Took my wife to have a look at an iLiad this lunchtime at Borders in Cambridge. We saw it advertised in the window whilst sitting in Prett eating our lunch. My wife has lots and lots and lots of books and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to look at a digital alternative.

The good bits. The screen looked great, you can plug in all of the most common storage formats i.e. MMC, SD, CF, USB so good all round there it also supports PDF so I could see it being used to read all sorts of stuff. It may have done some more stuff but I kind of lost interest when I found out the price and what the battery life was like! See below…

Now the bad stuff. This is the first time I have used a ebook reader like this so I wasn’t sure what to expect- it seemed slow to me - maybe I’m impatient? The worst part is a 4 hour battery life, if you are away from a power source for a couple of days, lets say you go camping or fly to Canada from the UK you will be out of juice before you know it. The price tag isn’t exactly great either its £400! That’s like $800!!!!! Yikes! You better have some paper based books as a backup!!!!

Is there a market for a subsidised ebook reader with a monthly contract for books? Surely if these devices were lets say from FREE to £50 with a monthly contract many more book people would be snapping them up.

Also bare in mind that the sub notebook market is just about to get really competitive with lots offerings from lots of different manufacturers so there may be good alternative in there as an ebook reader / email / internet / games machine.

Verdict: we haven’t quite saved the rain forests yet!