The folks at GottaBeMobile made a nice video review about the iLiad. You can check it out here. Next week they will add a second part covering the note taking and the connectivity.

In almost a week, NRC Handelsblad sold over 500 ePaper subscriptions and iLiad eReaders. Gert Jan Oelderik, the managing director publisher at NRC handelsblad said he had expected to reach these sales numbers in a few months, so without a doubt this is a spectacular start.

Due to this large demand of the ePaper, there is currently a delay of a couple of days in the delivery times.

For more information see: www.nrc.nl/epaper

Update: NRC Handelsblad has setup a forum on which subscribers to the ePaper are welcome to share their experience and suggestion.

Update 2: For those who want to try and see how the NRC ePaper looks on an iLiad, you can download a full demo NRC ePaper here.

Yesterday we had the pleasure to welcome, Thomas van der Zijden, Marketing and Sales responsible for Polymer Vision, over at our office, for a demonstration of the Readius. Polymer Vision and iRex are virtually neighbours; both companies are located on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. So we used this opportunity to have a closer look at the device and to fire off some questions at Thomas.

The first thing I noticed about the Readius is that it is smaller than I imagined from the pictures and video’s which I had seen so far. The Readius is about the size of an iPhone, and it gives an overall compact and light impression when holding it.

Clicking open the wrap to roll out the display works nicely, and it is quite impressive to see an electronic paper display roll out off this compact device. The display is about 5 inch, with a resolution of 320 x 240 and 85 dpi.

The reading quality is as good as you can expect from an electronic paper display, although the resolution is a bit lower compared to other electronic paper displays and there were also some slight bends in the display around the axis points where the display bends, but this could be due to the fact that this was just a production sample.

Navigation through the user interface and content is possible via the 5 capacitive buttons and two tactile buttons for options and back. There is no touch screen or on-screen keyboard, so adding a contact and writing an e-mail or text message is not (yet) possible.

The Readius runs on Windows CE and is currently supporting the PDF, HTML and TXT file formats. Polymer Vision is working with third party developers to add applications, and format support (DRM?).

Via a USB connection it possible to place your own documents onto the device, Additional content like newspapers, magazines, RSS feeds and ebooks will become available via network operators and content partners. Polymer Vision is also planning to make content available on the Readius.com portal.

In regard to connectivity, the Readius supports the latest technologies like UMTS and HDSPA, allowing the user to use the Readius as a phone and network operators to push content to the device. In order to make or receive a call you need to connect an earplug or Bluetooth headset to the Readius.

Battery life depends mainly on the usage pattern, so if you use the device mostly as a phone you can expect 30-50% longer battery life than your regular phone, and if used as a reading device you can expect a battery life similar to that of other e-Readers.

The Readius will be commercially available in Q3 this year and the price will be in the range of other high-end phones. On the question if this means we should expect a price in the range of €,.600 to 700,- , we receive an affirmative although not confirming response.

As with the iPhone, Polymer Vision strives to make deals with network operators like Telecom Italia, who will offer the phone in combination with a subscription and content service at a subsidized price. This will probably mean that the Readius will only be available in the countries were Polymer Vision has a partnership with a network operator, although Thomas did mentioned that the Readius will also be available for sale online.

Here at iRex we are definitely excited about the development of this highly mobile reading solution from Polymer Vision and wish them the best of luck with the market introduction of the Readius later this year.

Yesterday NRC Handelsblad started with publishing a daily newspaper for electronic paper, the NRC Handelsblad ePaper, and is herewith the first Dutch newspaper on electronic paper. Here at iRex we are of course very proud and excited to make this important step in the Netherlands with NRC Handelsblad and to celebrate we had some cake, thanks to NRC Handelsblad for providing the delicious e-Cake!

The iRex Team

Recently some iLiads showed up on eBay that are being sold as new. Although these iLiads might never have been out of the box, they can be different from the iLiads sold via our official retail partners. The reason for this is because iRex sometimes produces iLiads with a different specification and software on request of certain business customers. Due to this these iLiads might not be able to read Mobipocket e-books or receive the regular software updates.

We identified some of the iLiads now being sold on eBay as part of a batch with such a different specification and in some cases even 1st edition iLiads. As these devices are tailored to the business customer’s wishes, they might not offer the same terms of warranty and therefore iRex Tech Support might not be able to offer the same support for those iLiads.

