Get a Pandigital Ereader which is great at reading PDF files but make sure you get a black one as the earlier white Pandigital readers are buggy crap! Black ones work good enough but pricey!

1) Packaging is fairly nice. Full color cardboard box with a clamshell inside. The Book sat quite nicely inside the clamshell with its leather case already installed. Under the book was a power adapter and a standard USB cable. Under the clamshell was a user guide with yellow correction sheets inserted into about a 10 page booklet with a 3″ CD-Rom taped to the inside of the back cover. The CD Rom includes Calibre – a free, GNU License eBook organizer for your PC or Mac.

2) When connected to the PC, neither The Book nor its SD card is recognized. You must make transfers through Calibre.

3) Web browsing is EXTREMELY slow, taking 2-5 minutes to render a single page. Typing in web text boxes does not allow for easy editing. There are no arrow keys, so the cursor must be navigated carefully to just past the character you wish to delete. Also, I have heard from others and experienced myself that the symbol keys don’t work. Well, some don’t. The manual states that you can use the ALT-[letter] to obtain the symbol above it. Yet, there is a symbol key as well. Neither worked. However, SHIFT-[1-0] did generate the typical shift symbol which was depicted below the key. For example, the letter Q has an exclamation point [!] above it. ALT-Q nor SYM-Q would generate the [!], but SHIFT-1 did. None of the symbols in the 3rd or 4th row worked at all. Very important for typical grammar.

Typing also seemed to generate the characters slower than I can thumb, so the some letters were dropped.

4) Browsing a web page that is longer than the window means scrolling down the page. When this is done, the entire next page renders at once, and resets the cursor to the top of the page. Takes a bit of getting used to.

5) All 150 pre-installed books are from the Gutenburg Project. Augen did a top notch job utilizing a lot of free stuff to get their product out. Hope they don’t get in trouble for that…

6) The screen is very crisp. The dimensions seem to be a bit more narrow than their expensive B&W brethren, ie: the Nook and the Kindle. With the same height, the aspect ratio is a bit narrower than an average paperback book.

My conclusion – this is a good little bargain to see if you’re interested in reading books on an eReader. With a relatively short battery life (hours vs. weeks on the B&Ws), it would be prudent to keep a charger in the car and with you on travels. It’s a lousy web brower, though. Didn’t try the MP3 or video functions, though I understand there is no organization to music and video libraries. The user guide also says that the firmware is NOT upgradeable, so one may be inclined to wait a couple of generations before buying one.

See http://augen.lefora.com/2010/07/09/ereaders-shipping-date-was-changed/ for more up-to-date information regarding Augen’s eReader.