Unboxing iRex 800 and first impressions

[DeReader]

Originally Posted by catharsis

What about academic papers? Can you make some pictures of how the reader handles a document like this ? I'm intersted in the first and second page.

I tried to display the document on the DR800S. Without cropping the empty margins, it is nearly unreadable (first picture). But if I crop the margins of the PDF with a tool, the print is small but readable (second picture).

Reflowing the PDF is not an option, in that case the formatting of all formulas is gone.

But cropping the margins with an extra tool for every PDF is unnecessary extra work, which the reader itself could do with a software update.

[myprecious]

@DeReader - would you be so kind as to do some battery testing as well?

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by professzore

Thanks for the replies.
First of all, I'm looking something with extraordinary image quality, good ePUB support, 16 shades of gray, "8 inch in a 6 inch body" or something very similar. And one hand oparation (held in hand, page turning forward), both for right and left hand.
Based on your personal experiences, how can DR800 meets these requirements?

TIA,
Professzore

Quite frankly, for the moment I'm still a bit disappointed by iRex 800.
I simply compare to Sony 900 and (so far) I can't find any real arguments for a difference in prices of 40% (€ 500 vs. $ 400).
But on its own, it certainly is a great unit.

[pauli]

agreed, the DR800S is expensive. But unless you picked up your Sony 900 at a BestBuy store personally and took it with you back home, the Sony 900 will cost a lot more. A rough estimate transfers dollars into euros on 1:1 ratio, if sales tax, VAT, import duties etc are included. Products in the US are without VAT. So it is more a 20% difference.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by pauli

agreed, the DR800S is expensive. But unless you picked up your Sony 900 at a BestBuy store personally and took it with you back home, the Sony 900 will cost a lot more. A rough estimate transfers dollars into euros on 1:1 ratio, if sales tax, VAT, import duties etc are included. Products in the US are without VAT. So it is more a 20% difference.

In total, my Sony 900 was € 340 (ordered from the US). Okay, that's 32%.
In the very worst case, Sony 900 would add up to € 380. Still 25%.
There are tons of workarounds, for example colleagues from the US buying and sending as a gift.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by Bert

But with the iLiad you had a hierarchical folder system, even better than the categories most others (like sony) offers on its readers. So the concept clearly occurred to iRex, and earlier than most others at that ... so the question is why they didn't think it was necessary now?

The first thought that occurs to me is that this is simply one more indicator of the chaotic and undisciplined corporate culture at this company. It's almost as if you had a couple of programmers over in one room working on the DR1000S, and then when the company came up with the DR800 idea, they took another couple of programmers and told them to write the software for it, and it simply never occurred to anyone to have the two teams of programmers work together to build on a common software engineering architecture.

It's like the omission of the dictionary: I mean, really, how hard could it possibly be to write a simple dictionary lookup and display interface? What would something like that take a reasonably talented and experienced programmer? Maybe a few hours for the rough code and a day or two to polish it up? Yet they couldn't manage to get even this simple functionality finished in time for a 3-month-late release?

And jumping to a specific page number? Good God, a high-school kid could bang out about 10 lines of C code to make that work before he finished breakfast. It's just weird not to have that available.

All of this plus things like leaving out the rather basic idea of a folder-style organizational capability for a device that is intended to store hundreds or thousands of items just points to the fact that no one up there at iRex actually sits down to think and plan things out - everything starts with a great idea, and then they just seem to randomly cobble a chaotic mess of modules together to make the idea work and get it out the door. Then they spend a year or two trying to patch up that mess, until the next great idea comes down and they basically abandon everything that came before.

An odd company. I would love to see what a disciplined, organized company such as Apple could do with the starting-point design of the DR800. I'm sure the finished product would be an unbelievable reader. (Don't read that wrong, I'm not plugging for their forthcoming tablet - that'll be LCD based, and I'm not interested in reading books on a LCD screen at all).

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

The first thought that occurs to me is that this is simply one more indicator of the chaotic and undisciplined corporate culture at this company. It's almost as if you had a couple of programmers over in one room working on the DR1000S, and then when the company came up with the DR800 idea, they took another couple of programmers and told them to write the software for it, and it simply never occurred to anyone to have the two teams of programmers work together to build on a common software engineering architecture.

It's like the omission of the dictionary: I mean, really, how hard could it possibly be to write a simple dictionary lookup and display interface? What would something like that take a reasonably talented and experienced programmer? Maybe a few hours for the rough code and a day or two to polish it up? Yet they couldn't manage to get even this simple functionality finished in time for a 3-month-late release?

And jumping to a specific page number? Good God, a high-school kid could bang out about 10 lines of C code to make that work before he finished breakfast. It's just weird not to have that available.

All of this plus things like leaving out the rather basic idea of a folder-style organizational capability for a device that is intended to store hundreds or thousands of items just points to the fact that no one up there at iRex actually sits down to think and plan things out - everything starts with a great idea, and then they just seem to randomly cobble a chaotic mess of modules together to make the idea work and get it out the door. Then they spend a year or two trying to patch up that mess, until the next great idea comes down and they basically abandon everything that came before.