If you are interested to buy an iLiad we recommend buying one from our official partners listed on our website. If you buy an iLiad from a third party you can always verify that you are buying an iLiad with the standard software, and warranty by checking the model number, which is ER014x-002-000 for the Western version of the iLiad 2nd Edition.

And if you see a price that is too good to be true, it probably is

Today we released software release2.12. It is a small release which does not include any new feature but rather fixes and updates to the current software release. Herewith an overview of what is in this release:

1.Connection Manager GUI Improvements
To simplify the process of creating a network connection to the iDS, several improvements have been made in the connection manager. These improvements focus on providing more feedback to the user when an error occurs.

2. Support for Tables in Mobipocket files
Converted Mobipocket documents which contain tables are now rendered correctly. However there is currently no solution to navigate a table that is wider than the screen.

3. Support for Mobipocket folder on external memory
You can now create a ‘books\Mobipocket folder on MMC, CF or USB memory. This folder will act the same way as the Mobipocket folder located on the internal memory, so dictionaries will also work from any of these locations now.

4. Automatic connect to open WiFi Network disabled.
After software release 2.11 a number of people complained about their iLiad connecting automatically to public unsecured WiFi networks. This can now be disabled in the iLiad settings menu. This will stop the device from automatically using any unsecured WiFi network to connect to iDS.

5. Bug Fixes
This release also includes a number of bug fixes that were reported and some small stability improvements.

The release notes can be downloaded here.

Steve Jobs observations on the Amazon Kindle book reader, and reading in general has caused some interesting debate on the whole matter.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” - NYT

I think the statement is not completely incorrect but I tend to agree with Charles Arthur from The Guardian.

“It would be foolish to predict how electronic reading is going to pan out, because there are two unstoppable trends going on which have been continuing for at least 20 years and show no signs of letting up: people prefer to read bite-sized pieces of information, and people are reading more distinct pieces. Whether we’re reading more in terms of the volume of words compared to 20 years ago is hard to tell, but I’d guess so.” - The Guardian

This trend is not limited to reading alone but part of a Snack Culture which embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experience becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame. The signs are everywhere, from ubiquitous commerce to fragmented media to fast fashion to temporary ownership to Netflix-style all-you-can-eat models.

It is a fact that people read less books in the traditional way but the same goes for other types of content. Let’s have a look at the music industry. The sales of the traditional music CD are going down year after year, but I wouldn’t conclude that people don’t listen to music anymore. I just believe that the consumptions patterns are changing and digital content fits better with these consumptions patterns.

A good example is the iTunes WiFi Music store. Say you’re in line at Starbucks. You hear this amazing song wafting from the speakers. You gotta have it. Now. Tap the iTunes button on your iPhone or iPod touch, tap the Starbucks button, and preview, buy, and download whatever you like, right then and there. Basically the idea behind the Kindle is the same - with a tap of a button you connect to amazon.com and can access, preview and buy ten thousands of books.

So I believe Mr. Job has it wrong, when he says that people don’t read anymore, they just read different things like RSS feeds, websites, forums, blogs and of course e-books in different ways using e-readers like the Kindle or the iLiad or other devices like a laptop or a mobile phone, dare i say iPhone?

Now and than I will try to spend some time to share some of the tips and tricks on how they get the most out of their iLiad, from the people within iRex.

If you like to store a large amount of content on your iLiad, like some of the people here, the best way to do this is to extend the storage capacity of the iLiad with an external MMC or CF card. However it is not possible to easily access your documents on the external memory card via the archives keys. To solve this one of our engineers came up with a nice trick

When you press on one of the archive key (e.g. Books) on the iLiad, you would not only see the content on the internal memory but also an entry to content on other external memories (e.g. Books on CF card). This way you can use the archive keys to easily access your content regardless on which memory they are stored.

To enable this, download the necessary files here and follow the instructions in the readme.txt file.

If you experience any trouble make sure to let us known here.

It has been a bit quiet on the i-to-i blog recently but this will certainly change considering all the interesting developments and activities that you can expect to see from us in 2008.

For those who might have missed it, on the Teleread blog you can find a short Q&A, where I address some of the questions from David Rothman in regard to the iLiad and future developments. Make sure to check it out here.

A few weeks ago we had a visit from the Dutch television for the program ‘In de ban van het ding‘. This weekend the third episode covered the iLiad as well as the Kindle.