If you knew me well enough, you'd know that I'm a sucker for reading. While I like that PDF documents are so prevalent these days, and that most computers can read them with relative ease if one stays away from the overly bloated ``official'' reader, I'm still not happy with the fact that the only way to read these documents is through a computer screen that is largely placed in landscape format.
I mean, come on. The screens have such high resolutions, surely we can just rotate the screen to put it into the portrait format that is characteristic of most typed documents?
Well, no. Only a few screens do that.
For a while, I've been looking at having an e-book reader. The current offerings by the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader are inadequate for me---I'm reading academic papers not ``New York Times bestsellers''. Their ridiculously small screens are completely useless when trying to read technical papers which are almost always stored in Letter or A4 format (the readers mentioned deal with sizes of roughly A6).
But then I found the iRex Digital Reader 1000S. With a diagonal of 10.2 inches, a resolution of 1280×1024 (effectively having a reading area of 6 inches by 8 inches), I knew I have found what I wanted. Not to mention the use of Wacom's amazing pressure-sensitive digital writing instruments---annotation should be quite an interesting occurrence.
Needless to say, I put my money where my mouth is and placed an order for it. Let's see if it lives up to its claims when it finally arrives.
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