: SVGA / no effective resolution given, 4 grayscale)

And the latest device, the much-criticized Amazon Kindle (resolution: SVGA / 450x550; 4 grayscale)

Now, there’s a new player on the scene: Polymer Vision.

They have demoed a very promising prototype of their phone + reader combo called Readius. Some shots (all taken by me) follow:

Why you may be interested? I’ve talked to the Polymer Vision folks and found out the following:

Anyone having read my Pocket PC Wikipedia Bible knows there’re two decent Pocket PC Wiki implementations in town: the Tomeraider-based one and Lexipedia. Now, with the former, unfortunately, only slightly updated (dated 12/12/2005), new versions are released.

It was a few days ago that I’ve reviewed the brand new series of the great book / reference reader/browser TomeRaider and reported it being buggy.

Now, fortunately, this is no longer the case as can be seen for example in the following screenshot (I’ve searched hard to find any text with rendering errors – in vain):

All in all, NOW you may want to consider upgrading to the new version (as opposed t

TomeRaider is a well-known book/dictionary/reference work reader having a lot of useful application areas, most important of them being reading Wikipedia on your PDA. As I definitely wanted to add a complete, comparative review of TomeRaider to my series of dictionary / reference roundups (links in the article below), I spent quite a lot of time evaluating it.

Note that in this article I both compare the brand new (3.2.00) version to the previous (3.1.30) one and to the dictionary / reference alternates. Yeah, killing two birds with one stone :)

Also note that I directly compare TomeRaider3, as far as its dictionary engine is concerned, in the Definitive Roundup of All Pocket PC Dictionaries Part I – WordNet-based English Dictionaries. You will also want to check out the comparison chart in there to see how it compares to the alternates as a dictionary engine.

Availability, compatibility

It’s available here, compatible with all Pocket PC platforms (yes, even MIPS/SH3 Pocket PC’s – I’ve even tested it on my MIPS Casio E-125 and was very happy with what I saw) and costs $38.00. The upgrade is free for all 3.x users – previous registration numbers will work.

What’s new compared to the previous, 3.1.30 version?

I’ve made a lot of tests today to find out whether the final, commercial, 3.3 version of the NetFront browser causes problems with other (DLL/driver) memory-intensive applications.

While working on my thorough tests and benchmarks, I’ve run into the fact that Adobe Reader 2.0 constantly consumes between 29 and 36% CPU cycles – independent of the application loaded and even when it’s idling in the background.

I’ve tested this on all of my test Pocket PC’s (F-S Pocket Loox 720 (WM2003SE), HP iPAQ h2210 (WM2003), hx4700 (WM5), Dell Axim x51v (WM5) and HTC Wizard (WM5)), some of

http://pocket-pc-ebook-reader.com/en/

http://smartphonemag.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19753