For a while I’ve been looking for a portable device to read ebooks. I chew through a lot of techie books to pick up new languages and geek knowledge, but the dead tree versions take up a lot of room and are a pain to travel with. Most of the popular publishers like Apress and O’Reilly make electronic versions of their books available now–and most of the time at a discount, so it’s a win for me. I’ve looked at several devices, but most of them come up short when it comes to a key feature: searching. Sony, I’m lookin’ at you. The Sony ebook reader looks good for novels, but I just don’t see myself using it when I’m skimming through 500 pages of a Python reference. My next hunch was to check out a Palm or something like the Nokia Internet Tablet, but the loss of screen real-estate doesn’t seem to make those a good match. So I’ve narrowed my options down to a tablet PC, or a micro notebook, the main disadvantage there being price.
Enter the Asus Eee PC available later this year. The lowdown:
- Runs Linux, so it’ll be hackable
- 800×480 and maybe 1280×768 screen resolution
- Solid state hdd, so you get 15 sec. boot times
- wireless
- $250, cheap!
- plenty of cpu to run a pdf reader
The downside being it’s 3hr battery life.
I’ll be keeping my eye on this one. Any other ideas for a gadget primarily to read pdfs and maybe surf?
5 responses so far ↓
Chris // September 7, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I don’t have any suggestions, but I’m interested in hearing what you come up with. I’ve wanted a cheap ebook-type device for a long time, primarily for reading Wikipedia and similar kinds of things on the bus.
(See http://globalspin.com/ideas/wikibub for my abortive attempt at making something myself. I’m much more a software guy than a hardware guy, unfortunately.)
$250 is a good price point for hardware, and 3 hours isn’t that terrible if the recharge time is decent. The form factor of the Eee would make it unsuitable for me, though. I need to be able to read while standing, so a big foldy thing doesn’t work.
John // September 7, 2007 at 1:36 pm
That’s some good research. I’m always, ALWAYS tempted to go the DIY route, but since I’m basically looking for a sub-notebook thingy I’ll probably wimp out and buy something when it comes along.
Raph // April 3, 2008 at 9:07 pm
The Asus is a great little machine but i’d rather the Apple MacBook Air if i had the money. Anyway you should check out the amazon.com solution for tree-less reading http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_6369712_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=130E1JCTP9T6N8GHGPF2&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=379103301&pf_rd_i=507846
John Herren // April 3, 2008 at 9:11 pm
@Raph: My wife actually got me a Kindle for Christmas, but I returned it. Because of the reviews I read, I’ll wait for version two.
Craig Fluck // April 21, 2008 at 3:08 pm
How about an old Dell Axim. I have a newer one by my old X5 worked just fine.
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