So, I have finally got it. Only the 8 GB version as the 16 GB were sold out, but I just could not wait for another week :-). After playing with it for about 1.5 hour, I like it even more. The readability of Safari Web sites is excellent - I started to put together some links. Did not try too many sites yet, but the Dzone reads OK :-). Also the PDF book reading is very good - but that is no news. I guess I will have to put up some internal Apache access to my PDF eBooks from my bed :-).
No, I have not bought it yet, to big disappointment of Gabo and Shane - sorry guys. I wanted to buy it but all FutureShop stores in Ottawa are hopelessly sold out and on-line delivery is 7-10 business days - which I hope I will beat if these guys get new shipment (maybe tomorrow ?).
I played with two demo pieces though for about 30 minutes, and here are the first impressions:
After returning from holidays with completely drained PRS 500 (see field test blog entry), I have decided to test what is the battery life of the fully charged reader without any usage at all. It was easy as I was pretty busy after being away 3 weeks.
The reader was fully charged on 29th of August (24 hrs with wall charger). After that, I did not use it at all, only checked every 2-3 days the status (the reader was switched off except this brief check). As of Wednesday morning, September 19th the battery was drained and the reader switched itself off right away (it is being charged as I type this). This gives us about 3 weeks of available standby time, without any use from page turning, until the fully charged battery is completely drained.
With the latest software update (I am now on 1.0.3), one of the issues to be fixed was the "charging indicator behaviour". Looks like it was indeed the software bug. After upgrade, the indicator jumped to full 4 bars and stayed there. Beforehand, I had usually only 3 bars regardless how long it was charged.
Time will tell - I am taking the reader with me to Italy to get some mileage out of it, during transatlantic flight ...
Despite pretty impressive battery life - which is btw *nowhere* in the range of advertised 7500 page turns - over period of few months I have noted that the charging of the reader behaves kind of funny. Sometimes, even after being plugged-in for 24 hours, the battery indicator stubbornly stays on two squares out of four. Other times, right after connecting, it jumps right to full charge.
It is hard to really measure these things as the battery depletion is very slow on reading and I do not really listen to music on this device (that's what iPods are for). I am not the only person who noticed this behaviour - Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte, who enhanced my favorite podcast Security Now! to be an unofficial eBook Sony Reader news exchange :-) have seen the same thing (search for Sony). Btw, Steve and Leo - thanks for doing the eBooks plugs - I appreciate that a lot ...
A friend sent me link two days ago making me aware that Mozilla decided to change the source code control system (= SCCS) they use. When such large and important project as Mozilla moves ahead and changes something so basic and fundamental to development as the SCCS, there must be good reason behind it. What was even more interesting was the system selected: no, it was not Subversion, but something much less established - Mercurial. Actually, until they selected it I was barely aware of its existence.
After few weeks, I have got back to actually using my PRS500 again and I have finished the books loaded on the device. When I have connected the reader, first the CONNECT software as well as the PRS500 downloaded the updates. The firmware in reader is up to version 1.0.02.0130 from 1.0.00.21081 and should bring longer battery life and stability improvements. It better does, because so far the battery life is nowhere in the proclaimed range of 7000 page turns ... Time will show.
Now this is something really interesting: as found on Adobe Labs site, their technology codenamed Apollo is approaching Alpha status. What Apollo is - in a nutshell - is another virtual machine, similar to Java runtime or .Net framework, with few minor twists: it is multiplatform (as Java) as well as multi-language (as .Net) at the same time. Before flame wars start - I am aware that JVM is capable (more or less) to support multiple languages beyond Java and also that .Net is (more or less) capable running on non-Windows platforms (e.g. Mono project), but that is not the point. The point is what is different about the Apollo compared to JVM or CLR.
As the tittle says, Fedora Core 6 is it. Everything is installed, everything works. The box is very fast, Samba network server is visible on all computers - I have not had time yet to do some tests on access and write speed. I have 930 GB shared space on RAID 5 which is in process of being subdivided into separate shares for video, images, music, and so on.
Installation was really nice and I was very pleasantly surprised how huge progress did Linux made since 2000 when I last time was really spending some time on it (I was always using Linux as file server and Webserver, but since year 2000 never actually was working in Linux environment). The only minor issue during configuration was that after installing suggested updates (one almost feels like with Windows when Linux box tells you that there newer versions for 200 something packages available), the mouse disappeared. It was there, I could drag and drop, click - but it was invisible. It took less then minute googling to find an answer. As usually in Linux, once you find what is wrong, fixing it is very easy. All I had to do was editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (which is of course text file) and adding: Option "HWCursor" "off" to the Videocard device section.
In order to provide HD Video capabilities and to appease content creators, Microsoft went very far in making sure the Vista is not seen as a tool for content piracy. Did they went too far ? What will be the real cost of this contraversial features ?
Listen (or read) the comments of people that understand the DRM topic better than me and make your own opinion:
* How and why Windows Vista has incorporated the most pervasive and invasive system for digital rights management ever created, AACS - as MP3 and PDF