plaidchuck Diglot Groupie United States facebook.com/plaidchRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5115 days ago 71 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 1 of 18 21 November 2010 at 4:59am | IP Logged |
Hello all,
The holiday season is upon us here in the US and my family has offered to buy me an E-Reader for Christmas. Of course the question comes down to "Which one?" So I thought I'd consult the wisdom of the forum. Can some folks give me their impressions of the various ones available? Overall the features I am looking for are pretty modest: ability to view the most common text files (.pdf, doc, .txt etc), a good screen without glare that will allow me to read for an hour+, ability to look up words with a good dictionary(Spanish in my case), and ideally the ability to highlight/save words and pages for future reference.
It seems the forerunners are the Kindle and the Sony e-readers and while I've looked through the internet for some good reviews, they seem to alternate in opinion on which is the better value... but my question is which is the best for language study?
Edited by plaidchuck on 21 November 2010 at 5:00am
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patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6825 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 18 21 November 2010 at 11:29am | IP Logged |
You could get an iPad instead. This not only allows you to read books but also has lots of other language learning applications, some which are free.
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plaidchuck Diglot Groupie United States facebook.com/plaidchRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5115 days ago 71 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 3 of 18 21 November 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged |
Certainly an IPad would be nice, but I think it's a bit out of the price range, plus I have a net book that suits most of my mobile language learning needs. I think right now I'm leaning towards the Sony.
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Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5331 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish*
| Message 4 of 18 21 November 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
also, the ipad has shorter battery life and cannot really be read in sunlight. The upside is of course all the apps and that you can use it for websurfing.
i am also searching, perhaps nook or if pixel qi ever get around to releasing something.
you could check out engadget, the write about ereaders, existing and rumoured, among other things.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4940 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 5 of 18 21 November 2010 at 6:56pm | IP Logged |
I've been considering getting something for e-reading too, but I definitely want something color, because I will most likely be doing light surfing and word lookups on my favorite dictionary sites.
I'm currently considering either the new Nook or the Pandigital (which, out of the box isn't supposed to be all that great, but with an update is much nicer).
I wouldn't pay more than 200 bucks for a device, though.
R.
==
Edited by hrhenry on 21 November 2010 at 7:01pm
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plaidchuck Diglot Groupie United States facebook.com/plaidchRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5115 days ago 71 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 6 of 18 21 November 2010 at 8:22pm | IP Logged |
For me I suppose the bottom line is the screen and any problems with glare, because that is what keeps me from reading my ebooks on my netbook. Also how well the reader displays pdfs especially ones of older texts and materials like those from FSI and DLI
Edited by plaidchuck on 21 November 2010 at 9:16pm
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bernardpar Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 4 posts - 7 votes
| Message 7 of 18 22 November 2010 at 3:12am | IP Logged |
I got sony 650 after I had returned Kindle 3. Sony prs-650 is a great reader. No doubts about it. I like it much more than Kindle 3 and Kindle 3 is a good reader as well. Dictionaries on prs-650 are brilliant and very quick, no glare as it was the case with sony prs-600, touch screen works smoothly. I have to admit it, if there was a 7 inch ipad on the market I would have bought it instead. Would I be happier with it ... I doubt it. I have got Anki and Pleco and Podcast apps on my smartphone anyway.
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Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5331 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish*
| Message 8 of 18 22 November 2010 at 9:37am | IP Logged |
bernardpar wrote:
I got sony 650 after I had returned Kindle 3. Sony prs-650 is a great reader. No doubts about it. I like it much more than Kindle 3 and Kindle 3 is a good reader as well. Dictionaries on prs-650 are brilliant and very quick, no glare as it was the case with sony prs-600, touch screen works smoothly. I have to admit it, if there was a 7 inch ipad on the market I would have bought it instead. Would I be happier with it ... I doubt it. I have got Anki and Pleco and Podcast apps on my smartphone anyway.
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sounds good, i will look into it. just one question: how does it handle pdfs? can you for example zoom in and then do continuous scrolling, i.e. not hav to flip pages and rezoom all the time? it's possible on aji annotate for iphone, but the screen is tiny. many aother pdf-readers are unusable because the assume you want to see one page at a time.
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