An odd company. I would love to see what a disciplined, organized company such as Apple could do with the starting-point design of the DR800. I'm sure the finished product would be an unbelievable reader. (Don't read that wrong, I'm not plugging for their forthcoming tablet - that'll be LCD based, and I'm not interested in reading books on a LCD screen at all).

Apple??? Really????????
It took them about 1 year to implement "copy and paste" in their so called "business phone"....
But Apple definitely has great marketing.

[catharsis]

Originally Posted by DeReader

I tried to display the document on the DR800S. Without cropping the empty margins, it is nearly unreadable (first picture). But if I crop the margins of the PDF with a tool, the print is small but readable (second picture).

Reflowing the PDF is not an option, in that case the formatting of all formulas is gone.

But cropping the margins with an extra tool for every PDF is unnecessary extra work, which the reader itself could do with a software update.

what tool did you use? i'm interested how long it takes. also, would it be too much if i asked you to take a photo of that page near the actual a4 print? the text seems readable in both of your pictures, but i don't have a real reference to figure it out. also, the ability to display this kind of documents weighs about 90% in my decision to buy an e-reader, so it's very important to me. thank you very much.

[andrys]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

I've seen it. No idea, why quality of the pics is that bad. I certainly have bad lighting conditions here, but still it should be better. Theoretically, it's a great camera (Sony DSC-F707). I'll try again later on...

mgmueller,

It's just a matter of the white-balance setting of the camera being off a bit and making a blue caste.

I took a copy and have adjusted the colors so that the blue doesn't take over.

I did that only for the 2nd picture which shows the iRex and the Kindle DX together, since I have a better idea what the DX looks like, color-wise. than I do with the iRex (having never seen one).

It's at http://bit.ly/irex800

I have to add that even the DX is too small in Portrait mode for PDFs with smaller fonts; I usually turn it to Landscape mode.

If Amazon would pay Adobe for whatever type of Digital Edition licensing it takes to allow editing of it, they'd have a lot more clout in the business/academic market. I have to assume they need time to program how that editing is done of course.

I have a review on the iRex's 1000s model which complains that the navigation is awkward sometimes in that it takes 9 steps to close a file.

So far, I've been partial to the Que for serious business reading and editing mainly because of the way they're handling all the other formats.

- Andrys

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Apple??? Really????????
It took them about 1 year to implement "copy and paste" in their so called "business phone"....
But Apple definitely has great marketing.

I actually understood that one, believe it or not. In its first vision, I don't think even Apple understood fully what the iPhone would become to most people. It wasn't originally envisioned as a palm-sized computer with editing capabilities, thus no one considered that copy-paste would be important or necessary to anyone using it. However, when it became more clear what the customers were turning the device into and what they wanted from it, Apple just took the ball and ran with it. I'm certainly not saying that Apple is a perfect company - far from it. But you must admit they show many more signs of being organized and disciplined throughout their entire corporate culture than, say, iRex.

[olis]

Mgmueller, thanks for sharing your impressions.
By the way, you have been mentioned in an article at slashgear.com:
http://www.slashgear.com/irex-dr800s...pping-2270988/

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

There are tons of workarounds, for example colleagues from the US buying and sending as a gift.

It is possible for customs to require you to pay import taxes for gifts, though.

[myprecious]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

I actually understood that one, believe it or not. In its first vision, I don't think even Apple understood fully what the iPhone would become to most people. It wasn't originally envisioned as a palm-sized computer with editing capabilities, thus no one considered that copy-paste would be important or necessary to anyone using it. However, when it became more clear what the customers were turning the device into and what they wanted from it, Apple just took the ball and ran with it. I'm certainly not saying that Apple is a perfect company - far from it. But you must admit they show many more signs of being organized and disciplined throughout their entire corporate culture than, say, iRex.

You must be kidding Even simple SE, Nokia etc. phones have copy/paste functions. Isn't it a double standard? It's ok for an iphone not to have basic functions - but wrong for an irex device?

[pauli]

iRex put up the manuals for the DR800S on the support website... now you don't need to download the complete firmware file (68 MB), to have a look...

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

The first thought that occurs to me is that this is simply one more indicator of the chaotic and undisciplined corporate culture at this company. It's almost as if you had a couple of programmers over in one room working on the DR1000S, and then when the company came up with the DR800 idea, they took another couple of programmers and told them to write the software for it, and it simply never occurred to anyone to have the two teams of programmers work together to build on a common software engineering architecture.

It is interesting that IREX got the dr800s to market so late, given that IREX is not starting from a blank slate with the DR800x since it's not really anything they haven't already done: it's based on the OS and SDK used by the DR1000x and they have much experience with the 8" form factor. Of course, the existing OS could be in such a poor state that any significant change to it leads to disaster.

Granted, switching to the adobe engine is new, but other companies have that in place in new readers and update for older readers already.

I really think that IREX only has one or two programmers and at least one of them is a green replacement for the veteran one that got tired of the stagnation and left. I know that they had to outsource the port of the webkit browser.