YouTube clip »
Ouch!
hehehehe...man, that was a smack-down for sure. But a lot of what the guy did not like, had to do with the mechanics of putting books on the device. And yeah, he also hated the case, the buttons and the UI...so it has to be marginal at best. Then again it is the NYT who is in bed with Amazon...still it seemed genuine and honest, and funny as can be!

Funniest to me was the number of button presses to change the font...unreal!
Dang.... Course Harry Potter isn't on any ebook reader, but still.... dang.

I need to check out their "book store" and see if there is anything to it. Somehow I imagine it's almost all public domain stuff.
Pogue's usually pretty straight forward. I doubt NYT's relationship with Amazon had much to do with the review, but we'll have to see when more reviews start showing up.
Definitely it raises questions about the hardware - my biggest concern is how he said the buttons were really hard to press. But most of that review was completely annoying.

I hope somebody from mobileread manages to get one soon for a slightly more comprehensive and realistic review.
I love Pogue's videos but I felt his review was nitpicking a bit too much. On my cybook it takes 5 button presses to change the font size and 2 to zoom in on a pdf. You would never really do this more than once in the course of reading a book or document. He presented it as if you were forced to only buy books from their store and it is not true that you can't subscribe to magazines. There's software like Calibre that will download your magazines and format them as well as any of your documents and send them to your device for free. And what's with the Taiwan dig, the kindle is made in China.

Here's why I would get this device over the kindle

1. Smaller and lighter
2. $100 less than the kindle
3. Freedom to buy and get tons of free books and content from more than one place
4. Owning and controlling what you buy as opposed to subscribing to content
I would like to hear more about how the books are shareable. I can share my books with up to 6 people with Kindle but I have to register them to my account. I wish I had better details about the workings, though. I've gotten the impression from other users that the license follows the Kindle and remains even if you delete that Kindle from your account and register it to a different account. A poster some time ago said he bought a used Kindle and the books from the previous owner remained even after re-registering and connecting to Amazon. I doubt he would have the ability to re-download but they weren't deleted. I haven't seen verification of this from Amazon but they have said that the license isn't removable from a device, so it seems like it might be true. If I have downloaded a copy of a book for a given Kindle and then de-register it, that license does not return to my license pool. That's why they say you can have as many Kindles as you like on your account but only 6 can have any given book. Am I to take it there is some more flexible way of temporarily registering different devices with the Cool-er? Do they actually let you donate your license to a library when you're done or sell it to someone else? That would be massively cool despite the overall lameness of the device.

Anyway, two of my biggest issues with this thing weren't mentioned: the books are a good deal more expensive and they inflate the number of titles in their marketing speak. Bad form showing the search for HP books coming up empty. Not like Amazon has them, either.
As for the font changing, I believe he is counting EVERY key punch, including choosing the last font in the list. If there are 12 font choices, he presses the keys to fet to the fonts, then presses 12 more times to go down to the last one.

Now, if it took 16 key presses to GET to the font menu, then yea, the GUI/Menu needs work.

1 click - Menu
6 clicks - Font Family option (7th option in menu)
3 clicks - First option for font (smallest)
10 clicks for smallest font
7 clicks - Last font option
18 clicks for largest font

Unless there were verification popups to make sure you really wanted to change the font, which wasn't shown in the vid. But I can't really see an extra 6 button presses vor verification. Also, he may also be including button presses to go back to reading form the menu.

Either way, I think 16 key-presses is stretching it a bit. Using his journalistic perogative to stretch the truth. If someone buys this, perhaps they can shed a more UNBIASED light.

But regardless, it looks cheap, keys are cheap plastic, hard to press. I'll pass on this one.
I think that the cool-er not having a wireless connection is not a big deal. I like being able to download my books onto my computer and then transfer them. I know that in theory with the kindle that you could re-download the book if something happened to kindle you had. But I would be paranoid about that.

He also seemed to like the kindles design as far as its appearance, which I find to be a huge turnoff. The keyboard is icky to me.

He also doesn't mention that the kindle only supports its own format easily, you can get other formats but its a bit of work.

I am a bit worried about the repeated mentioning that the buttons are hard to press, I hope that is worked out before it ships.

Amy