After a month of having Ubuntu on the Samsung, I'm finding it very frustrating - suspend/hibernate is still very buggy and unreliable, the inoperable arrow buttons make reading a document whilst on the move very fiddly, and to cap it all, a recent automatic update broke the mounting of the swap partition so it wouldn't boot any more!

As a result it is proving pretty useless as a document reader/annotator, which is my main requirement at the moment. I have therefore decided to get a proper ebook reader and - shock, horror! - sell the Samsung on ebay to pay for it. After some research online I have plumped for the iRex iLiad; it's one of the more expensive models, but it has a Wacom digitizer built in so you can make notes on PDFs, which is perfect for my needs. Plus it is based on Linux and there are ports of various apps including busybox and AbiWord, so it can also be used as a basic word-processor with the addition of a mini USB keyboard.

My iRex iLiad arrived yesterday morning. Needless to say I didn't wait 3 hours for it to finish charging before I played with it :)

First impressions are that, although the software is generally slower than a normal computer, page turning has been speeded up noticably since the demo videos I saw on the web. Wireless was also a bit fiddly to get going - you have to hold down the button for several seconds to get the connection started, and the first time you try to connect, it can take a while - but once it was established, it went fine. I upgraded to the latest software (2.12) over the Internet, then connected to my MacBook (using instructions from the iRex forum, since the companion software is Windows-only) and loaded the iLiad up with a bunch of free ebooks from feedbooks.com.

Reading on the iLiad is a completely different experience from using a computer. The pages look like ordinary paper - albeit very pale grey rather than white, and slightly reflective from being behind a glass cover - so no eye-strain, or at least no more than if you were reading from print. No messing around with scroll bars or buttons, either; just flick the flipbar like you're turning the page on a book, and the page changes at about the same speed as using paper. Obviously you have more page turns because the ebook shows only one page at a time, not a two-page spread, but otherwise it's pretty damned close to reading a book.

I've now got all my critique reading loaded on as PDFs, so I can catch up on the two novels I'm supposed to comment on. Since I managed roughly 10k in bed last night, that shouldn't be a problem!